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How does the book of Daniel relate to Revelation? How is John using the imagery of Daniel?

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How does the book of Daniel relate to Revelation? How is John using the imagery of Daniel?
The book of Daniel and the Revelation are counterparts of each other. They should be studied together as to get the whole picture of God’s redemptive plan, world’s history, the future of the world, God’s victory over evil at the end of the world, and a glimpse into the new heaven and the new earth. Even if these two books are different, many parts of the books talk about the same event of world’s history in which we are about to find out. In this essay, I will show how the book of Daniel is related to Revelation and then how John uses the imagery of Daniel. First of all, let us look at the introduction to the books of Daniel and Revelation. I will …show more content…

So what does the ‘sea’ or ‘water’ prophetically represent? Revelation 17:15 shows that ‘waters’ represent ‘peoples, multitudes, nations and tongues’. With this clue, we know that these beasts in both Daniel and Revelation came up from the densely populated area. What about the beasts? What do they represent? Daniel 7:17,23 clearly shows that ‘beasts’ represents ‘kings or kingdoms’ so we can apply this to both Daniel and Revelation. Without relating Daniel to Revelation and vice versa, the interpretation of these books could be problematic and they could be misinterpreted.
Second, the books of Daniel and Revelation contain prophecies that point to the same event. Many Biblical scholars approach the interpretation of the books of Daniel and Revelation differently (Nelson 1982). For the book of Daniel, the majority of scholars share similar interpretation. This is because interpretations of dream or vision are included in the book. As for the book of Revelation, it contains various symbolic things and beings but there is not much interpretation for dreams or visions included in it. That is why there are several approaches to interpret Revelation in Christian community. Because of several approaches, I would like to focus only to the approach that is held by the majority of Seventh-day Adventists such as Uriah Smith and Ellen G. White who showed strong and clear connection between the books of Daniel and Revelation. Seventh-day Adventist pioneers such as Uriah Smith

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