Before I show you why I believe events are occurring that appear to be the fulfillment of end-times prophecies, I must first lay some groundwork. Even if you are already a student of prophecy and have an understanding of the subject, please keep reading. Sometimes it helps to see things from a different angle.

In my study of prophecy I have found several keys that have helped me in my understanding. I will share some of them with you.

When we study prophecy, we always come to the problem of interpretation. Who has it right?  After all, those biblical images of beasts with many heads, horns and other strange body parts are difficult to understand.

The fact is, Bible prophecy is not easy. Without the right tools some of those images can be hard nuts to crack. Fortunately, with each one of those images, God has provided us with the right tool. Sometimes God gives us the interpretation Himself in a nearby passage. Other times He wants us to use the keys we have picked up along the way.

This brings us to our first problem. We try to make Bible prophecy even more complicated than it is. Think about it. The Old Testament book of Daniel is where we find some of the most amazing prophecies in Scripture. Yet, in Daniel, we also find a favorite children’s story – Daniel in the lion’s den.

My point is, God wants us to look at all those strange images He has given us just as a child would look at the pictures on a Sunday School flannel-graph board. I believe one reason God gave us so much prophecy in picture form was so we would look at these images like a child and expect a simple meaning.

In Tim Lahaye’s book The Beginning of the End, he quotes David L. Cooper’s “Golden Rule of Interpretation”: “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense, but take every word at its primary, literal meaning unless the facts of the immediate context clearly indicate otherwise.”1 So my first key to understanding Bible prophecy is “Keep it simple, student.”

Our second key to remember is: “Always follow prophecy’s morning star.”  And the morning star of Bible prophecy is Jesus. What do I mean by saying Jesus is our morning star?

Picture yourself in a dark world. Your only light is a bright star in the sky. As long as you keep walking in the direction of the star, you know you are headed the right way. This is the way Jesus helps us in our study of prophecy. He is both our guide and our goal.

The Apostle Peter said, “And so we have the prophetic word made more sure, to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shinning in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star arises in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:19).

This morning star Peter refers to is Jesus. We know this because of the last chapter of the book of Revelation. Jesus said to John, “I, Jesus, have sent My angel to testify to you these things for the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright morning star” (Revelation 22:16).

What does Jesus mean?  If our interpretations of Bible prophecy lead us away from a simple faith in Jesus, or away from the Jesus in the Bible, we are going off course.
In other words, we need to let Jesus guide us through our study of prophecy like a bright, morning star.

Here we have an important key to unlocking the images of Bible prophecy — remember to focus on Israel.  In prophecy, our geographical focus is always Israel. From God’s point of view, Jerusalem is the center of the world. He said through Ezekiel, “This is Jerusalem; I have set her at the center of the nations, with lands around her” (Ezekiel 5:5).

God chose to work through the nation of Israel to reveal Himself to the world. The Bible we study, the promises we rely on for our salvation, and the Messiah who fulfilled those promises and purchased our salvation have all come through Israel.

John Walvoord, author of many books on Bible prophecy and former president of Dallas Theological Seminary, also believes the nation of Israel is an important key to understanding prophecy. In his book The Nations in Prophecy, Walvoord said:

   The biblical point of view, therefore, is quite different from that of the world in 
   general to whom Israel was an insignificant people. From the standpoint of 
   God’s divine election, Israel is instead the key, and through Israel God was to 
   fulfill His purpose whether redemptive, political, or eschatological.2

So Bible prophecy mainly deals with hard historical realities that have to do with Israel, the surrounding nations, and Israel’s Messiah.

When you think about it, prophecy is just history. The only difference is, in Bible prophecy some of the history hasn’t happened yet.

This brings us to another important key: Images in prophecy have an on-going nature. This is because God sees the end from the beginning at the same time. For example, we find a great, red, seven-headed dragon mentioned in the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible. This dragon represents the way God sees Satan and the subjects he controls. In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, Satan is described as a serpent. Between the time of his first encounter with humankind in Eden, to his final defeat at the return of Christ, Satan will have grown into a great red dragon with seven heads. So, keep in mind that the images in prophecy have an on-going nature.

The Word of God must been taken as a whole. The prophecies in the New. Testament can’t be correctly understood apart from the Old Testament. 

I have already mentioned the example of the great, red dragon we find in the book of Revelation. To understand the meaning of this dragon, we have to go back to the book of Genesis where this dragon was just a little serpent.

Another example of how the Old Testament helps us interpret the New Testament prophecies comes from our understanding of who the "Babylon" is in Revelation. According to Revelation, Babylon will return to the world stage only to be destroyed in one hour with fire.

To understand who this Babylon of Revelation represents, it helps us to go back and read about where ancient Babylon had its beginning – at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. Here we read that the nations were created when God confused the languages of the builders of the Tower of Babel and scattered them across the earth. 

So, the Babylon we find in the book of Revelation may have something to do with these nations coming back together. I believe it may be the United Nations, and I will show you why later in this book. 

Sometimes one important key can open the way to many keys. A dream God gave to a pagan king is one of those keys. 

The king was Nebuchadnezzar. But he wasn’t just any king. This was Nebuchadnezzar the Great, the king of the vast Babylonian Empire.

The dream came to the king when he had been thinking about the future. He saw a huge statue shaped like a man. It had a head made of gold, a breast of silver, a belly of brass, legs of iron, and feet and toes of iron and clay. As the king was watching, a stone struck the statue at its feet and shattered it into dust. Then the stone grew to become a great mountain and filled all the earth (Daniel 2:31-35).

This dream provides us with many important keys to unlocking the strange images in prophecy. The reason for this is that God Himself provides us with the correct interpretation of the king’s dream. This is a great help to us when we try to interpret the other images that follow.

The statue represents the four major Gentile kingdoms, beginning with Babylon, that will oppress the children of Israel before Christ comes the second time to establish His eternal kingdom. Jesus referred to the period of time represented by the statue as the “times of the Gentiles” (Luke 21:24). The stone that destroyed the statue and grew into a mountain represents the Messiah and His coming kingdom to Israel.

When we look at history, it’s amazing to see how accurate the king’s dream has already been. Through Daniel’s interpretation, God tells Nebuchadnezzar that the different metals of the statue represent successive kingdoms. Daniel tells the king that he is the head of gold – representing the Babylonian Empire (Dan. 2:38). The silver arms and chest represent the less powerful Medo-Persian Empire that followed the Babylonian Empire. The belly of brass represents the even more inferior Greek Empire. And the iron legs represent the Roman Empire.

It’s commonly believed that the feet of iron and clay will be a revival of the old Roman Empire and that the toes will be a 10-nation alliance that will rule over it. In Part 2 of this book, I will show how this is currently happening with the nations coming together in the European Union.

The importance of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, then, is that it gives us many keys to unlock the images that follow. God not only gives us the correct interpretation of these prophecies, but actual history can now be used to see how God fulfilled them.

This is helpful because these images from Daniel show up again in Revelation. We can use the image of the statue as an overlay to help us stay on the correct course when interpreting those prophecies. For example, since we know that the statue represents real earthly empires and their relationship to Israel, then we know that the coming kingdom of the Messiah will also be a real kingdom – the stone that becomes a mountain. So if our interpretation does not lead us to a literal restoration of God’s promised kingdom to Israel, then we have gone wrong somewhere.

The king’s dream also reveals to us that God is concerned and involved with our politics. Here we find God inflicting a king with dreams he can’t understand. This tells us that God was concerned and involved with the politics in Babylon. This was because the politics in Babylon had an effect on God’s plans for Israel.

For the same reason, God could well become involved in the politics of any nation, including America. In fact, I believe it would surprise us to know just how much God has been involved with our politics. The only reason we don’t see it is because God doesn’t always do what we expect Him to do.

This brings us to another important key: Look at things from God’s point of view. This is because God sees things differently than we do. If you recall, in his dream the king saw a magnificent statue of a man. While he was watching, a stone struck the statue at its feet, destroyed it, and the stone became a huge mountain. God was revealing the future in a way this pagan king could especially appreciate. He was showing him what would happen to his kingdom and the kingdoms following his.

Yet, as I said, God sees things from a different angle than we do. Later God gave the prophet Daniel a dream about the same future. But God revealed it to His faithful servant in a different way – the way He saw things. Instead of showing Daniel a magnificent statue of a man to represent the four Gentile kingdoms, God showed Daniel four wild beasts rising from the sea.

The first beast Daniel saw was like a lion. This beast represented Babylon. The second resembled a bear. It represented Medo-Persia. The third was like a leopard and represented Greece. The fourth beast was not compared to any animal. It was different from all the other beasts – it had iron teeth and had ten horns. This beast represented Rome.

Some Bible students believe these four beasts Daniel saw rising from the sea represent different kingdoms than those Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream. One reason is because later – when the fourth and last beast is destroyed – Daniel says of the other beasts that  “an extension of life was granted them for an appointed period of time” (Daniel 7:12). These students reason that if these beasts represented the previous empires of Babylon, Medo-Persia and Greece, then it wouldn’t be possible for them to be given an extension of life. After all, these empires ceased to exist a long time ago.

But I believe this opinion fails to take into consideration the on-going nature of these images of prophecy. In this passage where these beasts are granted an extension of life, they represent the people who remain from those Gentile kingdoms who are allowed into Christ’s earthly kingdom at the end of the tribulation period (Matthew 25:31-46).

There is another indication that the beasts Daniel saw represent the same four kingdoms from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. It comes from his description of the first beast. Daniel wrote, “The first [beast] was like a lion and had the wings of an eagle. I kept looking until its wings were plucked, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man; a human mind also was given to it” (Daniel 7:4).

To understand Daniel’s statement, we need to use the keys we have learned so far. This lion Daniel saw rising from the sea represents Nebuchadnezzar from God’s point of view. How can we know this?  Once, to teach this proud king a lesson in humility, God actually gave Nebuchadnezzar the mind of a beast for seven years. 

When the seven years ended, the Bible tells us this king looked up and gave honor to God. After he humbled himself by acknowledging God’s sovereignty, his human mind was returned to him. This is when, from God’s point of view, this pagan beast-king was given the mind of a man. And this was the meaning of the first lion-like beast Daniel saw rising from the sea.

Remember, God sees things differently than we do. We see our leaders and our governments as things of grandeur and beauty, but God considers them unreasoning and dangerous beasts that need to be restrained.

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we students of prophecy make is failing to recognize the difference between details and prophetic road signs. So my last key is: Follow the road signs. Although God has given us many amazing details of the future in the Bible, we must learn to recognize the difference between details and road signs. When we fail to follow the prophetic road signs, it’s easy to get hung up in the details and go off course.

Prophetic road signs are events that were foretold in Scripture and are now documented in history. But, too many times, we focus on events that are questionable. For example, many students of prophecy believe one of the signs of the Lord’s return is an increase in the frequency of earthquakes. For this reason, they are always drawing our attention to the latest count.

I believe they may be right. Yet an increase in the frequency of earthquakes is debatable because not all experts agree that they have increased. So I wouldn’t classify recent earthquakes as prophetic road signs. 

Yet, the rebirth of the nation Israel in 1948 was a prophetic road sign. It was foretold by the prophets and is now documented in history.

This doesn’t mean everyone who sees a prophetic road sign will appreciate its prophetic meaning. It simply means everybody will agree that the event occurred. And by carefully following the prophetic road signs, we are more apt to stay on the right course. 

I consider the Schuman Declaration another major prophetic road sign in history. On May 9, 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman presented his proposal that led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community — considered by Europeans to be the first step in the reunification of Europe. This date has now become a symbol of the European Union – like July Fourth is to America – and is known as Europe Day. 

Although not everybody may recognize or agree with the prophetic implications, almost everybody realizes that Schuman’s Declaration marked the beginning of the reunification of the nations of Europe that we are witnessing today. The appearance of the EURO in January 1999, the EU’s enlargement to 25 nations in May of 2004 and the EU’s new Constitution accepted in Rome by the EU’s heads in June of 2004 has convinced even the most skeptical now that the nations of Europe are reuniting. 

This revival of the Roman Empire was foretold by the prophets, and there is a recognized day in history when it began – Europe Day.

Think about it. What good is a prophecy if the event that fulfilled it is not established in history?  This would not serve God’s purpose for Bible prophecy. Beware of those who tell you certain Bible prophecies have been fulfilled without being able to point to reliable historical events as proof.

So remember, learn to recognize and follow the prophetic road signs before attempting to fill in the details.

1. Tim Lahaye, dedication, The Beginning of the End.
2. John F. Walvoord, The Nations in Prophecy (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1967) 52.