V. 2. John is told that he need not measure the court which is without the temple for it is given to the Gentiles; and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty-two months. Here is so plainly the destruction of Jerusalem that it could hardly be put in plainer words. It seems evident that there is no getting away from the fact that here we are dealing with the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70, — that all that John has said hitherto was leading up to this great fact, — that here we have the culmination of these prophetic seals, and this is where the first half of the book lands us. Here, as we open this chapter, is Jerusalem, still standing. Here are the temple and altar in the midst of it. This forever and absolutely precludes the idea that these events are to happen thousands of years in the future. It matters nothing what other men may say, this is what John wrote; this is what Christ revealed; this is what the Bible says; and that is final. This incidentally shows when John was writing; while the temple and city still stood, before they had been destroyed, or about the year 66. We read that the Gentiles shall tread the city down forty-two months. This is not to be taken as 1260 years by making every day mean a year. That method of interpretation has little to recommend it. I know of no reason why a day should mean a year or why God should obscure his prophecies by such enigmatical methods. But the times and half a time, the three and a half years, the forty-two months, the 1260 days, are all the same and mean just what they say. Here the forty-two months or three and a half years evidently refers to the time of the siege, sack, and pillage of Jerusalem by the Roman armies. We first find this term in Daniel when Jerusalem was oppressed three and a half years by Antiochus Epiphanes, and the term may have taken on a symbolical meaning expressing a period of oppression. It was exactly the time of Antiochus' outrages, and approximately, at least, the time of Rome's active operation against Jerusalem.