Let me give you Dart’s First Law of End-Time Prophetic Scenarios: the more detailed the scenario, the more certain it is to be wrong. Very simple. The more they try to tell you, the more likely they are to be wrong. So rather than try to give you another scenario of the time of the end, what I’m going to do today is to review what seems to be clear in the Bible regarding the things around which people try to build their scenarios. I want to take you to it, and try to make the things that are known—the things that are obvious and clear—as plain as I possibly can, so that you’ll have a framework in which to fit the events that take place as they take place; because I’m increasingly of the belief that the purpose of prophecy is not to enable us to write scenarios of what’s going to happen over the next period of time—with dates and events and names and places.

It’s really for two reasons. One is so that we can foresee the future, and repent and change, so the future doesn’t even come to pass. And the other one is so that we will understand as events take place, and we will see God’s hand in history—not merely assuming that this is just accident or happenstance or bad luck. The place I want to start with today is Daniel, the 12^th chapter…