Jack Van Impe: A Summary of His Teaching

   The following is from note 60 to page 46 of my commentary on the Revelation. 

   Jack Van Impe is one of the foremost readers of the Revelation and the book of Daniel together. His Television show, Jack Van Impe Presents, is a distillation of over fifty years of reading and preaching on the revelation in relation to the political events of the present time. His understanding of the prophesied alliances and alignments of the nations seems to me unsurpassed. Many of the suggestions in his teaching seem most probable, and we will have occasion to follow his account at various points below. Where we do not follow him, there appears to be in a failure to separate the visible and invisible things where these should or might be separated. An example is in his occasional identification of the heavens with the visible cosmos, and hence the spirits of the air with literal extraterrestrial beings. Arising out of the American Baptist tradition, he equates 4:1 with the rapture, quite dogmatically, without rejecting other possibilities or explaining that one. He does not comment on the secrets of Fatima, the prophetic vision of the Catholic tradition which St. Lucy once identified with Revelation 9-11. Nor does he understand the significance for his topic of the history of the West, the history of philosophy and the most fundamental thought of man on man.

   That said, the fundamentals of his teaching are:

1) That the prophesied time is that of the end of the age (aion) and not the end of the world; rather, scripture teaches a world without end, even as we say in the mass.

2) The five sections of the image of Daniel 2, Dreamed by the King and known and interpreted by Daniel, are five world empires preceded by the Egyptian and Assyrian and beginning with the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar. From the head that is Babylon, the image continues through the Medo-Persian, Greek and Roman empires, through the division of the Eastern and Western empires, and then the ten toes of a revived Roman empire.

3) The European Union is the revived Roman empire prophesied in the image of the second chapter of Daniel.

4) The Church was in error to follow Augustine contrary to the Millennialists or Chiliasts, in teaching that there would not be a literal thousand year reign of the saints.

5) There will be a literal rapture of the Christians before the tribulation.

6) The return of the Jews to Israel in 1948 and their taking of Jerusalem in 1967 are the fulfillment of the prophecy of the return of the Jews from worldwide dispersion and the beginning of the generation of the end times as prophesied by Isaiah and Ezekiel, as well as Daniel, and finally

7) That the time of the Antichrist is ushered in with a three wave assault outlined in Ezekiel 38 and 39, leading to the battle of Armageddon.

   Van Impe also teaches that at Daniel 9:26, “the people of the Prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary” means that the Antichrist is Roman, as the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD under Titus and by the General Vespasian.

   We note that Fascism is a revived Roman fasces, literally the rods and axes that were the symbol of Roman power, and Machiavelli especially restored Roman politics without the Roman gods, and this is indeed the Anti-christian motion of modernity.

   The two legs of the Roman empire correspond to the Eastern and Western Empires, and 10 nations, perhaps five from each, are ten kings of the end times. Crucial to the Reading of the image in the Revelation is the difference between the seven heads, the seven historical world empires ruling over Jerusalem, and the ten horns, identified with the ten kings to rule at the same time in a revived Roman Empire.