Daniel Lesson 25
Persia and Greece – Daniel 7:5-6
In our study of Daniel we have noticed that chapter 7 begins a new section. It’s a section that deals with history from the viewpoint of Israel. It is a section that concerns much apocalyptic imagery; it therefore is the one that is frequently looked up to as impossible to understand. As we have tried to show so far in this chapter Daniel 7 is not impossible to understand, it just requires some diligent study. And apocalyptic literature is geared only for the mature believer. The person who has not personally accepted Christ, who is therefore unregenerate, does not have the spiritual equipment aboard to perceive and understand and appreciate apocalyptic literature. So obviously it’s difficult for many people. It’s also difficult for Christians who do not have a background in the Old Testament. Daniel is one of the last books in the Old Testament; it presupposes therefore a thoroughly understanding of all that preceded the writing of Daniel and Daniel’s ministry.
We have discussed up to verse 4 and we have noted that Daniel 7 is a repeat of Daniel 2 in the sense that the four great kingdoms that will characterize the times of the Gentiles are defined. These four kingdoms, the Neo-Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Grecian and the Roman and the Roman fallout or the Roman derivative, will characterize all of history. And this means that the sovereign God of Israel, though Israel doesn’t even exist as a nation, actually is the true God behind history. And the great testimony of the book of Daniel is to stabilize believers by giving them a divine viewpoint framework that is deeper and more basic than any system of man’s thoughts; any philosophy, any religion, must start on a basis far later than the basis of Daniel, far further on down the logic chain.
Daniel is basic, and therefore the Jews, unlike every other group of people in the ancient world did not have to amalgamate their faith with modern scene. They could keep their traditional faith in tact because their traditional faith was given to them by the God who was presently working in history. So Daniel is a testimony for stability of believers, it is a testimony of believers in order to have hope which is long range use of the faith technique in life. It is a book that is designed to stabilize in the face of tremendous historical adversities. So for that reason Daniel is very practical. True, there are symbols, and it is also true there are difficult parts on which many people differ. But the overall purpose of the book is sound and agreed upon by most Christians and that is that is written to give the final capstone to the divine viewpoint framework by showing that all the doctrine of the Old Testament is not to be changed in the least because history changes. Daniel is an argument against historical relativism. Daniel argues that truth does not change from generation to generation, that faith does not have to be made (quote) “relevant,” (end quote) to the modern scene. It was already relevant to every age when it was given in Daniel.
Daniel is speaking of these beasts that come up out of the sea. The sea, we have found by a detailed study, is a symbol of and it represents chaotic fallen humanity. The sea was conceived in the ancient world as the source of all things, the source of the antediluvian world in Genesis 1; source of the postdiluvian world in Genesis 8-9; source of the physical body because the womb at birth releases water, and so the water, the sea, has the theme of creation associated with it. It also is a picture of the instability of men, as water conforms to whatever container it is in, so the sea is conforming to whatever the ground is in which it rests. Also the sea is representative of fallen humanity in that the sea becomes dangerous when it is whipped up into a frenzy by wind. And so also mobs of people, when they are spiritually agitated create monstrosities. There have been four great monstrosities that have been created out from the mass of fallen man throughout history.
Now this goes back deeply to the philosophy of history given for the postdiluvian world in Genesis 9 when it said that out from Noah would come three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Shem is the father of the Arabs and the Jews. Shem was to be characterized down through history as that segment of the human race most closely approximating divine viewpoint. So not by accident, but if you study history and ask yourself, where did the only monotheistic religions that man has ever known come from? Isn’t it interesting that the three monotheistic religions are Islam, Judaism and Christianity? All three have come from Semites, in conformity with the prophecy of Genesis 9. So out from the sons of Shem comes religion of the monotheistic type.
Then Ham; Ham was to be the greatest servant among men. Ham consists not of black people, the Hamites are white, they are black, they are red, and they are yellow. The Hamites are diversified in color and the Hamites are responsible in history for laying the basis for every major civilization that has ever existed. The Hamites have gone on every continent and have always been the ones to found great civilizations. The Egyptians were Hamites and founded one of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world. We have the Orientals founding the great Oriental civilizations. We find the Sumerians, called the black-headed people in the ancient text; the Sumerians were the ones that founded civilization in the Near East. We have the people that went down into the Indian Peninsula and the Indus Valley civilization, also Hamites. We find the Etruscans on the Italian peninsula also Hamites. We find the North and South American Indians also Hamites. So whatever continent you go to you will always find the earliest people Hamitic. And the Hamitics have a tremendous genius for inventing. The Hamites have invented every major technology known to man; the wheel, the gear, medicine, surgical operations, all of these are products of the great Hamitic races down through history.
Then the third segment of the human race, the Japhetics, are the Arians. The Japhetics would be known for their conquering. The Japhetics are not originators, they are borrowers. Japhetics have always borrowed off of people that they have replaced. Japhetic races are usually responsible for destruction of Hamitic races in history. For example, the North and South American Indians replaced by the Spaniards, the English, the French and so on. We find the same thing true in the Indian Peninsula; when the Arians crossed the Himalayas they moved down into the Indus Valley, interbred, and we have what is now called the modern Indian, actually a result of Japhetics and Hamitics. We find the same thing when the Romans replaced the Etruscans in the Italian Peninsula and we find later on the Persians replacing the Sumerian civilizations in the Near East.
So everywhere we go it’s the same pattern, and all of this key to history is given in a very cryptic and very, very short phraseology in Genesis 9:25-27. Daniel now looks upon the Japhetic history. The Hamitic stage is past and the Hamites have done their basic contribution; they have laid the ground for all technology and all physical civilizations. The Shemites, through Israel, have given the world the divine viewpoint framework, and now the Japhetics are ready to step on the scene and to play their role; and their role will be these four kingdoms.
The first kingdom, we said, was the lion in verse 4. The lion, it was said, had eagle’s wings, and when the lion begins these four kingdoms begin a resurgence of what we will call the new kingdom of man. That means a revival of the kingdom of man tendency in society, the kingdom of man is just human viewpoint faith incarnated socially and politically, it is a movement based from beginning to end on human good, it is an attempt by man to create a society which will give him happiness and security apart from God. And that has always been the motive of the kingdom of man and always will be the motive of the kingdom of man. Every nitwit in history from the communists to Hitler, to the weirdo socialists have been people absorbed with the kingdom of man concept, the power and the glory must be mans, always mans.
The new forms, in Daniel’s day, beginning in the 6th century, are characterized by imperialism. That is, the conquest of other nations by one, and the imposition of its culture upon these other peoples. Imperialism will be the policy among nation states from the 6th century to the return of Jesus Christ. And that means there is not going to be a world government based democratically upon all nations mutually giving their freedom up to join some super United nations. The role and law of history is that you will have maximum peace when you have maximum imperialism. When you have one nation who is strong, who is able to act as a world policeman and to subdue the earth, and to keep the bullies down. Wherever you have had this, for example, the Pax Romana, the Pax Britannica, you have always had a flourishing of the Christian faith. Wherever you have not had imperialism Christianity has always been weak. Christianity lives on the fruit of imperialism. When the British conquered the world and they settled continent after continent, they brought missionaries to the various peoples, we are not arguing that everything they did was right, that’s not the point; the point was as a historical movement we just simply observe the undeniable fact that where you have imperialism peaking out and maximizing you also at that same era of history have an advance of Christianity. So you have then the link up and tie up of imperialism in history.
A second characteristic of the new form is that the Word of God is now available to all men within their national boundaries, so that if a Roman wants the Word of God he does not have to go a foreign state of Israel to get it; the Roman citizen can get it from other Roman citizens, because the Jews have been dispersed in every nation on earth. So beginning at the 6th century there is no nationalistic barrier to the Word of God. Every country can absorb doctrine without having to swallow someone else’s brand of nationalism.
A third factor beginning in the 6th century is that the kingdom of man is now going to become a training ground for the long-range development of the faith technique. Prior to the 6th century believers were to trust in God on a short term basis, not knowing whether the final kingdom could come in their generation or a few generations hence. But beginning in the 6th century it becomes obvious that the kingdom of God is long postponed, way, way down the hallway of the future in history. And so believers beginning in the 6th century have to do something they were never asked to do before, and that is they are going to have to trust in God’s promises for centuries in advance. In other words, the faith technique is stretched out and we call that stretching by a technical word in the New Testament, “hope.”
Now hope is not what you usually think of when someone uses the word. “Hope” is usually used today for when you doubtful, you hope something is going to come to pass. But “hope” in the Bible is not that, has no connection with that meaning whatsoever. “Hope” in the Bible has to do with God’s final program for history, and therefore a believer who is oriented to God’s long-range program has hope. Simply stated, hope is nothing but a long-ranger application of the faith technique. Hope is made possible by apocalyptic literature; Daniel, Zechariah and the book of Revelation are the basis for giving believers hope.
Now we have examples in history who have people who have a false hope, but these examples do show you the massive effects of a well-defined hope. During the Vietnamese War the North Vietnamese POW’s were interviewed by some of our people that worked with the Rand Corporation. And they wrote a report on Conversations with Enemy Soldiers, 1968-1969 in which they analyzed the level of moral of the North Vietnamese in the light of the B-52 carpet bombings. And they found out that no matter how many bombs the B-52’s dropped, no matter how many areas they devastated; still the morale of the NVA would not decline. And they sought a reason why the NVA had such a fantastically high morale, why their soldiers would be able to take this bombing day in and day out, day in and day out, day in and day out, with very low supplies.
And the answer that came out of this long interrogation of enemy soldiers was this: that the reason that the NVA was able to sustain itself with a minimum of technology, with a minimum set of weapons was that they had an ideology; they had doctrine. Most of the North Vietnamese soldiers are less than 6th grade in the level of education; many of them cannot read or write. And yet with every unit in the field they have a political officer, that corresponds basically to a Bible teacher, who teaches Marxist-Lenin doctrine, and the soldiers, because Marxist-Leninism has its own eschatology, which Marx stole from Hegel who stole it from the Bible, Hegel stole the progress in history from Daniel 2 and Daniel 7, and Marx stole his from Hegel, and the communists have what they think is something really new. Of course our response to the communists, why get it second hand from Marx when you can get it first hand from Christ, because Marx stole everything that’s good in his system out from Jesus Christ. And part of what he stole was this concept of the future in history, the golden era that would come in with communist victory. And it is that picture, that long-range hope that encourages morale.
So the lesson for us is if the NVA with 6th grade people can motivate people to take that kind of adversity and that kind of suffering with a false hope, what ought Christians to be doing with the true hope, that has an intellectual basis, that can be discussed, that is opening for questioning and answers whereas Marxist-Leninism is not.
Now Daniel 7:4 speaks of that first kingdom which had already occurred, because as verse 1 says, this is “the first year of Belshazzar,” this means that during the Babylonian captivity, the kingdom era, Daniel has lived and now toward the end of that period he receives his vision from God. The lion is a picture of a ferocious man-eating animal and all of these are man-killers, and the reason is that it’s God’s divine commentary upon man’s efforts to secure a happy and secure society apart from himself, that is, when men start with Humanity, capital “H” they wind up destroying Humanity. So all of the visions of Daniel deliberately select man-eating, man-killing animals because when you build a society on godlessness, when you build it in apostasy, then you must wind up destroying that which you hoped to save.
Daniel 7:4, He says and I beheld till the wings thereof 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.” We said that that was the incident of Daniel 3, when Nebuchadnezzar had his apostasy smashed in his soul and he personally bowed his knee and trusted in Jesus Christ. And it shows you that by a miraculous intervention God can head off, at least momentarily, the beastly anti-human character of kingdom of man attempts. It comes about when people in those kingdoms are converted to Christ through the teaching of the Word of God and are edified. That is the only way these kingdoms can be stopped and robbed of their beastly character. And so Daniel 7:4 gives us a principle of history: to forestall the final culmination of any given kingdom, evangelization by the Word of God can do it, and that’s the only tool available to remove this inner hatred of man.
Daniel 7:5, “And, behold, another beast, a second, like a bear, and it raised up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it between its teeth; and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh.” Now the word bear, as we said last time, is identical to a lion in the sense that in many cases in the Bible both the animals are picked out very prominently for their ferocity. For example, in 1 Samuel 17:34 David talks about how he killed the lion and a bear and so on. In Hosea 13:8 the bear is used; in Amos 5:9 the bear is used; he also occurs in Proverbs 28:15. In all these usages in the Bible the bear again is a ferocious man-killing animal and pictures what happens to people in these kingdoms. When you start with the kingdom of man you build on the basis human good. Man tries to achieve a good life apart from confessing the necessity of Christ’s finished work on the cross, therefore cutting themselves off from grace and therefore creating a destruction of the conscience. When you have a destruction of the conscience, man then becomes identical to an animal. People act like animals when they have no conscience. So what distinguishes man from animals is not thought; animals think. The difference between an animal and a man is that man has conscience and he thinks in terms of right and wrong and truth and false whereas animals just learn in terms of recognition of patterns and so on, perception.
So the people, as these kingdoms, can turn into monsters. And the bear, pictured in verse 5, is a picture of the second kingdom, the kingdom of Medo-Persia. Today we are going to study Daniel 7:5-6 and to do so, even though there are only two verses here, we have to study some three centuries of history and we can’t work with three centuries quickly, so I have tried to summarize the highlights so you will understand verses 5-6. So let’s read it and then we’ll go through the verse and try to relate it to history. At the end of verse 5 it says, “they said thus unto it, Arise, devour much flesh.” In the Aramaic it’s simply the impersonal, “it was said unto it” would be the way of translating it, the emphasis isn’t on who is doing the saying, the emphasis is on somebody said to it, “Arise, devour much flesh.” Now you can probably guess who said “Arise, and devour much flesh,” because who was it? It was the four winds that worked upon the sea. Remember the four winds in verse 2, the winds that blew upon the sea that stirred the waves up and when the waves got stirred up then up from this ocean came these monsters.
Daniel 7:6, “After this I beheld, and lo, another, like a leopard, which had upon its back four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads, and dominion was given to it.” So we have the third animal. We have the lion, we’ve explained it, and we will explain now the bear and the leopard. The bear is the Medo-Persian Empire and the leopard is the Grecian Empire, but that doesn’t explain it. Verses 5-6 have certain specific things to say about both of these kingdoms. For instance, it says that the bear was “raised up on one side.” Now why was the bear raised up on one side? It goes back to history again, here’s the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf and the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. Over here is what is called Persia and here is Media, and down here you have Babylon. The Medes were the first ones to unite. They were tribes that used to go around stealing things and finally somebody got them together, and then there was a man who started a group of people over here in Persia. Persia today is Iran, it’s very high, very mountainous, and the people of Persia are Japhetic. Even though… if you see pictures of them you’d swear they were Arabs. They are not Arabs; Iran is not an Arab nation. Iran is just as Japhetic as Western Europe. The people have certain traits that make them look like Arabs in pictures, but those people of Iran are not Arabs; they are Japhetics. And they therefore, as Japhetics, and in a mountainous area, are very tough.
They always have been tough people because you have to be tough to survive in these mountains. In Iran today they have thousands and thousands of hand dug trenches to water the fields, for hundreds of miles away from the mountains the water is conducted down these mountains and into the valleys through underground tunnels, and in order to dig these underground tunnels you have to have a manhole every once in a while to go down there and do your digging, and so from the air you’ll see these long rows of circles, stretching for hundreds of miles across the Iranian plateau. And those wells and those holes are hundreds and hundreds of years old. They were hand dug hundreds of feet below the ground to convey mountain water to the farmlands on the plains. So it shows you just that project alone the tenacity of these people. They love their land and they are going to grow things on that land and they are going to defend that land. So the Persians have always been a tough group of people.
Finally there came forth from Persia a man by the name of Cyrus; Cyrus conquered the Medes in 550 BC, he went over to the west, to a place called Lydia, what is now Turkey and he wiped them out. He wiped the Medes out and finally he destroyed the Babylonians. Those three conquests are the three ribs held in his mouth in verse 5. It speaks of the three great conquests of Cyrus. The angel tells us the interpretation of this vision, at least in Daniel 7:17 the angel says, “These great beasts, which are four, are four kings, who shall arise out of the earth.” And the first king of each of these kingdoms is a special one. Nebuchadnezzar was a special king for the lion, and the special king for the bear is Cyrus. So predominantly the bear refers to Cyrus and his conquests.
Now it says something to the bear. Picture the bear on one side is the fact that after they conquered, Cyrus was the world’s greatest diplomat. In fact one historian very facetiously said every place Cyrus went to he’d make a call on the local temple and he’d walk into the temple and he’d kiss the feet of all the priests and bow down to the idols and so on, impress everybody that he was a great diplomat. And as one historian said after studying Cyrus and his tactics he said King Cyrus wouldn’t object to stooping down in the temple floor as long as there was some good stuff to pick up. This was his tactic, this was his diplomacy, and it was very successful, so that we call it the Medo-Persian Empire, but the Persian Empire was the most powerful side of it. So the bear is pictured as kind of a freak, the bear is lopsided; it looks like he has a super case of arthritis. On one side he’s high and on the other side he’s low, and the high side is a picture of Persia and the low side is a picture of the Medes. And he’s eating these three ribs. Obviously it’s a picture of the bear who’s already destroyed an animal and he’s sitting there munching on the bones.
So as he sits there and chews there’s a voice. Daniel sees this in his vision at night and he sees this bear sitting there chewing, and suddenly there’s this voice, get up from chewing those bones and “devour much flesh.” This means that the bear is called in history, he is called upon to conquer much flesh. Now how did the bear conquer much flesh? We are going to have to study how he conquered much flesh in connection with verse 6 and the leopard because the change from verse 5, that is from the Medes and the Persians, to the time of the Greeks, is a very, very involved piece of history. So we’ll have to teach both of them together. So even though I am going to skip to verse 6 and deal just briefly with the leopard, I haven’t left the bear and who he is in history.
In Daniel 7:6, “After this,” chronological sequence, “I beheld, and, lo, another, like a leopard, which had upon its back four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads,” we won’t get to that yet, we’ll just stop with the “four wings of a fowl.” We’ll just take that part of verse 6, the leopard and he has on the back four wings. Now what is the difference between the leopard and the preceding animals? Why is the leopard picked out in verse 3; we know the lion and the bear, they’re picked out for their strength, their ferocity, the fact they can deal devastating blows quickly. Why is the leopard picked out? The leopard is picked out not only because he can kill but because of his speed. And the fact that he has four wings emphasizes speed again, it emphasizes, like the wings of the lion the spreading of power and sovereignty over vast geographical expanse, but it denotes primarily speed, and it refers to Alexander the Great. Cyrus is the bear and Alexander the Great is the leopard, and we are going to study the fall of the bear and the rise of the leopard through studying Persian and Greek history.
Keep in mind that Alexander the Great conquered the world in five years. And it took the Persians 35 years, so we have a fact of history corresponding very well to these symbols. Alexander shocked the ancient world, that he was able in five year to conquer it. His empire grew fast and it fell apart fast, but the story of Alexander is one of the more thrilling stories of history which probably is omitted in most history courses, too busy talking about 1932 and all the socialists so we don’t have time any more to talk about the great things of history and the truly great people of history.
All right, this is how history went on. The points between verse 5-6, when the bear ended and the leopard began, is [can’t understand word]. We know the bear is Cyrus, we know the leopard is Alexander, but the transition between these two men occupied centuries of time, centuries of what we will have to say on the basis of this chapter, the four winds of heaven blowing upon the sea. How do we interpret the four winds of heaven blowing upon the sea? By sociological and political factors which we think, normally we cut off our perception at the ceiling and we forget the vertical nature of history and we jus think in terms of well, these people had this terrain, these people had these resources, these people had this racial characteristic, and then you put them all together and it explains history. No-no, not at all. History cannot be explained until you explain the interfering forces of history, which are these four winds that are blowing upon the sea.
Now a lesson comes out of this immediately and that is one nation may be in existence for centuries and then all of a sudden, when the wind blows upon that nation, that nation suddenly rises to prominence in history. Such is the case of the Greeks. The Greek city-states had been in existence for centuries, they had been fighting the Trojan Wars, the Peloponnesian Wars, and other wars for a long time, and then finally with Philip of Macedon and his son, Alexander, the Greek nation congealed and came into its own as a world power. Now it didn’t come into power over night, it just appeared to be that way, and the Biblical imagery behind all this is the winds of the four spirits blowing upon it.
The Greek tribes had been disjointed for many centuries from the Trojan War era. There were a lot of city-states and the Greeks loved to think in terms of their city-state, but not in terms of Greece. The concept of the Greek extended out to his city wall and that was it, and the Athenian didn’t care of the Theban, the Theban didn’t care much for the Spartan, and the Spartan didn’t care much for the Corinthian, they just had their own cities and their own states, and this talk about a Greek nation just wasn’t there, there was no Greek nation, there was just a lot of city states.
Now we have to go back a ways in time to catch what happens here. We have in world history, here’s Turkey sitting out here with the Bosporus and the Black Sea and we have the Grecian Peninsula sticking out into the Mediterranean, North Africa, and we have the Persian Empire here. Now the Persian Empire always had their cites on Europe. And the reason was because they knew there were people over there and they knew there were resources. The Phoenician navy had gone up through the Mediterranean and they were trading; in fact the Phoenicians had circumnavigated Africa by this time so there was a reasonable concept of the continent, and the Persian Empire always liked this area over here, and they always had their eyes to the west, ever since Cyrus tried to destroy Lydia and was successful in his generation. So the Persians wanted to first gain strong control over Asia Minor, the great cities which are mentioned in the book of Revelation.
While they attained control over these cities of Asia Minor there were Greek colonies on the coast, and these Greek colonies were under the hegemony of Persia. But the Persians found out, much to their amazement, that these Greek city states wanted to stay Greek, and much more, they had the Greek mentality of freedom. So they began to fight for their freedom, and the Persians began to notice, hey, where are all these city states getting this idea from, where are they getting their supplies from? And they noticed there were two other city states off to the west, one was Athens and the other one was Eritrea, and Eritrea and Athens supplying the rebel city states, finally agitated Darius I. Let’s go to our king chart and get located in history. Here are the kings of Persia; Cyrus II is the Cyrus of the Bible; he is the one that Isaiah talks about, he is the one that Daniel lived under. His son, Cambyses, takes over; Cambyses is the one that conquers Egypt. There is a whole mix-up here with a guy called Pseudosmerdis and a few other people, and then Darius Hystaspes attains the throne.
Darius is not part of the lineage, he comes in, and he intermarries and tries to keep on the family line. Following Darius, Darius is the man, who if you study Bible history… see Daniel ends right about here; he just goes off the scene during Cyrus’ reign. And later on we have Ezra and the temple rebuilt under Darius. Darius is the man that Zechariah will talk about; he’s the man that is talked about in Ezra and Nehemiah. And then you come down to the next king and his name is Xerxes. Xerxes is the man who is spoken of in the book of Esther. He is a person who turns into a tyrant and psychotic, and he is helped by a young Jewish girl called Esther. All during this time, Nehemiah, by the way is active, Zechariah, Haggai and Malachi, and then son Artaxerxes, “Arta” is the Persian word for rice, Artaxerxes I, Artaxerxes [not sure of word; may be: Longinus] is the one who had Jerusalem rebuilt. So there’s the sequence between Bible history and Persian history, but you wan to notice that after Jerusalem is rebuilt all these prophets stop, Malachi, Haggai and Zechariah, the last books in your Bible in the Old Testament is Malachi, and everything cuts out. So from this time on in history we have nothing, there’s no data on what is going on, the Bible is closed until Jesus comes. So we’re dependent on secular sources for the rest of this history. We have Darius II, Artaxerxes, Artaxerxes and Arses and finally Darius III.
Now what’s going on in Greece while this is going on? See, this is the Persian, this is the bear. The bear is primarily Cyrus and what he starts. Now over in Greece at this time we have the city states starting in this little intrigue business. And Darius Hystaspes gets mad. He gets mad at Eretrea and Athens for sending aid and so he starts one of the first campaigns over the Greeks. He sends his navy in and they wipe out Eretrea; they deport its citizens. Then they come down and here’s Athens, and one of the most famous battles in ancient history was fought at Marathon, from which we get the word, the 25 mile run between Athens and Marathon. And he landed his soldiers at Marathon and was going to come down the peninsula and destroy Athens. Darius had great generals; he had a great army and a great fleet and what you want to notice as I go through this, because I have a purpose in it, because it’s a part of verse 6 that you can’t appreciate unless we go through all this history. So if you don’t like history you came to the wrong service.
This part was the rise of strategy and Darius comes over here with tremendous strategy because what he wants to do is he stops at Marathon. Here’s his thinking; he doesn’t want to take Athens by siege, it would cost too much to his soldiers. So he has a plan, he’s going to drop his soldiers off at Marathon, and they’re going to hold camp there and threaten the Greek peninsula. He knows that he’ll draw the Greeks off and the Greeks will move the Athenian army northeastward to try to do battle with them at Marathon. And he has a plan that when the Greek army is all the way up to Marathon, since he has ships and they’re all ready to go, and they’re not thinking in these terms, he’s going to leave a holding force at Marathon and most of his soldiers are going to come around and strike at Athens. His hope is that by the time he can get around there, a party… they had the liberals of their day that were anti-Greek, everybody was better except the Greeks, and he hoped that by time the liberals would agitate enough inside Athens to throw the city into confusion and he could take it.
Unfortunately for him, it’s found out there’s some famous running going on between Athens and Marathon, the Athenians force march their soldiers all the way back from Marathon after clobbering the holding force, and come back and defend Athens and the battle of Marathon results in a defeat for Darius. So here we have the Battle of Marathon and it’s the first reversal that the bear has yet to taste. The bear has tried to push westward and he got his claws clipped at Marathon.
Now the second scene where it even gets more interesting involves Darius’ successor, who in this is case is Xerxes, the same person in the book of Esther. Xerxes was a man who was primarily interested in architecture. He built a city called Persepolis, or the city of Persia, a very famous place and that was what he was primarily interested in, except for unfortunately for Xerxes, he has a cousin by the name of Mardonius, and Mardonius looks around and he sees all these satraps in the Persian Empire and he says now look, so and so has his own province and so and so over there has his own province, I think I want a few provinces, and besides Xerxes, I’m your cousin, and you know what happened in Darius’ reign, those Greeks over there really made us look bad. So why don’t we conduct an expedition to Europe and conquer the Greeks.
So through Mardonius’ agitation Xerxes is convinced to move his armies westward and this is the famous invasion of Europe which was insane, but nevertheless Xerxes was the kind of person to do something like this. It was insane for several reasons. This is the battle that’s going to end in the famous battle of Salamis Bay, but Xerxes comes to the throne and he has some revolts he has to take care of for a few years, and then he takes 50% of the entire Persian Army, that’s three army corps of 180,000 men, and you can imagine the mass of people. It takes them two years to get started, and he starts to march west. And he marches to a place called Sardis. That’s the same city mentioned in the book of Revelation, and he bivouacs there with these three corps, they gather their supplies, and while they’re in camp they capture three Greek spies.
So Xerxes, to show his utter despicable attitude toward the Greeks, he has these three spies and he says okay, you guys came here to spy on my camp, I am going to give you a guided tour of every unit in all the three corps. So he has an escort take these three Greek spies up one row of tents, down the next row, up one row, down the next row, all through the camp. And he says now, I am going to release you and I’m going to have you sent back and I’ll even give you a boat, and you go back and you tell the Greeks what you saw. And these three spies did, and of course it was stupid because although he had a tremendously large army, it was a land-locked army because it couldn’t be live off the land, it had to be supplied constantly by the sea, yet it was too big to carry by the sea.
So he starts moving up to a place called Ilium, and there Xerxes has some fantasies and he conceives of himself as a man to finish the Trojan War; the Trojan War had been fought earlier and so he says now in the Trojan War the Greeks bested the Trojans; now I am going to be the latter day King Priam and I am going to promote the Trojan course. So he goes back and he dedicates the army, the expedition and everything to the opening of the second Trojan War. He has a series of pontoon bridges, one of the first in military history built, across the Dardanelles. It takes the soldiers seven days to march across the pontoon bridges. It shows you his line of supply is now dependent upon one bridge; 180,000 men dependent upon bridge, a very, very thin and vulnerable line of supply. He has three army corps and they move in parallel lines, corps one, corps two, corps three. They are supplied; corps three job is to hold the coast and the Persian fleet constantly meets them at certain points along the coast to supply them, because this is so large an army that no river can possibly supply their needs of water; no one river can and certainly no farmland can supply their need for food.
All during this time the Greeks get ready and the Greeks decide upon a strategy which is going to be to abandon entirely the Greek peninsula and build a massive fortification across the Isthmus of Corinth; Corinth is the city right here on this Isthmus, Sparta is down here, and on this Peloponnesian peninsula they are going to make this stand. So the Greek plan is to abandon, just to back up, because they think they can’t possibly meet Xerxes. Xerxes outnumbers them; massive hordes of these Oriental soldiers from all over the place coming down. The trouble with the Greeks is they never could together; if they had gotten together they could have stopped him. But they never could get together. And so they realized their weakness and they went down here and said okay, while we’re building this bridge we have got to hold them off, any volunteers. And that was where the famous band of 300 Spartans went to Thermopylae pass, and they held the pass against thousands and thousands of Persian soldiers until a traitor revealed a sneaky way around the side and the Persians came around the side and the Spartans fought to the last man. It’s one of the famous battles of history, it’s actually a small thing, it didn’t have much strategic importance but it is one of the great heroic stories of these 300 men that laid down their lives to slow the enemy advance.
But Thermopylae was just the
beginning of the surprises for Xerxes because when he gets down to the area of
Athens, which is down on this peninsula, he comes to a place near Athens called
Salamis. Now the Greeks have a plan to
evacuate. Athens is on a peninsula like this, and Salamis is a Bay here; the
Greek plan is they’re going to evacuate their civilians, so they have their
civilians all come to this place and the Greek navy is going to evacuate the
civilians. So they start evacuating the
civilians and then the Persian navy closes in.
And this is a most formidable thing and a very famous battle is fought;
there’s a triple line of Persian ships to block the south end of Salamis. To the north he dispatches 200 Egyptian
ships. So he has the entire Greek navy
bottled up in Salamis.
Now Xerxes begins to show what
always leads to the destruction of a nation and that’s one of the lessons I
want you to see as you study this part of history in the light of Daniel. Things happen here that show why nations go
down. At this point, Xerxes has control
of the Greek peninsulas. At this point
he is total master of the situation, he is the bear devouring much flesh; he
has moved westward and invaded for the first time Europe. The Greeks have nothing; they have failed,
they have had their heroics at Thermopylae but they have not been able to
hold. And if he destroys the Greek navy
at Salamis, then he can proceed south to the Peloponnesian Peninsula and you
don’t have to be a military tactician to see how you’re going to take the
Peloponnesian Peninsula. Let’s look at
for a minute; all your enemy is bottled up and they have one bridgehead across
here and you have the world’s greatest navy.
How are you going to take it?
Obviously you’re going to outflank this wall, you’re going to have
[can’t understand word], you’re going to move your land soldiers down here to
pull all your defenses up to that wall and then you’re going to make landings
and you can take the Peninsula. So the
destruction of Greece is right around the corner at Salamis, it’s a very, very
critical time for the nation.
All right, what happens? Xerxes loses his head. And I want you to notice that the bear is
going to lose to the leopard, not because the leopard conquers the bear, but
because the bear himself gives up his own strength. Xerxes can’t wait for this
Greek fleet to be starved out. See,
he’s got them all blocked as it is, beautiful.
All he has to do is just hold, just leave them there, they’re going to
starve to death after while, they only have a two weeks food supply, so all he
does is just one month of waiting and he’d have the entire Greek navy
destroyed. But no, Xerxes in his
arrogance and in his cockiness, he wants to see a fight. So he tells his men, now I want you to get a
silver throne for me and we’re going to set up a little amphitheater here, so
he takes his chair and he has his men sit there on a hill by Salamis. He says now I want to personally conduct
this battle, and so he orders the Persian navy to come up into the
straight.
Now the Greeks are smart because
at this point they know they’ve got the Persians; now they’ve got a fighting
chance, because in the narrows of the straight the Persian long boats can’t
maneuver and so the Greeks, when they see the Persians beginning to move, they
start backing up as though they are retreating, and once they get the Persians
strung out, then they come alongside and attack them. After the battle is over they have sunk 200 Persian ships and
Xerxes loses one-third of his navy at Salamis.
That is one of the great turning points of history, and that was when
the bear left Greece. For several years
the armies marched back and forth but never did anything more to the
Greeks. And the reason was not because
the Greeks were so great. At this point
the Greeks are not the leopard; watch that, the bear dies first, before the
leopard comes, before the leopard
comes. The leopard isn’t in existence
yet, the Greeks have not won world dominance by being Greeks; they have only,
by default, mastered Xerxes. Xerxes
failed at Salamis because of his own stupidity. The Persians failed because of their own stupidity. And not only did he fail at Salamis but he
still could have pulled the thing out had he not done something idiotic after
the battle.
The losses were 200 to 40; the
Greeks lost 40 ships, the Persians lost 200.
But he still had two-thirds of the Persian navy and he still could have
done something. But what does he
do? Now he’s furious so he’s sitting on
his silver thing, he says you get those Persian sea captains down here and I
want them to report to me. So they said
okay, and they send the guys that survived, they bring them up and they stand
at attention in front of Xerxes and he says now, I want every one of you killed
because you’re cowards, you lost this battle (and it was because of his orders
that they lost it). So he starts to
kill all the Persian captains of the boats.
Well, it just so happens that the Persians had a navy that was made up
of Egyptians, Phoenicians and other nations, and when they started seeing this
they said bye-bye, we’ll see you around the Mediterranean and so they took off,
and he lost control of the sea.
Now if we go back to the first map
you’ll see two silly strokes left Xerxes completely at a loss. Now he has this great armada of soldiers,
180,000 men and he can’t supply them.
The Greeks now control the sea lanes, because his navy was killed, or
the rest of it defected because of his cruelty, and so now the soldiers to
back, he takes two armies, goes back to Asia Minor, in the course of it one of
them gets wiped out and the other one is left in Greece and finally gets wiped
out, so that’s the loss of Persia. But
the leopard has not come; the bear has been given “rise, devour much flesh” and
he tries, and he lost; he lost because of his psychosis and neurosis. National leaders couldn’t think their way
through simple problems of strategy and they lost it, not because the enemy
took it, because they gave it away.
Now we come later on to the Greek
history. What was happening in Greece
so we can see the rise of the leopard?
The Greeks never could get together; they had after this the
Peloponnesian Wars from 431-404 BC, Athens and Sparta fought it out. And then finally after that we have a famous
battle at Leuctra, this battle is going to be important because there was
somebody who was watching the battle.
Here is Athens, Sparta is down here, Thebes is up here. By this time Athens is kind of out of it,
and Thebes versus Sparta, at a place called Leuctra, the Spartans move up and
they don’t have much respect for the Thebans but the Thebans have a young
general by the name of Epaminondes, and Epaminondes has a hostage boy called
Philip. And Philip is sitting off
watching these battles, and he watches Epaminondes and how he develops his
tactics, and Epaminondes is the first man to start using flanking
movements. Up to this point it was
mainly a direct type strategy, and Epaminondes used to organizes his soldiers,
instead of three with a left, right and center rank, Epaminondes at the battle
of Leuctra did this: he had holding forces at center and right and then the
left he made it very heavy and he drove in to the Spartans and hit their
weakest point using the principle of concentration of force, he hit them at
their weak point, folded up their ranks and destroyed them.
So much for Epaminondes, he goes
down in history as a great man, a tactical genius. But the real genius was this little boy who had been captured by
the Thebans and he was just sitting there watching, taking it all in. And Philip goes north and finally in 338 BC
he comes back for a visit; this time he conquers the Grecian Peninsula. He comes from the north, a place called
Macedon. And he’s known as Philip of
Macedon, and he shows the Thebans what real strategy is like. Keep in mind this is in the early phases of
military war, here’s how he fought.
He’s on a road that comes down here with a lot of highlands; these are
all mountains so he’s got a problem. He
comes south and everybody thinks he’s going to come to this place, a little
place on the coast, [sounds like: Amphisa], and so he starts to come down there
and he knows everybody is thinking he’s going to come there; this guy is real
shrewd, he comes down the road and all of a sudden he goes left face and goes
over here and stops for the winter, and the Greeks can’t figure this out. What’s going on with this guy, he should
come right down here because this is a key place. So they say, oh, I know what he’s thinking, he’s going to wipe
out Thebes and Athens. So they move all
their soldiers over to here and they build this big block against him coming
down the peninsula to destroy Thebes and Athens.
So Philip, while he’s stopped
here, he does a little strategy in back of him, he goes through all these areas
and promises them freedom from Athens, freedom from Thebes and so on, and he
gets a great, great grassroots loyalty behind his army. Then when he’s ready to move, instead of
coming down, hitting the Athenian Theban armies he comes over here and starts
down the road, comes here and secures all this sea coast. Then they come over here to stop him and he
goes back here and goes down the peninsula, and never, never does he go on an
expected route of invasions. It’s
always the element of surprise, always highly mobile, always very loose in his
strategy. So this is the genius who
fathered the “leopard.” His son is the
leopard and his son is Alexander.
Alexander is in his 20’s when he
conquers the world. Alexander is going
to conquer the world in five years and the leopard now rises. Notice it took time for the leopard. Alexander’s conquests are like this:
Alexander was taught by Aristotle; Alexander was the one that decided he didn’t
like giving orders in four kinds of Greek and he standardized it and we call it
Koine Greek. Alexander did a lot to
establish uniformity over the world, and although Alexander’s Empire fell apart
very rapidly, the Hellenistic process, that is the process of making Greek
culture the culture of the ancient world, lasted a thousand years. So in five years this boy, tutored by
Aristotle, was a man who changed the world, literally. He went into every country and he was quite
a showman.
The story is how his famous black
horse that he got, he went with his father one day to the horse market and they
were going to buy some horses, and there was this black horse there that nobody
could ride, and Alexander was a 12 year old boy, and his father was about to
walk away and Alexander said I can ride him.
And they said what, nobody can ride him. And he said I’ll ride him, and much to the amazement, they said
okay kid, and Philip said I’ll buy I for you just to see if you can ride
it. So Alexander goes and gets on the
horse and he rides it, and everybody says what was your secret, what was your
secret. And they can’t understand this
12 year old boy could ride this horse that the men couldn’t ride. And he said the secret is very simple, this
horse is afraid of his shadow, I just turned him around so he couldn’t see
it. It shows you that he was a very
sharp observer and this is how he gained reputation down through the ancient
world.
And he was quite a showman, and he
remembered that Xerxes, when he came to Ilium here, Xerxes had dedicated
himself to the Trojan War. So Alexander
marches his soldiers across and says I’m going to have some fun with the
Persians before we go to battle, I’m going to dedicate myself to the Greeks and
we’re going to have an opening of the Trojan War again. So he has this big ceremony, he invites some
of the Persian embassy, just like Xerxes had those three Greek hostages watch
his army. He goes through it and
finally he has his first battle, he destroys a place just north of Sardis, he
comes down the coast and when he comes down the coast he decides he doesn’t
need the Greek fleet any more. Now I
want you to notice something; Alexander is going to make some tactical mistakes
but the strange thing is that Xerxes makes tactical mistakes and he loses;
Alexander makes tactical mistakes and he doesn’t There is another factor operating in history and that’s where the
sovereignty of God and Daniel is coming in.
He makes a very bad tactical decision; I do not need the Greek
navy. And so he sends them all home; I
don’t want to pay for them. And when he
sends them home the Persians immediately start their complete dominance of the
sea. He goes along thinking he can
destroy all the Persian seaports but it doesn’t work and there’s a Persian
admiral who is a genius and he tries to bottle up Alexander in Asia Minor. And just as he’s ready to bottle up
Alexander he dies, just drops dead, nobody knows why, he just dies. And ever after that the Persian navy never
could seem to bottle up Alexander, what was left of it. So again we have a man that makes a tactical
mistake, but this time somehow history doesn’t punish him for making a tactical
mistake. Had Xerxes made it he probably
would have gotten destroyed.
So Alexander moves west, finally
he comes to a place called Issus, and that is one of the great battles of the
ancient world in which he faces Darius, the last king of the Persian
Empire. On that king list, Darius is
Darius III, that’s the man Alexander now faces at Issus. He comes to Issus and he’s out maneuvered;
he makes another tactical mistake. And
Darius comes in in back of him, completely circles him around and now he’s
trapped. So how does Alexander do
it? He now uses a tool that the Greeks
were famous for, a tool that even the Romans feared, and it’s the famous Greek phalanx. This thing, according to historians was a
horrible thing to behold.
First of all, they all had heavy
armor. Alexander’s soldiers were not light; the Persian’s always were
light. Remember they come from the
mountains, and even though Alexander’s army mainly came from the mountains,
they used very heavy armor, and they used 21 foot long spears, they were so
long obviously they’d tip at the end.
So he would have his strongest men, one in back of another, and there’d
be a whole line of these soldiers, and the first man would hold this spear back
like this to get a balance and the next man would have his spear laying over
the shoulder of this man, the next man’s spear over him. And they’d come at you and they’d have a
line of six men with a 21 foot spear.
And by the time you get six spears overlapping every three feet, you can
imagine the formidable wall. At one
time Alexander had a phalanx 50 men deep and half a mile wide, and he could
just simply march in a battle like this, just cleared the way. And the Persians tried elephants against
him, they tried camels, they tried everything just swept before this tremendous
phalanx.
Alexander had developed this from
his father; that was one of the things that Philip, the little boy that was
sitting back at that battle at Leuctra began to see that Epaminondes was
doing. And then Philip developed it a
little and Alexander developed it. One
historian who saw this said at one time Alexander had 16,384 men in one
phalanx; it was 16 men deep and a half a mile long. And that’s how Alexander got his way out of Issus, even though
Darius had gotten him down here at Issus, he actually cut his way through the
Persian lines with phalanx. Then he
went down, and the Persians expected him to move in the west and take over and
they had these formidable defenses.
Well, Alexander’s father was
Philip of Macedon, and Philip was a shrewdy when it came to tactics and
strategy. So Alexander being a genius had
learned everything he could from his father and he learned from his father that
you never try the direct approach. The Persians
know I’m going to come, so what am I going to do? I’m not going to go east, I’m going to go south, and he goes down
to Egypt. He says it’s warm down there,
I want a vacation, so we’ll take our army and go south to Egypt and spend the
winter down there. And not only is his
army refreshed, but he destroys the base of the Persian navy because it was
based at Alexandria and the Nile delta.
So now he wipes out and he destroys Phoenicia on the way down, and that
wipes out all the navigators for the Persian army. So now he’s stripped the Persians of all their Mediterranean
power. Now he’s ready to come back.
By the way, tradition says in one
of these marches he encountered the prophecy that we’re reading here of him,
one of the Jews came out and told him about it. So then he moves up and he comes up and he faces Darius and he
beats him again and that’s the last time that Darius is seen as a viable king;
there’s finally one further battle, in 331 BC a battle with remnants of the
Persian army. General [can’t understand
name, sounds like: Poritz] here is on one side of this long river, and
Alexander is on the other side; this is the last element of the Persian army,
soldiers are tired and so on, and he pulls off one of the neatest military
tricks of all time. The Persians are in
a solid camp at this place in the river, which is a fording spot, and they
obviously know that Alexander just has to come across that fording spot.
So Alexander’s army moves up and
they expect this tremendous phalanx because that’s what he’s used in every
other battle, so they’re all prepared for it, and what does he do? He stretches his army out for some 15 or 20
miles, just a thin line and they set up camp.
No defense, nothing, and the Persians sit over on the other side and say
what’s going on here? We don’t see any
phalanx, we don’t see any concentration of force, what’s he going to do? And then as they watched, he does a strange
thing; he divides the line off into groups.
And he assigns these groups tasks of hurriedly marching down this way,
you hurriedly march this way, and for day after day they’d see these forced
marches, one concentration of power here, concentration of power here,
concentration of power here, and he does this all the time he’s got them
marching like crazy on the other side of the river and the Persians watching
this going on, and finally the Persians get tired of seeing this, they get used
to and so Alexander carefully watches until they get tired of watching his
soldiers watching his soldiers march back and forth, back and forth, back and
forth. And then one night he leads a
group across the river 12 miles upstream and clobbers them, and that’s the end
of it, the Persians have been destroyed, Alexander is the ruler of the world
and he has done it in five years.
And that now goes back to Daniel 7:6 for the part of that verse that I want to show you. Now you can appreciate what it took God to supervise all this. In Daniel 7:6, “After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which had upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four heads;” which we’ll explain later, “and dominion was given to it.” Notice the voice of the verb to give, passive voice, the authority and reign of Alexander was given to him. Now how did God give Alexander power in history? He gave Alexander power in history because #1, remember Xerxes character decayed at a critical moment and that prevented the bear from destroying Greece.
God gave Alexander the empire
because remember the rivalry of the Greek city states allowing the Macedonians
to conquer the Greeks in the lower Greek parts. And then He gave it to Alexander by having Alexander’s father
just happen to be present as a political hostage when Epaminondes
showed his great tactics in the battle of Leuctra, just happened to be there
watching, just happened to bring those same tactics back to the Macedonians
where it would just happen to be developed by Alexander. And you remember when Alexander made that
tactical mistake as he was going along the Asia Minor coast, that would have
spelled his doom, but what happened?
The Persian naval commander who was about to completely encircle him
died at just the right time. And then
when he met Darius he was meeting an inferior Persian military general.
So when you read that the dominion was given to him, now with this very brief summary of history I hope you get an appreciation for how God sovereignly worked, that God promises also now if you look ahead in the chapter for application, for our hope, just as surely as God removed the Persian general, just as surely as He caused Xerxes to make a wrong decision here, somebody else to make a wrong decision here, somebody else to have a flash inside of tactical brilliance over here, just as He sovereignly worked to bring about the leopard in history.
So we read in Daniel 9:9, “I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow,” and then it says, Daniel 7:12-13, “As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their dominion taken away: yet their lives were prolonged for a season and time.” Verse 13, “I saw in the night visions….” Verse 14, “And there was given him” that is the ancient of days, Jesus Christ, “dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him,” that promise has not yet verified; that promise is still a promise. What we’re trying to show you is that when this prophecy was given the promise of the leopard was only a promise too, and yet for century after century did you see how God fulfilled His promise. See the powerful many orbed ways God had of bringing that promise to pass.
The argument is simple: if God this for the leopard, won’t He do more for the Ancient of days, His own Son.