Bucks are sometimes right and sometimes wrong. I'll explain on this edition of Key Life. Hello, this is Mike Killock. Key Life, getting you home with clean and joy and faithfulness to Christ. Our Bible teacher, Steve Brown, and his Steve with a teaching for today. Thanks Mike, if you had your Bible open into the book of Daniel. Actually, we are looking at a particular place in Daniel. And that's chapter 7 through 12. And we're sintering in on the most controversial of that prophetic session in Daniel. Daniel 920 through 27. As we look at the 70 weeks that are predicted in that particular place, the place where there is lots of controversy. Now, I've got to say what I've said before. I'm not a person who comes down hard on one side of this eschatological or prophecy issue or hard on the other side. There was a time when I was quite clear and quite sure, and I'm no longer so, I know that these things are interesting to discuss. I know that Jesus is coming back and I know that God reigns. But in terms of details, I'm not sure. So at any rate, I took the time day before yesterday to give you a brief summary of each of those chapters. And then we're looking at Daniel 920 through 27 specifically and all of those chapters and talking about the interpretation of them. Now, if you were listening yesterday and some of you weren't, and I know your name, we looked at the historical interpretation of the prophecy in Daniel. And we saw that those who hold to this view believe that this is not futuristic, that these things have happened or are happening at the time of the writing of the book of Daniel. And therefore, the prophecy is given to comfort the people who are going through a difficult time. Now, I said yesterday, and need to say again, probably, that many people who have a real late date for the writing of the book of Daniel suggest that prophecy of the future is impossible. Therefore, it could not have been written that far in the future. It had to be written or that far in the past. It had to be written at the date when some of these events took place. I suggested that that starts with a view that shows less respect for the Bible than one ought to show. However, I did say that there is something to be said about prophecy given to us primarily to comfort us in very difficult times. All right, let me give you the second interpretation of the prophetic parts of the book of Daniel, the weeks, the 70 weeks in particular. This one comes from Kumron. Now, Kumron was a monastic community, and if you ever go down to the Dead Sea in Israel, and I've been there, you can look at the hills around the Dead Sea, and you can see the caves where the Kumron community was discovered. Now, we don't know exactly what happened there. We don't exactly know who was there, and there's still debate about the manuscripts that were found there. In 70 AD, and you probably already know this, a Roman general by the name of Titus came into Jerusalem and occupied it, wiped out God's people and did some really, really bad things. Most scholars believe that Titus troops came up the North-Rift Valley, which starts in Africa and goes right up into the Middle East and into the Holy Land, and they saw them coming, and this community of monks who had pulled away from the mainstream of Judaism said we've got to preserve the most precious thing that we have. We have to preserve our manuscripts, our library, and so those scrolls were thrown into clay jars, were thrown into caves around the Dead Sea. When the Roman soldiers got closer, they said we don't have time for the jars, so they just threw the scrolls into those caves. And in the 40s, a little better one boy was, I guess, just fucking around in those caves, and he had a little dog and his dog ran into one of the caves. And he wanted his dog to come out and he wouldn't soy through a rock in the cave and it hit a clay jar. That was the beginning of the most amazing and wonderful manuscript find, maybe in the history of God's people. We found manuscripts of every book of the Old Testament with the exception, I think, of Esther. At least fragments of every book of the Old Testament that predated any manuscript we had by almost a thousand years. Well, we also learned a lot about the Gumbron community as they pulled out. Now that little better one boy found those manuscripts in 1946. And that means that those manuscripts were hidden in those caves from 70 AD to 1946. Now let me tell you what the monks said about Daniel's weeks. They said they were symbolic weeks. And the 70 weeks were up and that the prophecy referred to their time in particular. The monks in Gumbron were people who had fled from what they felt were the abominations of the Jews. They were waiting until the 70 weeks would be accomplished and they would emerge as the only people who had been faithful to the covenant of God. Now as a matter of fact, generally when people began to pull themselves away from mainline Christianity and Orthodox Christianity and basic Christianity and think we're the only ones left. Nobody else is left and we're the only ones who are right. They began to see prophecies as referring to themselves only. And that's what happened with Gumbron. That's why it's very important that when you look at prophecy and later on maybe tomorrow, or at least next week, we're going to look at what the church fathers said about the 70 weeks in particular and the books of prophecy in general. That's why it's very important that when you look at prophecy you don't just read what a doctor wrote last week. It's very important that you be a part of the heresies that God has given you, that you see yourself as a part of the people of God, that you see yourself as a part of the family of Christ. And what happened with Gumbron is that they looked at the 70 weeks and they said well this obviously doesn't refer to those liberal Jews. This obviously doesn't refer to those tweets in Jerusalem, they've taken the faith and messed it up. This obviously doesn't refer to people who have spurned the covenant and turned away from the eternal truth of God. But this must be referring to us. Let me taste them, you got to be careful when you start feeling that way. And I'll tell you something else, you'll find in most cultic communities, those are cults that they have a weird view of the end times. Be careful about that. You are never alone, you're a part of a family, and even if you don't like that family, you're still a part of a family. You think about that? Amen. All right, we take some time at the end of this broadcast, Wednesday's broadcast to answer some questions. And my pastor will of course be on Friday. He'll correct any heresy that I promulgate on this Wednesday broadcast. We love to get your questions, by the way, but you got to write them down. You can send them to key life, post office box 5,000, make them Florida, 32794, key life Canada, post office box 32150, Cambridge, Ontario, in 3H5M3. Are you an email your questions to Steve at keylife.org with your regular mailing address if you want an answer. And you always get an answer from me or a staff member on the broadcast or in the magazine. If you use the 1-800 key life number for questions, you can get a lot of neat free stuff. You can make a contribution, but you need to write your questions down. All right, let's turn to a couple of things. Key life is a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. ECFA, the council is a widely recognized Christian financial organization created to assure ethical monetary practices by its members. And be sure and check out our website for a lot of neat stuff. That's keylife.org, www.keylife.org. And Tim, the young man I'm looking at through the glass bowl who's in the control room is our webmaster and he does an incredible job. And he's very sensitive and if you don't go check out our website, you'll probably be suicidal or something. But you ought to tell he does. I mean, I am so proud of that website. I can't tell you. Tim, I don't know if I told you or the audience, but I used to say we're not doing that nonsense. And the board would say, oh yes, you are. And I said, no, we're not. It's demonic. You're not supposed to do that kind of thing. The board would say, I don't care. You're going to do it. And being this submissive individual that I am, I said, okay, you do it. And then they checked and they explored me. So we were forced into putting that web thing up. And then all of a sudden I find out that was incredibly wise. And I tell people I was so wise in my decision to get on the web. But anyway, check it out. It's www.keylife.org. Some questions now. This is from Ohio. It just got revealed things to us as a culture and individually in stages so that we're able to better digest it, invite size, pieces. Yeah. I think that's true. I think you find that an example of that in the Bible. Obviously, part of the Bible, the older testimony that we're studying now is incomplete. And we don't understand all of it until Christ comes and becomes the interpretive principle for all of scripture. And I think God works that way. For instance, I don't believe that God reveals to me all of my sin. I've been a Christian for a lot of years. I've been a Bible teacher for a lot of years. And I don't think that I have ever known so much sin in my life that I know right now. And you say, well, to make it worse. No, I was always that bad. It's just that I've got to dump that whole thing on me at one time. I probably wouldn't have been able to deal with it. So he said, we're going to work on this. Then I'm going to show you something else. And once you deal with that, we're going to show you something else. And pretty soon you begin to see yourself, you know what I've been doing. I've been reading the Puritan prayers for my devotional time in the morning. The Puritan's got a bad rap. They are so deep and so profound and so aware of God's grace. And the prayer I was reading this morning, I don't know who wrote it. But the Puritan divine prayed that if left he was talking about God's grace. And if we're left to ourselves, then we'll become devils. And then the final sentence in the prayer was, and we'll become devils the way I am capable of doing as you have shown me. And I thought that is so incredibly good and down to earth. So yeah, I think God does reveal things gradually to us. He doesn't dump the whole thing on us all at once. I thought I'd have time for more questions, but I jabbered on here. We'll get to more of them on Friday. I need to get out of here. One more reminder. Be sure and give us the call letters of this great station whenever you write or call. A lot of very wonderful people make this broadcast possible. When you let us know, we know who they are. And oh yes, key life is a list of orders of production of key life network.