1914, A Year With No Meaning

Attending the Kingdom Hall one Sunday morning, a talk is given by a brother, who lives many states away and is a relative of some of the witnesses in the congregation. Every week a different brother will give a talk, following one of the 200 or more outlines that the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society supplies for the speakers. They must follow the outlines with some room to bring in additional articles that are published by the Watchtower Society or in agreement thereof.

This particular Sunday, the speaker was eloquent. His style of speaking was clear and understandable. His voice fluctuations, accents and speed were extremely skilled and impressive. It was clear this brother was a fine public speaker and enjoyable to listen to. Not only was the talk of good speaking quality, but this talk contained hard to understand, numerical information, containing dates, figures, calculations and many scriptures, all smoothly conveyed by the speaker.

The only problem was, the information was a completely manmade interpretation, it was untrue. Focusing on numbers, dates, times and seasons, God, the person is put in the background. To many bible scholars it is clear that the prophesy of 69-70 weeks of Daniel chapter 9, applies to the Christ and was fulfilled in the years 29, 33 and 70 CE, with the

"A Day For A Year"

Ezekiel 4:6 & Num 14:34

The "Prophetic Recipe"

Stir in a "times" from Daniel and a "times" from Revelation and mix it thoroughly with Numbers 14:34 and "Wala," we have 1914, the year Jesus Christ will invisibly return.

baptism, the execution of Christ, the destruction of Jerusalem and later, the preaching to Gentiles. However this type of prophesy does not have any application to the prophecy of Daniel chapter 4, where King Nebuchadnezzar dreams that 7 times must pass over him. These accounts in Daniel chapter 4 and Daniel chapter 9 are completely separate and are not connected in any way.

The account of the 69-70 weeks in Daniel chapter 9 was clearly a prophecy for the distant future, that was eventually fulfilled, with Jesus Christ, however the account of the "7 times to pass over", spoken against king Nebuchadnezzar, in Daniel chapter 4, was a curse spoken for him and his kingship only. Nowhere does it mention or allude to a second fulfillment in the distant future, or the year 1914, as the Watchtower Society interprets an invisible rulership of God's Kingdom to begin. The book of Daniel clearly shows that this dream of Nebuchadnezzar was directly fulfilled by him, in 7 years of insanity, and then restoring his kingship, thus ending this prophecy. There is absolutely no future fulfillment to be calculated and estimated using the book of Revelation to figure out what a "time" equals. And to put Ezekiel 4:6 and Numbers 14:34, "A day for a year" and actually label this as a "prophetic recipe", as the Watchtower Society calls it, is to go far "beyond the things

written."

There has been much exhaustive, outlined, even burdensome, evidence of the year the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem Not being the year 607 BCE, the year used by the Watchtower Society to support the 1914 invisible presence of Christ and invisible rulership of God's Kingdom. It can also be seen from simply reading the book of Daniel, without preconceived teachings, that chapter 4 was not meant for our time period, but was fulfilled with King Nebuchadnezzar. To put a modern day meaning into this is to slant scriptures in support of various causes, outside teachings and organizations, and like all interpretations, adding manmade meanings, which make God's word null and void, taking away our real focus of the Bible itself, the person, Jesus Christ. To deeply discuss the numerology of dates, times and figures regarding the years 607 BCE and 1914 AD, are to distract from the real meaning of God's Spirit and His Word, our faith in Christ, the person and our focus, our transformation into new creatures of Christ and our agape - charity, towards our fellow man. There is also evidence showing Christ's second coming is not preceded by an invisible presence, another point of interest, yet again, a focus point that distracts us from our worship of God, that can reach the point of biblical idolatry, as so many do, worshipping both the Bible and knowledge, God falling in the distance, second or even further behind. Yet this is a tool of teaching used by many groups to win converts and increase membership in their organizational ranks.

The bible is about God, the person. In the Judeo-Christian teaching, it is a patriarchal, mono-theist God. The revelation is about the revelation of Jesus Christ, a man who lived more fully, loved beyond tribal prejudices and the had the courage to be more than the common man could be. So many people get interested in everything except God, loosing themselves in symbol hunting, intrigue with numbers, speculating with frenzied imaginations on times and seasons, despite Jesus' severe stricture against it. (Acts 1:7) Our salvation, our focus, is on God, love and Christ. Our timing is the looking at our present, the silence within us, God's very presence living within ourselves. The timing and sense of urgency of God is not the same as living with the sense of hurry. Eugene Peterson comments on St. John's message delivered to us in the book of Revelation,

"St. John impresses urgency upon us. But, paradoxical, he is not in a hurry. The beginning and ending announcements of urgency bracket an intricately wrought poem that requires contemplative pondering. The pastoral art of involving our believing imaginations in these Lord's Day visions has proceeded in rhythmically measured and meditative leisure. If St. John had been in a panic, he would hardly have written his message in these complex structures and with these multi-leveled symbols. If he had been in a rush he would have reduced everything to a slogan that could be shouted on the run. Baron Freiderich von Hugel was fond of saying, "Nothing can be accomplished in a stampede." St. John seems to be of the same mind. He certainly takes his time; he also takes allot of ours. Urgency must not be misunderstood as hurry. It is something more like a quiet attentiveness, alert to Christ's coming among us. The urgency is in the attending, being wholly present to the presence of God that Christ presents to us in his coming. Thorleif Borman in his profound study of time in the Bible, says, "Present means exactly what the word says, 'presence, i.e., we are at the place where action is taking place. (2) St. John's emphasis is never on the future as such, but on the present that is pregnant with futurity. Kant called time the "internal sense" and knew that it cannot be perceived externally. (3) Time is primarily the category of inner life, of personal events. but we are so used to thinking of time spatially-the past, present, and future as marks on a time line-that it is difficult to grasp this. St. John uses two words for time,chronos, andkairos. Chronos is duration, kairosis opportunity. We coolly measurechronoswith clocks and calendars; we passionately lose ourselves inkairosby falling in love or leaping into faith. We must never, and St. John doesn't, dismisschronosas inferior or unimportant-schedules and appointments are quite necessary in the course of living. But only by means ofkairoscan we comprehend and participate in Christ's coming. For the coming of Christ cannot be confined to a date-it is primarily a meeting, an arrival which is already in process of taking place, although not yet consummated. In his novel,The Second Coming, Walker Percy posed the question, "Is it possible for people to miss their lives in the same way one misses a plane?" The answer is yes, if all we know ischronos. Percy describes such a life: "Not once in his entire life had he allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future which did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream. (4) If we are dominated by a sense ofchronos, the future is a source of anxiety, leeching energy from the present, or leaving us whiningly discontent with the present, like the child who can't wait for Christmas. But if we are dominated by a sense ofkairos, the future is a source of expectation that pours energy into the present. An obsession withchronos-rigid schedules, carefully planned timetables-is a defense against God's kairos, the unexpected and uncontrolled mysteries of grace. People who are preoccupied with the future never seem to be interested in preparing for the future, which is something that people do by feeding the poor, working for justice, loving their neighbors, developing a virtuous and compassionate life in the name of Jesus. They want to predict the future. Prediction becomes a substitute for action. "But one of the fundamental truths of human experience is that we can never be sure what will happen in the next minute, much less in the next century. (5) Physicist Niels Bohris reported to have said, with prophetic wit, "Prediction is a very difficult art, especially when it involves the future." So where do all these gullible people come from who support the market for "prophecy" in the church and "futurology" in the world? St. John works out a grammatical formulation for God's name that helps us grasp this. He describes God as he "who IS and who WAS and who IS TO COME" (Rev 1:4 and 8). The seed for this formulation is in Exodus 3:14. Moses, at the burning bush, asked God, "When they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them? God said to Moses, 'I AM WHO I AM.' And he said, 'Say this to the people of Israel, I AM has sent me to you.'" In Hebrew this was not a name at all, but the present tense of the verb to be. St. John, using the Greek translation on God's name (the tetragramaten) to note that God's being includes all the tenses of the verb to be in it: present, past, and future. The name, the present tense of being, embraces past and future being. St. John starts our by following this line, but then he does something surprising. We expect "he who is, he who was, and he who shall be." But that is not what we get. Instead of the future tense of "to be," we get the present tense of come-he who comes. The unknown future (he who shall be) is traded for a recognizable arrival (he who comes, which is to say, the Christ who has promised to come, comes). The emphasis shifts from the metaphysics of time to the history of salvation. Later in Revelation, there is an ingenious reinforcement of this perception of time as the antichrist is described in a parody of the grammatical name: "it was and is not and is to come" (Rev. 17:8). The antichrist is defined by a past (he was) and a future (will be here, parestai, but as having no present at all. The antichrist is never here and now, there is no existence. He conjures with items out of the past and suggestions about the future but never deals with what is, for there is no is, no present. In the present, antichrist is sheer fraud. but everything that God is and everything that God has been is present, immediate, invading the here and now. Nothing is remote, either in the distant past or in the far-flung future. In God, past and future impinge, constantly, on the present. All this is on the first page of what St. John wrote. On the last page he puts a final spin on the emphatically urgent, "he who comes." Twice Jesus is reported saying, "Behold, I am coming soon" (Rev. 22:7, 12). The Spirit, the Bride, and the listeners all urge this arrival: "Come." (Rev.22:17). The thirsty of the world are invited to come to him who comes (Rev.22:17). Jesus speaks his final word, "Surely I am coming soon" and is promptly answered with "come, Lord Jesus!" (Rev.22:20). "Come, Lord Jesus!" often prayed in its Aramaic original Maranatha! (1 Cor 16:22) is a basic Christian prayer. As Christ comes to us, there is always an element of surprise that will cause us to cry out in delight, "So that is what he meant." (7) The unexpected puts a keen edge on our expectations. No longer do we face the future with anxious questions on chronology, but with the welcoming kairotic, "Come!" (1)

Reading scripture as prophecies to be captured, to be problems solved, puzzles pieced together with neatly framed outlines of future activity, miss both the mind of God and our focus, direction and pursuit of Him. Thomas Merton relates:

"God approaches our minds by receding from them. We can never fully know Him if we think of Him as an object of capture, to be fenced in by the enclosure of our own ideas. We know Him better after our minds have let Him go. The Lord travels in all directions at once. The Lord arrives from all directions at once. Wherever we are, we find that He has just departed. Wherever we go, we discover that He has just arrived before us. Our rest can be neither in the beginning of this pursuit, nor in the pursuit itself, nor in its apparent end. For the true end, which is Heaven, is an end without end. It is a totally new dimension, in which we come to rest in the secret that He must arrive at the moment of His departure; His arrival is at every moment and His departure is not fixed in time."(6)

Eugene Peterson brings out, two Greek words used for "time." Chronos, pertaining to rigid schedules and carefully planned timetables, the meaning taken by those who predict time frames, dates and years, such as the Watchtower Society does with 1914, and many other religious organizations. Yet God is found in kairos, in the unexpected and uncontrolled mysteries of grace. It is here that God exists, as we enter the paradox of urgency to take our time in the solitude, silence and peace of God that lives within us, in our silence, as God speaks to us in His silence, Thomas Merton further relates:

The god of the philosophers (those who usechronos-rigid dates, figures, and prophetic timetables) lives in the minds that know him, receives life by the fact that he is known by them, lives as long as he is known by them, and yet dies when he is denied by them. But the True God (the One who lives inkairos-the unexpected and uncontrolled mysteries of God's Grace) gives the life to the mind that is known by Him. The Living God, by the touch of His mercy in the depths of the soul that is "known" to His mercy, awakens the knowledge of His presence in that soul so that it not only knows Him but, at the same time, loves Him, seeing that it lives in Him." (6a) (Blue parenthesis added).