Category: The Revelation of Jesus Christ
Indispensable to understanding The Revelation is a knowledge of the content of many of the books of the Old Testament. The number of quotes and allusions to OT texts, especially the Psalms and the prophets, is vast. Any attempt to interpret this book ought to include a regularly opened concordance.
One such quote from the OT is the phrase a] dei/ genesqai ("things which must take place"). This phrase occurs in the Greek translations of Daniel 2:28, 29, and 45. The phrase is a direct quote, but the time referent is different. In Daniel, the vision is of things which must take place "in the last days" (v28) and "after these things" (v45); in The Revelation it is of things which must take place "shortly." John is telling his audience that the time for fulfillment of Daniel's vision is now.
Dan. 2:28: "Things which must take place in the last days."
Rev. 1:1: "Things which must take place shortly."
What was Daniel's vision that was being fulfilled in John's day?
Daniel 2. Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, began having the kind of troubling dreams that keeps a person up at night, so He summoned his magicians and sorcerers and asked them to interpret the dreams for him. But instead of the normal routine of the king describing the dream and the magician making up some amphibology that might pass as a plausible explanation, on this occasion the king demanded that the sorcerers first declare the dream itself. And they had better be accurate in their description upon penalty of death. It's as if the king said, "I have a number in my mind between one and five trillion. Tell me the number or you're a dead man." The magicians and sorcerers protested that no man on earth could do such a thing, thus provoking the king's wrath to execute all of the wise men of Babylon (2:1-13).
In steps Daniel to save the day for these imposters. He asked the living God to reveal the dream to him, and praised Him for His grace and power in so doing. Then Daniel approached Nebuchadnezzar with the dream and its meaning as shown by God (2:14-30).
Nebuchadnezzar had seen an enormous statue with a head of gold, a breast of silver, a torso of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of a mixture of iron and clay. Then he saw a stone fall on the statue's feet smashing them into pieces--the whole figure was pulverized. The stone then turned into a great mountain filling the whole earth (2:31-35).
Daniel explained to the king what the vision meant: He--Nebuchadnezzar-- was the head of gold, ruling the world of his day with great might and power. After the Babylonian empire, another would arise (represented by the silver breast), and another after that (the bronze torso). Then a fourth kingdom as strong as iron would crush and shatter all others, but because of its weak feet, it would not stand forever (2:36-43).
This brings us to the extremely important declaration of 2:44-45:
"And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that kingdom will not be left for another people; it will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it will itself endure forever. Inasmuch as you saw that a stone was cut out of the mountain without hands and that it crushed the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold, the great God has made known to the king what will take place in the future; so the dream is true, and its interpretation is trustworthy."
Daniel explains that in the days of the "Iron Kingdom" God will establish His eternal kingdom. It will not be overcome by a future kingdom, in fact it will crush all others and reign forever. Nebuchadnezzar had watched the inauguration of God's eternal kingdom, and Daniel described the vision, "things which must take place in the last days" (LXX).
It was revealed to John that the fulfillment was no longer far off in the future, it was now. The 'last days' had arrived. [This is consistent with Peter's announcement that the outpowering of the Spirit promised by God in Joel, which would take place "in the last days," was fulfilled in the first century (Acts. 2:16f.).]
Consider the impications of this for interpreting Isaiah 2:2, "Now it will come about that in the last days, the mountain of the house of the LORD Will be established as the chief of the mountains, and will be raised above the hills; and all the nations will stream to it." If the last days began in John's day, then it was time for the mountain of God's house to increase in size and be filled with people from every nation. And we notice that the imagery of a great mountain in Isaiah's prophecy is similar to the great mountain of Nebuchadnezzar's vision.
The Revelation is an illustrated depiction of the fulfillment of the establishment of God's everlasting, worldwide kingdom.
Understanding John's quote of Daniel takes the pressure off of trying to determine a strict chronological meaning of "shortly" in v1. John's purpose is not to establish a specific future time frame for the things which must take place, but to establish that their fulfillment has come. As Jesus repeatedly announced, "the kingdom of God is at hand," it's here, it's now. And The Revelation is going to describe it for us.