In the year 1917 the world was still ablaze in ‘the War to End All Wars,’ (World War I). Many things of momentous importance happened in that year of the War, and a couple are worth mentioning. First, it was in 1917 that the Christian Czar Nicholas of Russia was overthrown and he, along with his family, executed by the Bolsheviks who, in order to consolidate their powers, signed a peace treaty with Germany and pulled out of the war. This marked the beginning of Communist Russia who, going forward, would spread their godless ideology and threaten the peace of the nations of the world.
And while this was certainly an important event, there was something else that happened that year that is also still being felt today. In December of that year, Jerusalem, who had for hundreds of years been subjects of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate, was liberated by British forces. This paved the way for changes in that part of the globe, and ultimately opened the door for the birth of a Jewish nation 31 years later. But what many people do not know is that this very thing (the liberation of Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks) had been predicted three decades earlier by one of the great Protestant prophetic expositors of that time. In fact, the man didn’t just predict the event, he accurately pinpointed the exact year it would occur.
The man’s name was Henry Grattan Guinness, an Irish Protestant preacher who was the great Evangelist of the Third Evangelical Awakening in 1859. On top of being a preacher, Guinness was also an author and, in the year 1886, wrote a two-volume book called “Light for the Last Days.’ It was in this book that he made his prediction. So how was he able to discern this? Was he just lucky, or was something else in play here?
Well Guinness was of the school of prophetic interpretation known as ‘Protestant Historicism’, which is a much different understanding of prophetic interpretation than is taught today, which is known as Dispensational Futurism (i.e.; the teaching that there will be a rapture of the church, followed by 7 years of great tribulation under the Antichrist, just prior to our Lord’s Second Coming).
Now in the Historicist school of understanding Bible prophecy, much of what we find in Daniel and Revelation is meant to be understood symbolically, including the numbers. They believed that prophetically,each day equaled one year. For example, in Revelation 12:6 it says, “the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days,” that the days in this verse should be understood, not as “1260” days, but years. They also believe the 1260 days spoken of in verse 6 is the same time period as the “time, times and half a time” (3 ½ times) in verse 14; and that dividing 1260 days by 3 ½ = 360 days or 1 prophetic time.
Now, Leviticus 26 speaks of God’s seven times punishment (see verses 18, 24, 28) that was to be inflicted on Israel if they refused to live up to the covenant that God had made with them. We know they didn’t, as both nations went into captivity. So if Leviticus 26 is referring to a duration of punishment for Israel, it would last for 7 times, or 2520 years (360 X 7).
Guinness took Jesus at His word when He, in Luke 21:24, announced that “Jerusalem will be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.” Guinness considered that this troddening down of Jerusalem by the Gentiles began when Babylon, under Nebuchadnezzar, first subjugated Judah in the year 604 BC (when the prophet Daniel was taken to Babylon). So Guinness took this to mean that if he understood this correctly, Jerusalem would have to be liberated from the Islamic Turks in 1917, exactly 2520 years from when its subjugation to the Gentiles began.
But he had an additional reason for believing this. There was another prophecy in Daniel 12:12 that read, “Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days”(1335 days). He considered this as confirmation that His prediction would come to pass. Why you ask? Because the year 1917 AD was also the year 1335 on the Mohammedan calendar. This led him to write on page 346 of his book, “there can be no question that those who live to see the year 1917 will have reached one of the most important, perhaps the most momentous, of the terminal years of crisis.” Now, Guinness was no quack and I’ll let you decide whether you agree as to whether he was right in His interpretation of these verses, but there is little doubt that when one is able to rightly divide the word of truth, that what God reveals will, no doubt, astound you (Isaiah 46:9-11).
For God’s glory and His alone,
Pastor Terry.