Was Daniel Awake or Asleep?
I do not mean to be a “picky” reader, but I have a question.
I read Phil Harris’ article on Daniel 7:1-14 with great interest. He always provides an interesting perspective. So here is my question. How does Phil know that Daniel was “awake” for his night vision?
Most Bible commentators believe Daniel was asleep, that he was brought into the vision while he slept, thus the detail about him being on his bed and the use of the word dream.
Any chance Kaspars [Ozolins] would give his thoughts on this? He has such terrific Bible knowledge. I enjoy and learn from everything he writes.
I also enjoy your weekly Proclamation! e-magazines. It can’t be easy publishing one every week.
Thank-you for this information. And, thank-you for all your hard ministry work.
—VIA EMAIL
Response: Here is Kaspars Ozolins’ response: “Daniel 7 is part of the Aramaic section of Daniel, and the idiom in Aramaic is not to ‘dream a dream’ (as it is in Hebrew), but rather to ‘see a dream’. But no, he would have been asleep.”
I remember learning, as a student in an Adventist school, that “visions” occurred while a person was awake, and “dreams” occurred during sleep. After looking up some references to Ellen White describing her time in visions, it seems that she described herself seeing “visions” while awake. Further, people sometimes watched her go into vision right before their eyes.
I am now thinking that many Adventists were taught—perhaps even subliminally—that her visions were miraculous waking occurrences in order to forestall people from realizing they resembled paranormal trances or even seizures. It is a fact that some observers who did not believe she was a prophet of God did believe she was a trance medium (see Cheryl Granger’s “The Seventh-day Adventist Health Message: From Where Did It Come?” Part 3).
Does Context Normalize EGW’s Writings?
Whenever I reference the legalism of Ellen White and the investigative judgment, my very Adventist mother likes to respond that EGW’s writings are very BALANCED (hilarious I know) and that you have to read the entire thing in context to get her whole message.
Thoughts on how you would respond to this?
—VIA EMAIL
Response: I would say that “balance” and reading the entire “message” will never undo the unbiblical things she says about the nature of the Lord Jesus, the nature of man (no spirit), the perpetuity of the Sabbath, and the ongoing, undying relevance of her own writings. Does she contradict herself as well as the Bible within her fully-balanced writings? Yes. Does she ever admit she was wrong about any of her false doctrines such as the IJ, the perpetual Sabbath, her fallible Jesus, and man’s non-existence during death? No.
Her false worldview—including her pre-history story of Lucifer becoming jealous of Jesus and of Jesus pleading three times with His Father to become our Savior—are nowhere to be found in Scripture. She simply made these things up or borrowed them from Mormon writings or received them from her handsome visitor, supposedly an angel, that came to her at night.
No amount of reading her in context will undo the false things she says that shape Adventist doctrines and its great controversy worldview. She taught an unreal picture of existence and a false gospel that demands obedience to the fourth commandment. Those ideas are never renounced nor “undone” in her writings but shape the Adventist worldview and doctrine to this day.
God Must Have a Body
Thank you for the magazine. I watch your Fact Check videos and love them. My question, however, is: why do you say God does not have a body when Exodus 24:10 and 33:23, says that He has hands, a feet, a face and a back? And elsewhere it says that if one sees His face he will surely die.
We were also created in His image. I know He is Spirit, but surely if we were created in His image, He has to have what we have. Please explain. Thank you in advance.
—VIA EMAIL
Response: In John 4:24, Jesus was dialoging with the woman at the well. She asked Him where the “right” place to worship was, because the Samaritans worshiped on Mt Gerazim, and the Jews worshiped at Jerusalem. Jesus then announced the new covenant reality that was coming “and now is”—true worshipers must worship not in a PLACE but in a “way”: in spirit and in truth. And then He gave the reason for this new revelation: God is spirit, and true worshippers must worship Him in spirit and truth.
“Spirit” is not a mental attitude; God IS spirit—an immaterial reality that cannot be explained physically. “Spirit” is what Adventism and Jehovah’s witnesses deny; they say “spirit” is merely breath. We also know that angels are spirits, not physical bodies (Hebrews 1:14). They are God’s ministering spirits sent to do His bidding on behalf of those who are being saved.
The anthropomorphisms in the Old Testament are figures of speech used to make the functions of God accessible to the understanding of people. Jesus, who did not have a body before being born to Mary, is the One who told us clearly that God is spirit. Colossians 1:19 and 2:9 that all the FULLNESS of deity dwelled in Christ bodily. Every single aspect of God’s substance—His eternality, His omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, holiness, righteousness, love, wrath, justice—every singe attribute of God and the fulness of His actual SUBSTANCE dwelled in the human body of the Lord Jesus. This is what it means that God became incarnated as a man. He became “enfleshed”, embodied. “Carne” is the word for “flesh”.
Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 6:16 that God alone “possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see.” Spirit is not physical and is not discerned with physical senses. Spirit is invisible; God’s presence is described as unapproachable light and as a consuming fire. He does not have a literal physical body; He is not visible. The miracle of the Lord Jesus is that almighty God (who is spirit) added humanity to His own spiritual identity as God and lived as a man bringing God Himself among us: Immanuel.
Being in God’s image is not a physical reality. In fact, our own spirits are not physical. They survive the death of our bodies, and they go to the Lord when our bodies die. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:1–9 that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. SOMETHING dwells in our physical mortal tents, and that “something” leaves the mortal tent upon death and goes to the Lord until the resurrection body is united with the immaterial part of us.
Genesis 2:7 is very clear that the human body was shaped by God out of the literal dust of the earth. In that respect humans have a similarity to the animals whose creation is described in Genesis 1. God was not shaped out of the earth. In fact, God created the dust of the earth; His personal existence is uncreated and eternal. By definition, He cannot have a physical body. Our bodies are formed by the eternal, invisible God from the created substance of the earth, and He breathed life into Adam.
The fact that man was made in God’s image is not about the body. The body is a product of the stuff of the earth. God is not a product of the earth nor of anything He created. He preceded creation, and He does not have a physical body.
Our “likeness of God” is spirit, not body. God is omnipotent—a fact which means He can do absolutely anything—and He made all the elements and substance of creation by the power of His word. Yet He personally fashioned man and woman out of the created substance of the earth and breathed His own life into us. The Bible only says that man was created in God’s image—and we see in the Genesis account that the image of God has to be something OTHER than the body because bodies are made from the dust of the earth.
We Adventists learned to think of reality as being understandable from the perspective of our own experience. We learned to read the Bible from a human perspective: we looked for ourselves in the Bible, and we understood God from the perspective of how we functioned. Yet that very lens of interpretation is inside-out. God is not LIKE US; we are IN His IMAGE. This image is immaterial—as the Lord Jesus made clear.
He was immortal, invisible God the Son INCARNATED in human flesh, making God present literally, personally, among men.
It is our immaterial spirits that are born again when we believe in the Lord Jesus. It is our spirits that are literally born dead (because of Adam’s sin) that are made alive and transferred out of the domain of darkness into the kingdom of the Beloved Son (see Ephesians 2:1–4 and Colossians 1:12, 13). It is our spirits that pass from death to life when we believe—just as, in reverse, it was Adam’s spirit that died when he sinned.
Here is an article that may help you with this concept which is very confusing at first for us who have Adventist backgrounds.
- Does Protestantism Have All the Truth? - September 12, 2024
- September 14–20, 2024 - September 12, 2024
- We Got Mail - September 12, 2024