Last Days

Gregory Beale and other scholars have noted that John’s phrase “things that must shortly take place” echoes the LXX of Daniel 2:28: “GOd has shown King Nebuchadnezzar what must take place in the last days.”

The crucial difference, of course, is the change of time reference. These things that are happening are not in the “latter days” but “soon.” What was sealed for Daniel is being unsealed.

And what was it that would take place in the “latter days”? God would erect an imperial statue of various materials, and then crush it to power with the coming of His own kingdom. That’s what Revelation says is “about to happen”: Not just the fall of Jerusalem but the end of the imperial order of late antiquity, at least as that imperial order pertained to Israel.