Daniel Lesson 24

Four Winds and Four Beasts – Daniel 7:2-5

Some questions have been handed in on the feedback cards in regard to some of the teaching. One is where will believers be when Christ reigns for one thousand years? The Bible doesn’t explicitly say but since we have resurrection bodies, it could be any place in the universe, though it appears that we will be in some relationship to the government on earth during that period of the millennium. It could also possibly be that we’ll be in the heavenly Jerusalem, which is being constructed now.

Could you explain how the mark of the beast fits in here? It doesn’t fit in at all because the mark of the beast is placed upon unredeemable unbelievers who have finally and utterly rejected the person of Christ during the Tribulation.

Another question is if Daniel was supposed to pray toward Israel, yet in the kingdom of man Israel ceased to be a focal point, why was this still recurring, since the glory of God had gone from Jerusalem? The reason was that because during Daniel’s era, as contrasted to our own, the glory was going to return to that point, and it did in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is why John in his first chapter says “we beheld His glory, glory as the only begotten Son of God, full of grace and truth,” and it was the return of the glory at the time of Christ that was anticipated by Daniel’s turning to Jerusalem. After Christ came, of course, there’s nothing like that. It wasn’t that Daniel was saying the glory was there, but rather he was saying the glory would be there. And also in regard to that question, that’s not a violation of the principle that he was being politically non-loyal. The reason being that where was Jerusalem? Wasn’t Jerusalem within the confines of the Neo-Babylonian Empire? It was within the confines of all four kingdoms. So his loyalty wasn’t focused outside of that political domain, it was focused on just one city within that domain.

How do we know that James who wrote in the Bible is Jesus’ half brother and is not James, the son of Alphaeus listed as a disciple in Mark 3:18? All this is summarized in the Scofield Bible, page 997 note 2; that’s why I encourage you to get a copy of the Scofield Bible; that’s why I’ve refused so far to go to the New American Standard Version in the worship service because I want to keep the King James since the King James is the only translation that has these notes available, not that we go along with all the notes but that they are the best summary of Biblical material. And for some of you parents who are new believers in certain realms the Scofield Bible is a very, very handy tool to have.

In regard to Daniel 6:23, because he trusted in his God, and Hebrews 11:33 talks about Daniel in the lion’s den, lions didn’t attack Daniel because at that point in time he believed and was saved; you said had not trusted he would have died out of fellowship. Does that mean that if, in a situation, such a rape, burglar in the house, and so on, that if we don’t trust God at that point in time and we are killed or murdered do we go face to face with Christ out of fellowship right then like Daniel had, had he not had faith in God? Many believers die out of fellowship, the statistics favor that all of us will. So I wouldn’t to panicky about it; you have two explicit verses in Scripture that deal with it, one in particular deals with believers out of fellowship, 1 Thessalonians 5:10, the people who are sleeping there are people who are out of fellowship at the point of the rapture. And 1 Corinthians 5:5 you have somebody who is given over to Satan for the destruction of the body that the spirit may be saved, and he’s obviously out of fellowship. So it’s no big thing because we are locked into the plan of grace.

God reacts in history; does God live in time as men do or does He live in an eternal presence, such as C. S. Lewis mentions in The Great Divorce? If so God can interact in the flow of time. Can God’s eternality, if Lewis is correct, be used as an argument against predestination. I wouldn’t say it could be used as an argument against predestination but it certainly can be used to relieve a lot of the pressure that predestination seems to give some people. It’s the heart of the solution to one of the problems between time and eternity. So I’d say this; it can be used to put predestination in a proper perspective.

Turn to Daniel 7. Daniel 7 begins a new section of the Word, a section that is called apocalyptic because it is for the mature believer. From Daniel 7-12 there’s one theme and that is Daniel is constantly learning about how God’s plan for Gentile history phases with God’s plan for Israel, to get the two together. And that’s the problem of chapters 7-12. It is to give believers a sound base so that they can withstand persecution and pressure. Apocalyptic literature basically is aimed toward believers only and in particular believers who have a maximum time in the Word.

Apocalyptic literature is the last kind of literature in both the Old Testament and New Testament canons, which means that in the soul of the Christian, as the divine viewpoint is built up, you begin to learn about creation, the fall, the flood, the covenant, the call of Abraham and so on, and these events take on meaning, you are able to vividly imagine these events in your soul, you are able to link these events with doctrine, then you have within yourself a residue of Bible doctrine that is understood and is believed; then you are prepared to start study of this apocalyptic literature. It is written, originally, not for the world, though chapter 7 is the last chapter of Daniel written in Aramaic, primarily because it’s the last one that really details of Gentile history. It’s a warning to the Gentile nations, but primarily we can say that the apocalyptic literature, which is Zechariah, Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation are private books; they can’t be understood by the unbeliever, so you might as well not even try to explain them, they are for Christians only. It’s an attempt, a successful attempt, by God the Holy Spirit to provide for suffering.

Apocalyptic literature solves two great problems. It shows the believer that God is sovereign in history. So you have one lesson that grows out of this; it proves that God is sovereign because it shows that God controls the Gentile nation’s culture so that since the God of Israel is the God over Cyrus, the God of Israel is the God over Alexander the Great, the God of Israel is the God over all the Roman Caesars, it means that no country, no society, no religion, no philosophy has prior claim to man’s mind. The Apocalyptic literature is the capstone to the divine viewpoint framework in which it is shown that the Bible is the starting point for all thought, all philosophy and all religions. It is not to be culturally adapted, it is not to be explained away like many Christians do who are chicken to stand up for the full force of the Word of God in today’s era and they try all these little excuses like God used evolution, etc. The Bible is not to be compromised in that way; cowards compromise and people who do that are spiritual cowards. So apocalyptic literature is an attempt by God the Holy Spirit to show God’s sovereignty and thereby neutralize any cowardly compromise with the world. The Scriptures are the base, the starting point, for all thought and all action.

The second thing that apocalyptic literature is famous for is that it is to show that God is righteous after all; even though he postpones judgment because He is gracious toward the nations, God is finally just. The believer need not worry that evil is going to go on and on unpunished. The delay in judgment does not mean God is unjust. The delay in judgment upon evil merely shows that God has a temporary grace period to history in which He is giving men time to respond to Christ. Those are the two things of apocalyptic literature.

Last time we dealt with the first vision. There are five visions between Daniel 7 and 12. In Daniel 7 we have the first vision, the panorama of history viewed as to its basic motive. Earlier in the book, in Daniel 2, Daniel has shown the panorama of history but there it was viewed from the standpoint of God’s sovereignty and glory. Here in Daniel 7 it is viewed from the standpoint of God’s righteousness and His true moral character.

In Daniel 7:2 where we left off last time: “Daniel spoke and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea.” For several reasons we did an extensive word study; one was to prove to you that these symbols can be correctly and accurately interpreted, they are not ambiguous. This charge that apocalyptic literature is ambiguous usually comes from people who haven’t studied it too carefully; “well that’s just your interpretation.” Anybody that comes up with that excuse is obviously someone who has not studied very thoroughly in apocalyptic literature. Of course there are areas in it that are debated, but the main symbols are not debated. In fact, I can show you that even liberals who deny the inspiration of Scripture agree with us as to what these symbols mean. So that’s just simply not true, “well that’s your interpretation.” That’s just a nitwit speaking so when you hear it just tune out because it’s a stupid reply.

There are details that are up for discussion but the large scale symbols are not up for discussion; scholars over many, many centuries have agreed on the interpretation of these symbols; no problem. Why? Because of the tremendous amount of data. The reason people do that is because they can’t read Daniel like they can the other books; they get frustrated because they come to Daniel, they come to the book of Revelation and they see beasts and angels and stars falling from heaven and they wonder what is all this about. In apocalyptic literature we come to a great test of how well we study Scripture.

The “great sea” in verse 2 we said has several concepts behind it. Summarizing those: it is a source of creation, both of the antediluvian and postdiluvian world. Out from the sea came the land in Genesis 1; out form the sea came the land in Genesis 8. So where you have the great sea it is usually viewed as a source of something; reflected also in the fact that the waters of physical birth of a child are made in analogy with the great sea. The water is a picture of dangerous instability in two ways: water is shapeless and formless as a liquid, it consumes the shape of its container and thus water can be manipulated and used and it becomes a symbol of a person who can be manipulated and used, who has no inner character, who has no doctrine and therefore becomes a total passive victim to every circumstances of life.

Water is also a picture of instability in the sense that when water is blown by the wind it becomes extremely dangerous. One of the worst places to be in a high wind storm is a small fresh water lake. The shallower the lake the more dangerous it is. The deeper the lake, the deeper the water, the safer you are and the reason for this is because the water return flow, the return circulation that is established in the water that can transfer all this momentum that you have linked to it by the wind downward and get rid of it. But where you have a shallow area of water, such as along Galveston and the Texas coast, and you get a south wind of hurricane force, that is an extremely dangerous situation. Some places have been disastrous cites because people thought they were safe, oh, this is just a small lake, it’s shallow, on problem, and that was the whole point, because it was shallow it was a problem. The deepest lakes and the saltier the water the safer you are because the depth and the saltiness give stability. Shallowness gives instability.

So a body of water that is so vulnerable to whipping up by the wind becomes dangerous to those around it. Similarly people who are unstable can be whipped up into mobs and become very dangerous to the people around them. So our third point about the “great sea” is that it is a symbol of fallen humanity without the divine viewpoint framework; it is vulnerable to satanic influences and vulnerable to mob activity. Now it’s not too hard to see the mob psychology today. This country is largely going over, as the Christian framework is destroyed, to mob action; it occurs in many ways. It has occurred in the past in our streets. When people become a mob they become animal like and that’s why these animals are shown in the book of Daniel. There’s a lot of psychology in these symbols. The only way to deal with mobs is to deal with them as you would a herd of animals. You have got to literally herd people who are in a mob; you have to watch out for stampedes by people who are in a mob. Mobs are extremely dangerous.

And one form of government that is, always has, and always will be prone and vulnerable to mob action is democracy. We have seen mob activity in legislative form in our country, the ecology craze, everybody got on the ecology bandwagon and we had all sorts of rules passed for this and that, the law was used for this and that regulation. There is only one thing that can break the trend toward mob action and that is the promulgation of the Word of God on a mass scale. When a maximum number of citizens have a divine viewpoint framework in their soul they will believer like rocks when the waves smash against them. They will not move, they will not go along with the sweeping of the water; they will stay fixed in one position. That’s a picture of people with Bible doctrine; they will not be swept along by mob activity. What gives people the water-like character instead of the rock-like character? The difference is the Word of God. The people who have doctrine know what they’re doing.

As we go through this you will note a tremendous picture of world history. Some of you who could care less about world history, you have my sympathy. You probably were taught history in school by someone who said memorize all these dates for an exam and then you vomited them up for an exam and that’s the last thing you remember. When you were taught in school you were not taught in the divine viewpoint framework; you were not taught to correlate what you learned in history with what you were learning in your science class. You were not taught to compare in modern science with what happened in late medieval history. You were not taught to take what you learned in your political science class and compare it to what men were thinking in the 18^th century. You were not taught to go from one area to another area and your education was deficit.

In Daniel 7:2 as we deal with the “great sea” we are going to study many of these cause/effect relationships that come under fire in our day.

We defined the “great sea” as the fallen masses of humanity; they are called the “great sea” because they have no stability; they are dangerous, there is no divine viewpoint framework; it is an extremely fertile area for Satan to do his work. The verb “stove” in verse 2 is an Aramaic participle and it doesn’t mean strive, it is a word to burst upon, as ambushes leaping out from hiding or as waters of birth rush out of a woman at physical birth. It’s a picture of something new being created. So it shouldn’t be “strove,” it should read “the four winds of heaven burst upon the great sea.” It’s a picture of Daniel observing in his dream this placid sea. Sometimes the sea can get so placid that it’s almost a mirror. Daniel has this picture of this calm sea and all of a sudden as he watches “the four winds of heaven,” that means from the north, the south, the east and the west, there’s a suddenly a chaos of wind; first it blows from one direction, then the other direction and the sea becomes turbulent and so he uses the verb, “they burst upon the great sea.” And since we now know what the great sea is, we know that this is fallen humanity in the 6^th century BC.

Now here’s something that you’re going to get that you’ll never get in any history course you’ll ever take because in spite of all the analysis of political science and sociology, none of them have ever been able to peer behind the realm of empirical observation to what you see here. Daniel is giving you something that is over and above all sociology and all political science. He is saying that in the 6^th century BC there was a tremendous spiritual movement that began; it began close to the year 600 BC and he’s describing it as though up to that time fallen humanity was just sitting there, and then there came these tremendous forces operating upon all the countries of the world.

Now who are “the four winds of heaven?” Obviously four is the picture of completeness, four winds means that the wind is coming from every direction. But does this just mean wind or does the word “wind” in verse 2 have a double meaning. Is it just the picture of a placid sea being whipped up by the wind? Let’s look at this a moment. If we have the sea and that equals people, what can the wind be? Not the literal wind, we don’t have the wind blowing the people around; the wind too must be a symbol of something. What is the wind a symbol of? In the Hebrew the word “wind” is ruach, hard “ch.” Ruach is also the word for spirit, there’s no difference because the Jew didn’t think abstractly, he thought of the spirit, the human spirit just as your breath. [Clough blows whooo] that’s the human spirit, right there. When the baby takes his first breath that’s the generation of the human spirit; they didn’t think of some platonic soul or something. And here when they talked about history the wind becomes a picture of these spiritual forces.

Now I’m going to take you to three passages that gives us insight as to what these four winds are because we are again studying a symbol and we must understand the symbol to understand the principle. The first passage is Ezekiel 37:9; remember this is an apocalyptic vision too, and he’s observing the visions when God is telling him about the regathering of the nation Israel and he observes the bones. Ezekiel 37:7 is the context, “So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a noise, and, behold, a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to its bone.” He observes and here’s this… it’s like a graveyard with all these bones and suddenly clank clank clank, you have a bunch of skeletons all standing there. [8] “And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them above, but there was no breath in them.” So they’re just like some Frankenstein monsters standing there in a field and they’re just standing, there’s no breath in them, they’re dead, but the bones have assembled themselves, and the flesh has come around them.

Ezekiel 37:9, “Then said he unto me, Preach unto the wind,” the word is “prophesy,” it means preach, “Preach unto the wind, preach, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God:” you see the prophesying is not an unknown tongue, it’s a sentence of known language, preach the message, “Thus saith the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. [10] So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great army. [11] Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost; we are cut off on our part. [12] Therefore, prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, O My people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.”

This does not refer to resurrection, he is using resurrection imagery but this is referring to restoration of the people to their land as seen in Ezekiel 37:21-22, “And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, to which they are gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land. [22] And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel, and one king shall be king to them all; and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more.” We have, then, the regathering of the nation Israel. But there’s something to observe. How does this regathering proceed? God says in verses 21-22 that He does it; it is a miraculous regathering of the state of Israel.

But then in verse 9, in apocalyptic imagery it is “the four winds” that accomplish this. Now if this is all we had we could guess that the four winds has something to do with carrying out God’s program, but fortunately the Bible doesn’t leave us here; fortunately Jesus elaborated on the passage in Matthew 24:31. Here you see a passage where Jesus speaks of the same thing, that is, the regathering of the nation Israel. And as Jesus speaks of this regathering, as He has in His mind exactly what Ezekiel had in his mind, in what terms does Jesus refer to this? “And He shall send His angels,” He’s talking about Himself, He’s looking forward in time to the Son of man, “He shall send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect ones,” those who are regenerate Jews, “from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.”

Now we haven’t seen that restoration. The nation of Israel is undergoing two restorations, one began in 1948 and is a restoration in unbelief, but this restoration is not that one, this is a yet future restoration in faith. It is the resurrection to be accomplished by Jesus personally when He returns. He will gather together every Jew out of the tribulation. Prior to Christ’s return there has been seven years of tribulation and during those seven years thousands and thousands of Jews have trusted in Christ. They’re scattered all over the world. And Jesus, when He comes back, is going to return these, but He says here He’s going to do it by sending His angels to gather them. Now what form these angels are going to be, maybe they’ll appear as flying saucers, we don’t know, but the angels are going to be performing a function and the point is that where Ezekiel says the four winds do the gathering, Jesus says the angels do the gathering. So the Ezekiel passage at least tells us that the four winds has something miraculous about them, referring to a special work of God in history. There’s another passage in the Old Testament that talks about these four winds.

Zechariah 6:1, again notice significantly this is an apocalyptic book; Ezekiel is apocalyptic; Daniel is apocalyptic. So this is a trait of apocalyptic literature. “I turned, and lifted up mine eyes, and looked and, behold, there came four chariots out from between two mountains; and the mountains were mountains of bronze. [2] Before the first chariot were red horses; and before the second chariot, black horses; [3] And before the third chariot, white horses; and before the fourth chariot, grizzled and bay horses. [4] Then I answered and said unto the angel who talked with me,” that’s the interpreting angel, all the apocalyptic literature is visualized, an angel is coming and showing you a movie projector, he’s running the projector and answering questions. I “said unto the angel who talked with me, What are these, my lord?” He doesn’t call them Lord, capital [L], this is master, recognizing the angelic realm. [5] “And the angel answered and said unto me, These are the four spirits of the heavens, which go forth from standing before the Lord of all the earth. [6] The black horses are they who go forth into the north country; and the white go forth after them; and the grizzled go forth toward the south country. [7] And the bay went forth, and sought to go that they might walk to and fro in the earth; and he said, Go from here, walk to and fro through the earth. So they walked to and fro through the earth. [8] Then cried he to me, and spoke unto me, saying, Behold, these that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north country.”

In other words, these four angels or these four spirits are commanding officers of a global force of angels that operate in the geopolitical environment. This is why materialist sociology and materialist schemes of political science in their analysis of various actions in history will never arrive at truth; they arrive only at partial truth. You cannot go back and analyze, let’s say the American Revolution, and analyze it just from the standpoint of economics. The [can’t understand word] did that and we had a whole theory of the origin of our country from the economic aspect. Now that’s not denying there were economic forces; true. You can analyze the American Revolution from the standpoint of military maneuver; that would be another way of looking at the American Revolution. You could look at the American Revolution from the standpoint of religious history.

You could look at the American Revolution from many, many different angles but there’s one that you’d probably never look at from the standpoint of the average classroom, and that is angelic interaction. The Bible insists that when all is said and done, the economic aspect, the military aspect, the religious aspect, our natural resources, whatever the aspect is that you’re using to analyze the historic event will always be incomplete unless you take into account angelic forces that operate on all of these factors. History is open, not closed. Reality does not stop at the ceiling, but the modern scholar always insists, simply because he arrogantly says I will not study what I cannot assume under my own authority; he arbitrarily cuts everything off at the ceiling. So all we have as factors are material factors. And thus everyone wonders why we can’t explain this; it seems like we never can get a hold of real historic events. It’s simple, because history is His story, God’s story and therefore you have to go to Him to find out the keys to these events.

Now here Zechariah is giving the key to 5^th and 4^th century history, just like Ezekiel is giving the key to future history, Daniel 7, to 6^th century history Zechariah is the 4^th and 5^th century, and he says that the key to history in that period is the activity of these four spirits that operate in the north country which in the area of what is now Iraq, Syria and the south country which is now Egypt, and he says because of angelic factors operating on the political scene, we have certain things happen in the 4^th and 5^th century of our history.

So Zechariah 6, in addition to Ezekiel 37, substantiate the position these are not just four innocent winds. They are four angelic forces. Now for a third passage; if we’ve dealt with Daniel, with Zechariah, with Ezekiel, where do you suppose the other one would be? Revelation 7:1-3 all four books of the apocalyptic literature, the symbology is the same from book to book. These four books have to be studied together; when they are you have a consistent picture emerge. “After these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth,” this is the four directions of the earth, that look to the north, the south, the east and the west, “holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree. [2] And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God; and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, [3] Saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.”

The picture there is of this mighty angelic force, invisible to the materialist scholar, invisible to the man who rejects the Word of God; absolutely inconceivable to the humanist and naturalist, but to those whose eyes who by God’s grace have been opened to these factors, these additional factors in history, there we have these four angelic forces, poised for action. And there’s one angel that holds up his hand and says stop until we finish securing the believers. Now the believers don’t know this is going on. That’s the most magnificent part of it all. The believers who live in that future day and age will have no idea that there’s an angel coming up and somehow marking him, and another one coming up, marking him. The believers won’t go around and give testimonies on how big the mark is because they won’t even know they’ve been marked. But there will be angelic forces throughout the world and these other angels are holding back, ready to launch a tremendous assault on the physical environment of man, and they will hold back this catastrophe in the geophysical realm, holding it back in time while these angelic beings go in and take care of the believers to protect them.

So these three passages, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Revelation show the role of these four angels in many different situations. We can summarize the four winds of heaven as a set of geopolitical angelic forces; normally they cannot be seen. Scholarly analysis of historic events based on economic theories, political theories, natural resource theories, military theories, balance of power concepts, these schemes of scholarship are fine over limited areas, but they are not capable of discerning the actions of these forces. To learn those you must come back to the Word of God. The Word of God is prior to all thought.

So Daniel saw in the vision; now we can interpret verse 2, we’ve spent two hours of study on two words, and that’s about how you have to proceed through apocalyptic literature. That’s obviously why most people don’t like it. Daniel 7:2, “Behold, the four winds of heaven burst upon the great sea,” pictured in a physical way the wind starts and the waves start kicking up, but the interpretation of verse 2 is that sometime around 600 BC God had these angelic forces, probably utilizing evil spirits in a link, had them operate on fallen humanity. Fallen humanity sits here at 600 BC and now these spirits begin to operate. How they operate… oh, undeniably they operate economically, socially, politically, with the natural resources, with trade routes; the work of these angelic forces is all observed in empirical history but the problem is we never can tell, well why did that event happen then and this happens there. Why, for example, did Kennedy get shot in the particular city of Dallas at the particular time he did. You can say it was a plot, but ultimately it goes back to the sovereignty of God. Why does history occur the way it does? This shows you the mechanism.

Now we see something else in verse 3, as Daniel sits there and the winds begin to blow and the water starts to kick up, there’s a delay time, it takes some time for wind to kick up waves; usually a wind starts blowing over a surface of water and you have what you call friction waves start, but those waves we don’t bother with. Soon, after an hour or two of the wind blowing across a sea of water you have a transfer of momentum down into the water and the only way that this energy can be expressed in the water is what we call by swells, and so you have this degeneration of swells, and those things become dangerous, because where swells come into shallow water, suddenly a swell that would be unnoticed out over open water, you take a beach where the water is getting shallower and shallower, a good example is a tidal wave, a tidal wave is practically unnoticed and as it comes up and approaches the shoreline the energy can’t return, and so you have a shortening of the wave length and an increase in amplitude and it suddenly comes up just out of the clear water, and you wonder, where did it come from. Well, hundreds of miles in the distance it was slowly coming and the energy just couldn’t get rid of itself so it went up, and that’s why swells become extremely dangerous. Swells occur because of the wind blowing over water.

There’s some in the western Pacific and in the eastern Pacific there are whole tribes of men who scholars wondered, how did they ever sail across the sea and recently there have been studies that show that the old, old men of these tribes can get out in a boat spread their legs apart and stand in one direction and by the feel of the boat they can feel these swells, and they will actually navigate from island to island as the water…say the prevailing wind is from the southwest and you get these reflective waves off the various islands that come like this, and these men are so sensitive in their feet and their sense of direction that they can stand on the deck of a boat hour after hour and they can feel the swells coming from the island, and they’ll navigate hundreds of miles over the open sea without a compass, simply on the basis of the swells. By the way, these are primitive people. So the sea is a source of many, many interesting things.

Daniel watches the wind begin to burst upon the sea, and he begins to watch the waves, first the friction waves develop, and then the swells develop, and then all of a sudden, four great beasts are coming up from the sea. Daniel 7:3, “And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another.” Daniel is vividly describing this; he says I want you to see the film just as I saw it. And so he uses an Aramaic participle here, he says look, the four great beasts, they are coming, the process of it, first one of them rears its head out of the water, and then after that one comes up, then there’s a second one that rears his head up out of the water; then there’s a third one, and then a fourth one. It’s a process. They are coming from the sea and each one is different from the other he says.

Now why are they called “beasts?” We know the interpretation of this like we know the interpretation of “sea.” Daniel 7:17, “These great beasts,” which you see, “are four kings, who shall arise out of the earth.” So the angel who is running the motion picture projector turns to Daniel and he says okay, do you see that, that’s the king, that’s the earth, etc. So he’s explaining to Daniel, so Daniel would have any mistakes about what this is all about. To let’s go back to the first beast. The beasts that come up are kings; they are kings of the four kingdoms of Daniel 2, which means that we have the Babylonian Empire, the Medo-Persian Empire, the Grecian Empire and the Roman Empire, those four great world empires. But the question we have to ask, okay, I understand the empires, but like we did for the word “sea,” what’s the significance of a “beast” picture in these? Why the beast, why not something else? Why the water? We learned after careful study that there was a reason for using “water” for people because people without doctrine are like water; they are unstable and dangerous when they get in a mob.

Well then what’s the animal like. Okay, there’s a principle here and we won’t go into a big long word study about this, we’ll just observe as we go along. The principle of using animals is that all these particular animals are man-killers. They are man-killing animals. To show you the fear that men had in the ancient world, turn back to 1 Samuel 17:34, David’s account to Goliath when he was out there, and they were wondering how this little kid was going to take care of this giant. 1 Samuel 17:34, It is, after all, an unusual sight to see thousands of men in military array facing one another and this little kid pops up with a slingshot. Now he wasn’t a kid, he was a teenage boy but still, a slingshot doesn’t look too impressive. So he has to justify himself. Verse 33, “And Saul said to David, You’re not able to go up against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are but a youth, and he is a man of war from his youth. [34] And David said unto Saul, Thy servant kept his father’s sheep, and there came a lion, and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock. [35] “And I went out after him, and smote him, and delivered it out of his mouth.” And in verse 36, “Thy servant slew both the lion and the bear….”

So for the Jew two of the most vicious that in his everyday experience he faced was the lion and the bear. And we find the lion and the bear used in other places; Hosea 13:8; Amos 5:19, but there’s a passage I want to look at, Proverbs 28:15; this gives us a definition of why the beasts are used in Daniel 7. “As a roaring lion, and a ranging bear, so is a wicked ruler over a poor people.” There is the picture, and so the reason we have animals used is because they are man-killers; they are destructive of humanity. As I showed you in my remarks about the fact that history can’t be analyzed apart from seeing the angelic forces, now we come to another collision; a collision that is titanic in our day between orthodox Christianity and humanism. In Daniel 2 what was the form of all the four kingdoms? Man, a worship of man, and Daniel 2 looked at these four kingdoms as to their essence and their sovereignty and their power. “All glory to man” is the cry, the cry of the naturalistic humanist in our generation. For several months we had tacked on the bulletin board the human manifesto, and soon we’ll have a critique of the human manifesto. The human manifesto is an important doctrine because the humanists have come out and stated what we’ve been saying they’ve been saying they believe all along and nobody believes us. Now you don’t have to believe us, go to the humanists and they’ll tell you themselves. The humanist manifesto, “all glory to man.”

So Daniel 2 is written, all glory to man, but when you come to Daniel 7 and apply this revelation for believers, God says now I want to show you the true nature of this “all glory to man” business. It is anti-human, so the paradox is that humanism is anti-humanitarian. Humanism begins with man and destroys him; orthodoxy begins with God and elevates man. If you start with man you wind up destroying him; if you start with God then you wind up helping man. You cannot help man if you start with him. You must start with something bigger than man and that’s God. Then you can help him, but you cannot help man by starting with man, which is precisely, of all the social reform movements they are all people centered, they’re all human centered and they are going to wind up just as Daniel 7, turning into raging monsters.

There’s a third lesson to be observed from this. Observe that from out of the sea comes the animals. If the sea is fallen humanity, and it was the wind or the demonic forces allowed by God’s sovereignty to operate on fallen humanity, we get an equation. Fallen humanity plus satanic influence equals animal behavior. And that’s a principle of history. Wherever you have large masses of mobs who lack doctrine, who lack a heritage and a culture that is built upon Christian principles, they become vulnerable to satanic assault, and when that culture becomes subject to satanic assault, you will have manifested immediately animal like behavior in every area. You will have mobs of people who act like animals. And we have to ask ourselves, what is the difference; what is the difference between animals and men.

All right, let’s go back to a principle. Here is the situation, here’s the response. Here’s an animal; an animal responds to a situation by instinctive behavior patterns and some learned behavior patterns, mostly instinct. He has a set of instincts that tell him what to do, and he may be trained. So animals will respond on the basis of behavior patterns. But animals do not have the image of God, and therefore animals do not have conscience. So, when you take a man and a man responds to a situation, he has his learned behavior patterns but he has understanding, he understands right and wrong, he understands truth and false because he has a conscience and an animal doesn’t. If that’s the case, then what’s the significance of these kings that come out of the seething sea of fallen humanity, demonically whipped up in a mob action?

What is it that is produced? A conscience-less society, and when God goes to condemn these four kingdoms he says these four kingdoms He says these four kingdoms are animals, they lack conscience, they have rejected the Word and rejected the Word and rejected the Word and rejected the Word, and the result is that socially you have an animal; the whole thing is one monster. And it all starts with the sea; you’ve got to get rid of the sea because by the time the monster is there it’s all over. And that tells Christians on how they ought to operate. You can’t fight the monster, God can do that, but basically our job is to keep the sea from existing in the first place, by having a maximum number of people on doctrine.

Now we have to see what happens to one of these animals and we’ll have time to just deal with the first one. Daniel 7:4, “The first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings; I beheld till its wings were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man; and a man’s heart was given to it.” The first thing is the animal is a lion and an eagle, the beast of prey. An interesting historical sub note, of course, that should be familiar with those of us in the west, the lion is the symbol of Great Britain (not in this prophecy, I’m just saying that later in history Great Britain used the lion), and we have used the eagle. When this country was formed they had a conference as to what the national mascot was to be. And there’s a story that Benjamin Franklin nominated the turkey; that would be interesting to have the turkey as our mascot, but the reason Benjamin Franklin did that was apparently he knew history enough to know that there was something to this business of always selecting an aggressive preying animal and his concept of nominating the turkey was… the turkey represented plentifulness and did not represent this kind of aggression, but our country went ahead and all the western powers are basically together in this preying concept, the nations just gravitate to these concepts. The Russians depict the bear. So these animal like symbols shouldn’t be a problem to most of us, we use them today. The change in your pocket has at least one of these animals on it.

“The first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings,” now that would have been known to the Babylonians. Here’s a picture of one of Ashurbanipal’s, an Assyrian but nevertheless, the Babylonians picked it up, this one has a human head on it but it’s a lion with eagle’s wings, and they’ve found these in archeology all through the ancient world. So it is a symbol that would have been understood by the people of the time. The lion with the eagle’s wings, if you walked into Nebuchadnezzar’s palace and all over that blue gray brick were these animals, and many of them were the lions with the eagle wings. It would be like today saying the roaring lion would be Britain, or the flying eagle would be the United States, if you wanted to do that in our context. Don’t go out of here and say that I’m saying that the lion in verse 4 is Great Britain. The lion and the eagle in verse 4 is not Great Britain or the United States, it is a Neo-Babylonian Empire.

“The first was like a lion,” not exactly, it had eagle’s wings. The significance of wings is power, Isaiah 8:8 is an illustration of that, the idea of spreading out the wings means to conquer many lands. You stretch out the wings and they encompass territory, so it’s expansive, the lion that stretches out his wings. But something happens to lions and the rest of verse 4 has to do with a historic event we have already studied in Daniel. Remember Daniel 7:1, “In the first year of Belshazzar,” that’s the date of this vision, so this historic thing has already occurred to the Babylonian Empire. Daniel said I kept looking at this monster until the “wings were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth, and made stand upon the feet as a man; and a man’s heart was given to it.”

So something happened to that first empire that removed its beastliness or its minus conscience. That was removed, the first king, and the first king was Nebuchadnezzar, and when it was removed in Daniel 4, the humbling of Nebuchadnezzar, when Nebuchadnezzar personally became a believer. And the significance of Nebuchadnezzar’s conversion is that it destroyed the animal like character at least in his reign, not to Belshazzar’s, but at least destroyed the animal like characteristic of the Babylonian Empire under his reign. And it’s significant that we observe historically that since Nebuchadnezzar, after he died, after he passed off the scene, the Babylonians never expanded beyond his domain. The wings had been clipped, there was no further imperialism, the Babylonians flourished in many, many ways but they had done something that the previous powers had never done and they paid a price for it.

The Babylonians were the first people in history to keep a standing army. Assyria had not done so and eventually they went bankrupt; prices doubled between 560-540 BC, there was a tremendous inflation that got started and the later rulers never could keep it under control. Babylonian was noted for many fine accomplishments. We have tables, they have given us the decimal and [can’t understand word] systems, if you ever want to deal with number theory some time you can have a ball with the cuneiform. That’s what cuneiform looks like, they uses these small wedges of varying sizes and they had three sized wedges they pushed into soft clay. And they’d take the smallest wedge and push twice and there was the number 2; they’d have a larger one down, with a down stroke, and that’s five, sort of like Roman numerals. You push into the clay with these three and push in with the large one, that makes 8. Then they had a big one that signified 10, push into it twice and there’s the number 20.

Then we have the sexigesimal system, they had a large vertical stroke for sixty, how they wound up with sixty no one knows but… then here’s the ten, this is seventy, and they developed what is called positional notation, that was the first time that occurred in history, and later on with the Hindu’s developed the zero and decimal point, then we have our present number system. So these people weren’t stupid. They were geniuses when it came to developing a culture. We have found tables of squares to the number sixty; tables of cubes to the number sixteen, table of square roots, table of cube roots, so you think just because you have one of those little computers that you’ve got something. Well, the scholars of Babylon had done it all before you; they didn’t have electronic computers but they had worked out all the math. They were the first people to develop silver coinage, they were the first people to develop private banking, and they were the first people to have extensive credit.

Now it’s significant that Babylon becomes in the book of Revelation the symbol of economic evil; we’re not saying private banking is evil but we’re saying isn’t it interesting that we do observe that Babylon was the place where we’ve had banking and credit begin on a mass scale, and banking and credit are one of the ways in which Satan will eventually rule the world; the beast comes to power through economics.

Verse 4 deals with the Babylonian Empire and Nebuchadnezzar. And there are some conclusions we can make to this, and that is that God’s sovereignty over history is shown by these four angel’s control over Babylon, Medo-Persia. You must to remember to discard in your mind much of the materialism that you have gained in your school and in your education and begin to see history as open, open to these angelic forces at every point. You can also see God’s grace in permitting this growth and you can see His grace in providing for the believers who must live under it. You also ought to remember that you ought not to be naïve concerning the kingdom of man around you. God never changes His symbols, and as far as He is concerned, human civilization that is not grounded upon the Word of God is an animal, always an animal, it represents a rejection of the Word. Where the Word of God is not primary in education, and in every subject, you have a monster, an animal created. Modern education would be considered in apocalyptic literature as an animal. And the reason is it thrives on mobs, doctrine-less mobs, people, thousands and thousands of people who have rejected the Word of God will come responsively to going Satan’s way; all it takes is a little angelic manipulation.