The Day Of The Lord And The Seventieth Week Of Daniel -- By: Craig A. Blaising
Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 169:674 (Apr 2012)
Article: The Day Of The Lord And The Seventieth Week Of Daniel
Author: Craig A. Blaising
BSac 169:674 (April-June 2012) p. 131
The Day Of The Lord And The Seventieth Week Of Daniel*
* This is the second article in a four-part series, “The Day of the Lord,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas Lectureship, March 29–April 1, 2011, Dallas Theological Seminary, Dallas, Texas.
Craig A. Blaising is Executive Vice President, Provost, and Professor of Theology, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas.
What is the relationship of the day of the Lord typology to the eschatological pattern presented in the book of Daniel? This is not a question of the relationship of merely juxtaposed types. As will be seen, the New Testament integrates the patterns. However, even earlier, within Daniel itself, the integration can already be seen.
The Time Of The End In Daniel
The book of Daniel presents the personal experiences, dreams, and visions of Daniel, his three friends, and certain Babylonian and Medo-Persian kings whom they served. These personal experiences, dreams, and visions dramatically portray a pattern of trouble that will precede the establishment of the kingdom of God.
Some of the dreams and visions present a sequence of kingdoms beginning with Babylon and extending in succession into the future. Two of these—Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel 2 and Daniel’s vision of the four beasts and the Son of Man in Daniel 7—present a four-kingdom sequence that ends with climactic divine
BSac 169:674 (April-June 2012) p. 132
judgment that terminates the succession of Gentile powers and establishes in their place the everlasting kingdom of God. In this four-kingdom sequence the identity of the first three kingdoms is easily established in the text: Babylon, Medo-Persia, and Greece. The fourth is unnamed.1
In Daniel 2 the climactic divine judgment is presented in a catastrophic but abbreviated picture of a rock striking and crushing a statue. In Daniel 7 the scene of the climactic divine judgment is given more detail and is expanded into a narrated pattern in which a ruler emerges from the fourth kingdom through some political maneuvering and attains to military and political dominance. His character and actions come into sharp focus: arrogance, perpetration of war, and persecution of the saints. A temporal duration is placed into the pattern—time, times, and half a time—which is concluded by divine judgment and transference of the kingdom authority to one like a Son of Man coming on ...
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