Prophecies of Daniel

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Main Content

Prophecies
of Daniel
with Mark McMillion

Daniel’s Dreams and Visions

In dreams and visions the prophet Daniel saw amazing scenes of the future of the world. In these videos on the prophecies of Daniel, I’ve tried to recreate visually what Daniel saw and to explain it in a way which has been broadly accepted by students of Bible prophecy for many centuries.

“Did he really say that?”

· by · In: Basic Christianity, The Future and Endtime Tagged: , ,

When you start talking about the possibility of a spiritual world, life after death, and prophecies fulfilled, some people just have a sudden shut down of their mind or emotions. It’s a real wrench because it just goes counter to almost everything they’ve generally held to be true.

I know this because I went through that exact experience and it was not easy. It was really difficult. But also it was a real liberation. I wanted the truth, no matter what, even if it meant there actually was a real God, just like I’d always been told, ha!

And if you’re here, reading part 3 of this series, then maybe you’re willing to “give this an ear”, as they say in English. Maybe there have been a few true prophets, right? Maybe there is some kind of world other than the one we can see and feel and move around in daily. Maybe Jesus of Nazareth was more than just some carpenter from Israel that the Romans killed 2000 years ago.

Did Jesus say he would return to this world?

So you might wonder, “Did he really say that? Did Jesus say he would return to this world?”

Yes, he did. The night before he was arrested, he was in Jerusalem with his most trusted followers, privately celebrating with them the Jewish Passover. Here’s one of the things Jesus is recorded as telling his closest friends that night. “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, so that where I am you may be also.” 1

Jesus was telling them that he was about to leave them and go “somewhere else.” But he told them he would return so that they could be where he was. And it wasn’t like all of them totally understood what he was telling them. Far from it. In fact, he’d already told them repeatedly some months earlier that

The Son of Man [this is how Jesus referred to himself] will be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him. And after He is killed, He will rise the third day.2

Did his followers understand that when he told them? No. The next thing the Bible says is “But they did not understand that saying and were afraid to ask Him.” 3

Even the closest followers of Jesus during his life on earth often just didn’t totally get what he was saying. It was not until after his death and resurrection, when he appeared to them again, repeatedly, that they began to get the full picture of what he truly was and what he taught.

But after he began to appear to them, after he rose from the dead… (Yes, I know, I’m asking you to believe another preposterous thing: Jesus rising from the dead!) Well, that’s what he told his followers would happen, that he’d be crucified and rise again, even though they didn’t understand it.

So after he rose from the dead, the followers were asking him if he was at that time going to establish his kingdom on earth4. It’s clear they were aware that something was still left to happen.

Jesus was with them for 40 days after his resurrection. Then the Bible says, He was taken up. And a cloud received Him out of their sight. 5

His followers were there and saw this happen. It goes on to say, And while they were looking intently into the heaven after Jesus had gone up, two men in white clothing [angels!] stood beside them, who said, “Why do you stand gazing up into the heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up into Heaven, will come in the way you have seen Him going into Heaven.” 6

So there it is again. He is going to come again. He was “taken up into Heaven”. But he is destined to return again to this world.

Maybe that’s a lot to swallow. Or at least a lot to think about. I know when I first read all this, or was taught it by someone who knew the Bible, it radically changed my whole outlook of life, reality and the world I lived in. Either this is all just completely crazy or it’s true. And I just didn’t feel inside of me that it was crazy. There was too much that I’d already experienced or seen that pointed towards these things being the actual experiences of people who saw all this and recorded it for everyone then and from then on.

And I guess it wasn’t just one time only when my viewpoints and earlier views of life were fundamentally challenged. There were a number of times when I was just left in shock and awe at what I read in the Bible. It took some time to digest it all, to ponder the significance of it for myself personally and for what it also meant to every person living in this world.

In the next post in this series, we’re going to look further at this whole concept of Jesus’ return to this world. What would it mean to all of us? What will the conditions be like when it happens? How would it change things? When will it happen? Our next class is called “Who is Armageddon anyway?”

Talk to you soon, Mark

1  Gospel of John, chapter 14, verses 2 and 3
2 Gospel of Mark, chapter 9, verse 31
3 Gospel of Mark, chapter 9, verse 32
4  See Acts chapter 1, verse 6
5 Acts chapter 1, verse 9
6 Acts chapter 1, verses 10 and 11

“When you die, you die like a dog, right?”

· by · In: Angels, Miracles and the spirit world, Basic Christianity, Current events Tagged: , , , ,

Someone told me that when I was young and it really stuck with me. “When you die, you die like a dog.” It’s a real simple way of expressing one of the most prevalent ideologies on earth: atheism and unbelief. If you look at things that way (and I did for years), then you just have to laugh and smirk at anyone who says something about Jesus returning to this world. It’s just ludicrous.

Because, when you look at things that way, there’s just no life after you die. You usually think of yourself as not much more than a complex nexus of neurons, a composite of carbon, calcium and water, the highest form of life on this obscure little planet. And how many millions of people look at our existence this way? Many.

What can you say to them? They hold a fierce, entrenched view of the life we have. So what do I say when I meet someone who has those views and challenges my faith in God? I usually just say something simple like, “Well, there is a spiritual world.”

There is a spiritual world

I’ve found that many, if not most people will sooner or later admit that “perhaps” there’s “something” more than what we can see and feel and measure with instruments. So many people have had personal experiences, or their relatives have, where someone from the past, a relative who’s passed on, has appeared to them in a dream or in their minds to speak to them, sometimes even to warn them of a danger or to speak words of comfort. This is such an often-experienced event that many people will candidly admit, if they are honest, that it’s happened to them or someone they know.

And of course, that’s the truth. There really is a spiritual world. And if there is, that means that we’re not just a collection of atoms. We’re more than that. As the famous atheist-turned-Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis said, “You don’t have a soul, you are a soul. You have a body.”

I can honestly say that the biggest turnaround in my life occurred when I very reluctantly had to admit that there is a world beyond my mind and politics and shopping and all the little things I was caught up in.

Naturally we find that this is what the famous characters from ancient times were saying all along. Ancient prophecy had some very major things to say about this, especially when it came to that unique king that would come one day to the world.

Like we saw in that verse from Micah that we’ve read, “But you, Bethlehem, though you be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth He which is to rule my people Israel, whose going forth is from old, from everlasting.” (Micah 5: 2)

It not only predicted that the king to come would be from Bethlehem, but it also said this ruler to come was “…from old, from everlasting.”  In other words, he was pre-existent, even before he was born in this world.

But what about life after death? King David, the greatest of ancient Israel’s kings, prophesied of the unique king that was to come. In one of his writings, speaking to God, he said, “…you will not leave my soul in hell, neither will you allow your Holy One to see corruption.” (Psalm 16:10)

David foresaw that the king that God would send to the world would not “see corruption.” In other words, the king to come would not suffer the fate of every other human being, in finally being laid to rest in a grave and their flesh decaying.

This was one of the most unique things about the life of Jesus. After his crucifixion, he was laid in a grave outside Jerusalem. But, according to the Bible, on the third day after his death, he rose from the dead, just as he’d told his disciples he would.

Now you may not believe that. I certainly didn’t when I first heard it. But I didn’t know it had been prophesied centuries before that there would be a king to come who would not “see corruption.” I didn’t know there were prophecies that he would be “born in Bethlehem”, that he would be “born of a virgin”, and so many more.

Usually, at some point, it comes down to a matter of the truth, and how much you want it. Many people like facts, I always have. But when you’re faced with truth that challenges much of what you’ve believed till then, there comes what is called “the moment of truth.” It’s sort of funny it’s called that.

But if there’s a phenomenon of prophecy which has been foretelling the future for thousands of years, if there’s a spiritual world greater and more real than the physical one we live in, if there’s a life of the soul that goes beyond the physical life of our bodies, then this could lead us to a very different view of our existence.

It would mean that we don’t just die like a dog. We go on. Our soul will go on, after our body ceases to work. And in this reality, realm and existence, that unique king came and died and rose from the dead. If there’s a spiritual world, if there’s prophecy that foretells the future, then this is all utterly possible.

And that king that was to come, Jesus of Nazareth, said that he would come to this world again.

Talk to you soon, Mark

 

“Jesus coming back? No way!”

· by · In: Basic Christianity, Daniel videos and texts, My past Tagged: ,

No Way-2-flattenedWhen I was 20, I’d sometimes met Christians who’d talk to me about Jesus of Nazareth. I usually really enjoyed it. I felt I could always out talk them and usually make them feel stupid or embarrassed about their faith. Back then, I liked to do that. So I know how nutty it can seem to some people when they hear about the idea of a person who died 2000 years ago “coming back” to our modern world.

I won’t tell you how I came to believe in God, that’s another story. But, if you’re not too sure about this whole thing and wonder how anyone could have such an eccentric idea, let me give you some information which you may not know. Maybe you’re a very rational person and like facts. Let’s look at some.

First, let me introduce you to something which you are perhaps not familiar: prophecy. Now, don’t run off. I said I wanted to share some facts with you. But the word “prophecy” may conjure up for you some crazed fellow in robes, running around shouting about the end of the world. Or maybe some strange mumbo-jumbo of predictions someone said was going to happened, when there was nothing really prophetic about it.

But what if there was a phenomenon of prophecy that consistently came true? What if there were people who really had a proven track record of foretelling future events and those events happened? Well, there is. And this is going to bring us back to our original subject, Jesus of Nazareth.

[By the way, one of the videos that I’ve produced explains the phenomenon of prophecy, against the backdrop of the history of ancient Israel. It’s called “An Introduction to Prophecy in History.” You can view the video here.]

In the centuries before Jesus, the ancient nation of Israel from time to time would have Hebrew prophets. Maybe you have heard of David or Isaiah or Elijah or Daniel?  One of the things these prophets told the people of Israel was that God was going to send them a very special king. This king would liberate them and he would be incomparable to anyone before.

And these prophecies would get pretty specific. Let’s look at one of them. In 700 BC the prophet Micah wrote,

“But you, Bethlehem, though you be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth He which is to rule my people Israel, whose going forth is from old, from everlasting.” 1

Bethleham file for blog
Bethlehem, just south of Jerusalem, during the time of the prophet Micah, around 700 B.C

That’s one of those prophecies about the king (here it says “ruler”) that God said He would send to the world. It says that king would come from a small town south of Jerusalem, called Bethlehem.

Now you may be like me, I wasn’t brought up a Christian or hardly a believer in God. But even though I wasn’t a Christian, I still knew that Jesus of Nazareth was born in Bethlehem.

If you look closely, you’ll also see in that prophecy that it says the king to come was from old, “from everlasting”. That’s one of those places where the prophecies indicated that the king to come would not be like anyone before him.

Here’s one more. The prophet Isaiah wrote that the king to come would be born of a virgin.  Isaiah said,

“Behold a virgin shall conceive and bare a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel, meaning God with us.” 2

Even if you find it hard to believe, most likely you’ve heard that Jesus was born of Mary who was a virgin when she bore Jesus. And there are a lot more like this, very specific, all of which were fulfilled in the life of Jesus.

So that, briefly, is why it’s possible that some people think Jesus will come back. But for this to have any credence, you’d have to understand that Jesus was just not exactly the same as you and me. In one way he was. He got tired, took naps, it’s recorded that he wept in public, he got hungry. In those physical things that we all experience, he was just like us. But he was different in that he was more than just a man. He was what the Bible calls, “the Son of God”.

Maybe you know all this already. Or maybe you never really had this kind of thing explained to you before. I know I didn’t. I got really angry when I was 21 and had come to find that there really is a God and a spiritual world. I’d spent the last 17 years in pretty good schools and no one every told me about this. Why wasn’t this being taught in all the schools I went to? Because, if there is a God who has a plan for man and if there is a spiritual world that’s more real and important than the physical world, then what they teach you in school is not really as important as these other things. So I didn’t learn about prophecy in the schools I went to.

Perhaps this hasn’t answered you’re question about how anyone could think that someone who died can come back to this world. But maybe it’s given you some facts you didn’t know before.

You didn’t know that there were a bunch of specific prophecies given hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, telling about so much of what he would later accomplish in his life. Maybe this will give you a slightly different perspective on who he was.

Next I’ll tell you about another really crazy thing that some folks talk about: rising from the dead. How can Jesus “come back” if his corpse has been rotting in a grave for the last 2000 years? The next article is going to be called “When you die, you die like a dog, right?”

(By the way, what do you think? Send me a comment in the reply box at the bottom of the article. I’d love to hear from you, whether you agree with what’s said here or not.)

Talk to you soon, Mark

1                 (from the Old Testament)  Micah chapter 5, verse 2 

2                 (from the Old Testament) Isaiah chapter 7, verse 14; (from the New Testament) Matthew chapter 1, verse 23