Daniel Lesson 26
Fourth Beast: Rome – Daniel 7:6-8
In Daniel 7 we have the second passage that deals with the great four visions of Daniel. The difference between Daniel 2 and Daniel 7 will become quite prominent this morning because it is in Daniel 7 where we look upon the four great empires from the standpoint of their moral quality whereas in Daniel 2 we see these four great nations from the standpoint of the sovereign program of God. The reason is that Daniel 7 is for the mature believer; Daniel 7 is apocalyptic literature that cannot be understood and wasn’t intended to be understood by any random reading of the Bible. Apocalyptic literature is a private message that God the Holy Spirit has placed in history for those believers interested in God’s Word. The believer interested in doctrine, the believer interested in the long range application of the faith technique will find apocalyptic literature his staple; it will be his thing that gives him the basics for a long term historic optimism.
Remember that all four of these kingdoms deal with the phases of the kingdom of man. Beginning in the 6th century we have the revival of the kingdom of man. As such, we’re looking at an organization of society; we are looking at Evil with a capital “E”, and Daniel is designed to orient believers to evil, to avoiding evil in this life. And today as we study one of these kingdoms, the great kingdom, you will see evil as the Bible sees evil, and hopefully this will enlarge your appreciation for the problem of evil, the problem we face as believers, that we are not just dealing with a few moral ethical points, we’re dealing with an entire system that is evil, a system that includes human good, but nevertheless is declared to be a monster.
We have studied the four winds and the sea in verses 2-3 and concluded that the sea represents fallen humanity, unstable like water, filling and taking on the shape of the container that it’s in. And like water, extremely dangerous when acted upon by wind forces. So the sea in Scripture represents the sea of fallen man, the society at large without Scripture, and an alienation from God. We have studied the four winds as the angelic forces that operate on history, challenging the naturalistic humanistic view of history that is taught in most schools, we hold to the supernatural view of history, that history is not a closed box, completely walled off from external influences. History, on the other hand, is open to angelic influence and direction at every point.
And the four winds are what blow upon the sea, and out from the sea come the four monsters. The first was a lion, which we said was the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar; a human heart was given to the lion in verse 4 which was the process outlined in Daniel 3. In Daniel 7:5 we have the bear and the bear was a picture of the Persian Empire. Last week we dealt with the first part of verse 6, the leopard, and the leopard stands for speed. I neglected to point this out last time, but Habakkuk 1:8 is the verse I was going to cite to show that the leopard in Scripture is a symbol of speed, and this very accurately fits the tremendous lightening campaigns of Alexander the Great. We outlined how his father, Philip of Macedon, at the various battles, one particular battle at Leuctra, was observing how Epaminondes, the great Greek general, deployed his soldiers. Philip was a great tactician and passed that tactical skill down to his son, so that Alexander was one of the great tactical and strategic geniuses of history.
Alexander’s campaigns are still studied. One of the great campaigns that Alexander waged was in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean at a place called Issus. Darius III had completely closed off Alexander’s mode of retreat. And Alexander’s soldiers gathered together in their phalanx and they rammed their way through Darius’ III ranks. And this showed the ancient world once again the formidable power that the Greek armies had with their horrible looking phalanx. The phalanx—sometimes as deep as fifty men carrying spears 21-24 feet long, in great long sometimes half a mile long, would just literally plow the field of every human being on it; there would be just one mass, the men in the second, third and fourth ranks behind the first row of men with their spears would rest these long spears on the shoulders of the men in front of them. And then the order would be given: forward march! And then they would go, just like a plow; all armies would be destroyed before Alexander’s phalanx. And that’s what happened at Issus and it shows Alexander’s genius, not only as a tactical man but in his training program of training soldiers how to respond to disaster, that when they were outnumbered, when they were cut off, when the hope of victory was very, very small, Alexander’s men came through, they didn’t fall apart and panic. And if they were going to be massacred they decided to just take as many of the enemy with them as possible, following the great Spartan tradition of [can’t understand word] pass. So the leopard was the sign of the third kingdom, the kingdom of Alexander the great.
This morning we come to Daniel 7:7-8, the last two verses of the vision, and the fourth monster or the fourth beast. We’ll be studying verses 7-8 and then the angelic commentary on this. However before we get to verse 7 the end of verse 6, the phrase, “dominion was given to it,” the “it” included Alexander and that’s true, but it includes more than Alexander as indicated by the phrase just preceding “the beast had also four heads.” Now the liberal higher critics, in order to avoid the problem of supernatural prophecy, have tried to rearrange these beasts so that the lion becomes the Babylonian kingdom; the bear becomes the Medes, the leopard becomes the Persians, and this fourth monster becomes the Greeks. And they have to do that because the liberal holds to a Maccabean date for Daniel, that Daniel was written late, that Daniel doesn’t have real prophecy, that prophecy was written after the fact because for the liberal theologian to permit even a shred of a prophecy in his system destroys his system. So he must carefully insulate his theology from any hints that God supernaturally reveals Himself, and in order to do so He has to play games with the text here on these four monsters.
But instead of doing this we hold to the traditional view, the view espoused century after century, that it was the Medo-Persian Empire, there were not two Empires, that the bear is the Medo-Persian Empire and the leopard is the Grecian Empire. And the key is in the last part of verse 6 with the four heads because after Alexander died he had his kingdom split up among his generals. Alexander died of a fever in 323 BC in Babylon; the wine, women and song got to him, and finally he just gave up and died at a very young age. And he distributed his kingdom among several generals. Eventually the kingdom coalesced into four basic divisions corresponding to the four heads of verse 6.
In Egypt we have a famous general, General Ptolemy, who started a new line in Egyptian history, the Ptolemy’s, very famous, very well-known. Then the second area of Alexander’s kingdom was Babylon and Syria, settled and ruled by another very famous general, General Seleucus. Seleucus started a heredity line and it was this line from which the monster of Daniel 8 comes, the horn of the goat, Antiochus Epiphanes, one of the most vicious human good people in history. The third area of the kingdom was Macedon and Greece itself, ruled first by Antigonus and later by Cassander. Then the fourth area was Thrace, that’s the area north of Macedonia and east of Macedonia, along the north part of the Aegean, just by the Dardanelles, and that was ruled by a General Lysimachus. So you have four generals take over from Alexander, Ptolemy, and Seleucus, Cassander and Lysimachus. Those are the four heads of the leopard in verse 6.
Now Daniel 7:7; verse 7 is the fourth beast that occupies and terrifies Daniel, as he watches this vision played out like a color motion picture before him, and he says, “After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were before it; and it had ten horns.” The verbs here and the participles, “it was devouring, and breaking in pieces, and stamping the residue with the feet of it, and it was acting in a diverse way from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns. [11] I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.”
All attention is now focused on the fourth beast. And the key point about this beast as you look at verse 7-8 is that it is totally different from the first three kingdoms. It’s acting differently and it looks differently, and one particular observation in verse 7 that should strike you in our summation of these kingdoms is the fact that it has iron teeth. Iron is a metal that has to be refined by man. And the fact that this monster has iron teeth suggests there’s something peculiarly man-made about this monster. The other monsters look like animals of nature, the leopard, the bear, and the lion. But when he goes to describe the fourth monster he can’t quite place this in the realm of animals, because it’s an animal but the problem is as he looks upon it he sees it has iron teeth, teeth therefore that are man-made.
This strikes us as unusual, and it evidently struck Daniel as unusual because if we turn to verse 19 Daniel refers to this strange nature, remember the angel, the interpreting angel, in the apocalyptic literature is always there, visualizing it in 20th century terms, he’s the one that runs the movie projector and as he shows this movie to Daniel, Daniel turns around and says oh, what’s that on the screen, tell me about it. So he stops the projector and says to Daniel here’s what it’s all about. And the angel gives him the authoritative interpretation. So next time you hear someone say well, anyone can read the Bible and get anything out of it; that’s true because the world is filled with nitwits and nitwits can get anything out of anything. But for people who take literature seriously there has never been a question that when you write something you write it to be understood.
You do not write something to be a mirror that any character that comes up and looks at it can see himself in the mirror. That’s not the purpose of any literature; it’s not the purpose of any verbal communication. So when we see this kind of thing we should ask ourselves, if God is giving a symbol surely God also ought to give us the means of interpreting the symbol, and therefore we cannot be at all sympathetic with the person who tries to refute Christian or shows contempt for the Christian faith with the expression, well, anything can be read into the Bible. A response to that remark would be, and anything can be written to the remarks that you’re telling me right this moment so if you’re going to argue that verbal communication is but a mirror that can be loaded with any meaning you want it, then why do you bother to talk to me right now because I can sit here and load your words with any meaning that I want to, just as you claim people do to the Scriptures.
It’s passages like Daniel 7:19 and following that show us the fallaciousness of that objection. The angel is here; Daniel is a person just like we are, he sees this peculiar thing and he too would like to know, what is all this about. So in verse he says in verse 19, I want to know the truth, “Then I would know the truth of the fourth beast, which was diverse from all the others,” and when he goes to describe the fourth beast in verses 19-21 Daniel adds observations that we didn’t see in verses 7-8, so again we want to look through these for the sake of observing the quality of this fourth monster. “Then I would know the truth of the fourth beast, which was diverse from all the others, exceeding dreadful, whose teeth were of iron,” again he refers to something peculiarly man-made about this animal like thing, and then he adds, “and his nails of bronze,” not “brass” as in the King James, but bronze, again an alloy refined by the ancient metallurgy of the near east, and so again a man-made product. So there’s a second element about this piece that strikes him as unnatural and man-made, there’s something about his “nails of bronze which devoured, brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with his feet,” notice the “devouring,” devouring, breaking in pieces and stamping, how is it that the devouring occurs? With the teeth. And how is the stamping being done? With the great claws that are made of bronze. And so what is the most potent thing about this fourth monster. It’s its man-made nature that renders it so vicious, so horrible, it’s the human qualities that have been put into this thing that make it even worse than the animals of the previous vision.
He says, Daniel 7:20, “And of the ten horns that were in his head, and of the other one which came up, and before whom three fell; even of that horn that had eyes, and a mouth that spoke very great things, whose look was more stout than his fellows,” obviously stronger, a new piece of information that we didn’t get from verses 7-8. In verse 21 is completely new information that we wouldn’t have gotten from verses 7-8, Daniel says to the angel, he says, look, while I was looking at the vision, “I beheld, and the same horn made war with the saints, and prevailed against them;” not only did it make war with the saints, it won the battles with the saints, it was wearing the saints down, it was winning against God’s armies. Why is this fourth monster so potent that it can win against God’s people?
Then the angel goes on to explain it in Daniel 7:23-25, “Thus he said,” and here’s the authoritative interpretation, we don’t have to go into all sorts of guesses as to what these symbols mean, the angel is there and the angel gives the interpretation. “The fourth beast shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth, which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces.” The one claim that the angel adds is that this fourth kingdom will be a global kingdom, it will trample the earth and the means that it uses to trample the earth is its man-made nature.
Daniel 7:24, “The ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise: and another shall rise after them;” so by reading verse 24 there’s no doubt what the horns mean, they’re not symbols of power, they are meant to be literal kings that shall reign. How do we know? Because the angel tells us this, and since he’s the one that made the film, the vision, obviously he’s the one qualified to tell us why he uses the symbol “horns.” “…and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings. [25] And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and the dividing of time.”
Now in going back through what this angel has just spoken, we want to look at some of the phrases; particularly we want to look at the ten horns. The fourth kingdom, in its final version, will have ten horns. Now if the liberals are correct the ten horns are symbols of something that has to do with the Greeks, but since nobody has ever been yet able to explain how what ten horns have to do with the Seleucids and Ptolemys, and the period of the Maccabean era successfully, we kind of doubt that interpretation. Then we have our amillennial and postmillennial friends who argue that the ten horns have already come to pass, because they have to argue that the fifth kingdom is the Church and the Church is already destroyed or is in the process of destroying this fourth kingdom. So they have to date these ten horns in the past. And again they have the same problem as the liberals, that there doesn’t seem to be anything in history that fits the ten horns. Oh, you can place it ten successive kings but the problem is the horns aren’t successive, the horns are all there at one point in time, ten kings ruling at one time in history. Why do we know this? Because when the little horn comes up he displaces three, so these three had to be ruling while this last horn grew up and displaced them.
Well then, what do we do about these ten horns? We know the symbol of the horn is the king. By the way, in ancient mythology the horn always symbolized power. This is why Saturn, the planet, was worshiped. Saturn, from an optical view without an unaided telescope looks like it has horns simply because of the rings around the planet, and Saturn was called in the ancient world, “the horned star,” and it was therefore worshiped, long before Jupiter was worshiped in ancient history Saturn was worshiped.
Now the other thing about horns that’s just a footnote to history is that’s where the concept of crown came from. We draw the crown with points on the top, and kings down through history have always had their crowns, but have you ever asked yourself why does the crown look that way? It looks that way because in ancient history they used to take a leather strap and tie animal horns to it, something like you see the Norsemen wearing. And from that these later crowns are just artistic symbols of the prior horns. So when you see the word “horn” in Scripture, animal horn, or ram’s horn, representing power, it’s just simply part of ancient art and the ancient way of symbolizing power. Now several things about this strike us as peculiar. The holy war is being waged against the saints; liberals would say oh, that’s Antiochus Epiphanes when he tried to destroy the Jews, but again, who are the ten?
Who are those ten? The book of Revelation still mentions the ten as future, so if you turn to Revelation 17:3 you’ll see that the ten horns are still future by the time of the Apostle John. Now if John is writing this last letter to the Bible, the Apostle John is an old, old man, he’s writing about the time of 90 AD, thereabouts, toward the end of the first century. And John says that all this is yet future to 100 AD. So if John picks up the image of the ten horns out of Daniel and John insists that this has not yet been fulfilled, obviously it can’t refer to the Greeks, it’s got to refer to something future to the Apostle John’s day. What does it refer to? 17:3, “So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.” And like with Daniel, John wondered about it, and like with Daniel he had an angel he could ask.
So Revelation 17:12 the angel gives his description of what these are, “And the ten horns which you saw are ten kings,” exactly the same description given us in Daniel 7, “who have received no kingdom as yet,” in 100 AD these kings have not yet sat on their throne, “but receive power as kings one hour with the beast,” or a short time. They have not yet received their kingdom, as of 100 AD.
Now let’s go back and observe something more about Daniel 7. We’ve shown that these ten kingdoms are future to John, so here’s what we’ve got now. We know that the fourth kingdom coming after Alexander must be Rome. We know Rome comes in in the first century, we’ll just say a round number, 50 BC in Palestine, we know that the fourth kingdom is Rome, and we know somewhere off in the future it is going to have these mysterious ten kings. Now in Daniel 7:25 it says something about this latter day, this last period. It says he,” that is after the ten kings three are destroyed, and this one new king comes forward, he will speak blasphemy against the Most High, and he will wear out the saints of the Most High, and “the speaking great words of the Most High” is an idiom which means blasphemy.
It’s like Goliath, for a while it looked like it was just an innocent battle until Goliath made one big mistake back in Samuel, and the big mistake that Goliath made is the big mistake that all the enemies of God finally make in their negative volition toward God. And that is they become son incensed against God that they finally curse His name, and Goliath said “I defy the armies of Yahweh,” and when Goliath said that, David knew that he had him, because Goliath called judgment down upon himself for cursing the name of God.
And when in verse 25 it says this future king will say “great words” that means that whoever this future ruler will be, that he will at some point in his political career, totally and completely repudiate Biblical Christianity, and he will defy not only Biblical Christianity but by name in public he will defy the Lord Jesus Christ. And with that he will bring down upon himself the wrath that Goliath experienced and all the enemies of God of the past have experienced. And he “shall wear out the saints of the Most High,” means simultaneous with his assault upon Biblical Christianity or upon what remains of it in that day, he will attack believers with a holy war in reverse. He will not just attack and make life miserable for men, for remember the previous beasts, we argued, why their beastly character? Because the humanist that starts with man winds up with man, making man lower than man, making him into an animal. So Daniel argues that all these kingdoms have a beastly nature, and animalizing effect on man so all the kingdoms make life miserable for men. But this last kingdom makes life particularly miserable for a special group of people and that is the believers. So the believers are singled out and the believers are made an object of official governmental persecution; that’s what this is talking about.
And moreover, he says, he will “think to change the times and the laws,” the “times” would be the mode of religious observances. Now Christians don’t have seasons or “times” so the peculiar thing about verse 25 is that if it’s future to John, it’s talking in terms of Jewish religion; it’s talking about something he’s going to try to change, some governmental leader in the future, who will try to change the Jewish calendar, the “times and the laws,” Jewish tradition. This tends to argue that his stress is not primarily toward (quote) “Christianity” but toward Judaism. And therefore this has led to our premillennial, pretribulational view of Scripture, which places this point, Daniel 7:25, in the great tribulation. Here’s the end of the church, here’s the return of Christ and the millennial kingdom. Here’s seven plus years of tribulation and during those seven years the nation Israel will come back into more prominent position, the nation Israel will revive, it already has in fact, sabbatical laws, it will have its calendar, and whoever this political being or leader is, he will persecute and try to change Jewish law in the future. “…and they shall be given into his hand,” that is in the future, “until a time and times, and a half of time.” The word “times” has a dual ending. So we have one “a time,” one plus “times,” dual ending, two, plus “half a time,” three and a half. And time has already been used in Daniel in 4:25 to refer to a years. So therefore we interpret verse 25 as saying whoever this monster of the future is, for three and a half years he will wage war against… we can’t define it yet but there’s some sort of a Jewish area of belief, revived Jewish believers and he will fight them for three and one half years.
Now let’s return to the first part of Daniel 7, to verses 7-8. We’ve observed some of the features of the beast, there’s no question that it refers to Rome, but there is a question to just what these ten kings are. Again, we start out with Rome, just after Greece, before Christ, we have Christ die, we have the Roman era go on, and then somehow up in the future we have these ten kings. That’s all we’ve got so far to work with. Those are just observations based on the text. So as we did last week, to show you an appreciation for the text, we are now going to summarize the history of the period and deal with some of the things that went on in the ancient world at this time. And in particular we’re going to try to solve some questions. Rome is meant but we have four basic questions we have to ask about this beast; four questions that demand an answer before we can walk away from Daniel 7 and say I understand; at least four questions, and here are the questions:
What is the man-madeness of this particular kingdom; this kingdom is different from all the other kingdoms, the other kingdoms are sort of natural but this one has those iron teeth and bronze cross, the teeth used to crush and devour and the claws used to trample down. What is this man-humanness about this kingdom that is not true of previous kingdoms? We ought to be able to go to Rome, since Rome has already existed in the past, and ask ourselves what was particular about the Roman Empire different from the Greeks, different from the Persians, different from the Babylonians and can we argue that this quality which we’ll see back in Ancient Rome is a quality still with us; a quality, in fact, that the west has picked up from the Romans, a quality that right now in front of our face is growing and growing and getting bigger and more powerful until just before Christ, this whatever it is, this factor X that the Romans had that nobody else had, is going to rise up and inform a world government, the likes of which that man has never seen. We’ve got ask ourselves, what is this X factor, this man-madeness about Rome?
Then we have to ask another thing, how did Rome act differently, maybe from that we could answer the man-madeness. We’ll go back in history and say well, the Roman legions conquered, you can’t argue the Roman legions were more cruel tactically than Alexander’s phalanx, so what was different about how this beast acted. Some way the Romans acted differently than the Greeks, than the Persians, than the Babylonians. How did the Romans act differently? It wasn’t just military power because they all had military power. If you want to argue cruelty the Assyrians beat out the Romans; the Romans took prisoners, the Romans made slaves of people, the Romans decimated themselves at times for disciplinary reasons in the military; the Romans did spread-eagle you out and peel your skin off while you were still alive. So the Romans weren’t that much more cruel than the other people, yet this beast appeared to be more cruel. So we’ve got to pinpoint what’s going on here, what was different about Rome?
Then we’ve got to also argue something else? How did Rome crush the world? Did Rome crush the world; it says this is going to trample the whole earth, what’s different about that.
Finally, we’ve got to ask: who are the ten kings? We can’t find them in the past, can we? And if we can’t find these ten kings in the past they must be in the future, and how can we anticipate where these ten kings are going to come from.
We’re going to try to answer all four of these questions by answering one of them. We’re going to answer basically this: how did Rome act differently than all the other kingdoms. If we can answer that question, then we can answer these other questions. So we go back and study Roman history and ask ourselves, what is the panorama of Roman history. Without going into details, Roman history can be divided into four parts: the days of the old republic, these were the days that would be analogous to the pre-revolutionary days of the United States or maybe just around the time of the Constitutional convention. These were the days that all patriotic Romans looked back to as the good old days, the days of the old republic, the days when we had the small country of Romans in the Italian peninsula; we didn’t rule the world, we just had our own farms, we had our own cities, we minded our own business and we had our own patriotism. Those were the days of the old republic.
Then we have part two of Roman history, the days of the expansion. These were the days when the Romans as the aggressor began to conquer the ancient world, the Punic Wars, the Punic Wars waged against Carthage, North Africa. It was the Punic Wars when the famous general of the Carthaginians, Hanibal, pulled off a brilliant tactical maneuver. In the Mediterranean, here’s Spain, the Italian boot, Sicily, Italy, and then North Africa. Hannibal, instead of crossing over to Italy to conquer the Romans moved over to Spain, came across the Alps with an entire corps of elephants, and hit the Romans from the north. The longest way around is often the shortest way home in military strategy. Hannibal was an architect of what I said early, Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great were architects of, the so-called indirect approach. Hannibal would never fight the Romans except on battlefields of Hannibal’s choosing, with soldiers and tactics of Hannibal’s choice. The Romans were strong on infantry; Hannibal was strong on cavalry, so guess where the battles were that Hannibal wanted to fight them? He always fought them on plain level ground, and the Romans were often stupid enough to try to fight Hannibal on plain level ground, and Hannibal always clobbered them.
And for 8 or 9 years Hannibal’s armies just pillaged and controlled all of northern Italy, utterly unstoppable, legion after legion would try to stop Hannibal and they failed because Hannibal was far superior to anything, until there was a young Roman general who said if Hannibal can use the indirect approach, I’m going to use the indirect approach. The man’s name was General Scipio, and Scipio took the Roman armies over and he said while Hannibal is attacking Rome I will attack Carthage. So how did he get Hannibal off the Roman’s back? By attacking Carthage, his home ground. Hannibal heard about it and then finally Hannibal had to come back to fight him in North Africa and that’s how Scipio rose to the nobility of Rome.
And during this early expansion period other things happened. During this period, from 250-150 BC, roughly, these are just approximate dates, during this period of expansion there was a very foolish alliance made by one of Alexander’s successors that ruled in the place of Cassander in Macedon and Greece, and he made an alliance with the Carthaginians against Rome because the Greeks were becoming uneasy over this rising power in the west, so they decided to go into a political alliance with Carthage and they said Carthage, you attack Rome and we’ll get them from the east. So after the Romans had reduced Carthage to rubble with General Scipio, they decided to teach the Greeks a lesson, so they came over and they conquered Greece and then this man who had ruled called Philip, not any relation to Philip of Macedon, this man had a panic button that he pressed and he got some of the other kings of Syria and some of the other places to come on over and aid him. So he called for help off from the east, from the rest of the four heads of the leopard. He did so and the Syrians and the Babylonians gathered together into an army, under Seleucid leadership and they moved westward and they met the Romans and were defeated by the Romans.
And the Romans imposed the largest penalty of ancient history and in a way foolish; in a way these large penalties of reparations are always foolish. The Treaty of Versailles has taught us in the 20th century that giving Germany a lot of reparation payments and so on didn’t solve a thing; we should have learned because the Romans tried it at this time in history. So they put they Syrians under twelve annual payments; they required of the Syrians to pay indemnities for attacking imperial Rome. And this was why later on the Jews were so hard pressed because it was from the Jews that the Assyrians had to get their money to pay off the Romans, and this is what led to a lot of persecutions later on. But the Romans during this period of expansion, wound up controlling the entire Mediterranean, not because they wanted it but because they just drawn into battle and they won the battles; they were a new aggressive people. So that’s the second period of Roman history, the period of expansion.
The Punic Wars and the extension eastward, then comes the third period of history, we go from the old republic to the period of expansion to the period of the Roman civil wars; the third period of Roman history, Julius Caesar, Octavian, and Sir Marc Anthony, this area when the leadership of Rome was floundering around for a program. The Romans were used to ruling just one little peninsula and suddenly they were given power like the United States was given in 1945 and they didn’t know what to do with the power and so they scrambled around trying to figure out, how do we rule society equitably, and all this struggle. Julius Caesar arose, and Caesar was what we would call a populist, he was a man who catered to the masses, “all power to the people” said Caesar; ultimately winding up as all those populists do, “all power to Caesar.” So he started with a campaign for the people against the Roman senate. Julius Caesar was one of the prominent homosexuals of the ancient world. And as he rose in ranks he attained tremendous power and finally you know the story; Brutus and a few of the boys took care of Caesar. Julius Caesar is the key figure of the civil war period.
The fourth and last period of Roman history is the period of empire, beginning in 30 BC with a man by the name of Augustus, a brilliant genius, Augustus Caesar, not to be in any way confused with Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was the great man of the civil war era. Augustus was the empire.
Now before we go any further let’s review something. We’re trying to get at what is unique with the fourth kingdom in Daniel. The kingdom has man-made qualities, teeth of iron and claws of bronze. Now if that’s the case, can we identify any period in the four periods of Roman history as something happened that was different from all that had ever happened before in history. Can we point to one of these four times when something unique happened? Yes we can, and the first signal that we have that something unusual is happening in the ancient world is the civil war period with the rise of Julius Caesar. Caesar wound up with the people’s party, it was to be all dedicated to the people; no longer the aristocracy, but power to the people, equality, and all that stuff. And finally Caesar wound up as a dictator. Now historians have said that the Romans ought to have learned their lesson with Caesar, Julius Caesar, that bad things were coming down the road. They should have learned that every time you appeal to the people for power and you strive to help all the people in every place, the hotten tots and this group and that group and all the rest of the groups, you’ll always wind up with a dictatorship. Caesar proved that and the Romans should have remembered it, but they didn’t. They’re like us, they have short memories.
So later on when they had gotten completely fed up with Marc Anthony, they got completely fed up with Octavian, completely fed up with Julius Caesar and all the fights and the hassles of the civil war period, we come to the period of empire in 30 BC. That is the time of the rise of the iron monster; the period of the rise of the Roman Empire. And in 30 BC we have this genius administrator, Augustus, and I want to emphasize this, was not a cruel man. This is going to be very, very critical because all the [can’t understand word] for the next couple of minutes as I work through them in history, I want you to keep in mind this vision, this horrible monstrous beast that crushes people, and then I’m going to show you what a beautiful thing the empire appeared to be, what fine, wonderful sincere men held the reigns of leadership, men that would have been worshiped today for their brilliance, for their concern for welfare, and to prove how well they were I’m going to read some documents from the ancient world describing this man, Augustus Caesar.
Keep in mind Augustus Caesar set up in 30 BC a system for administering all the ancient world that lasted 400 years, from one man. Now we say we had a galaxy of geniuses in 1776 that set up a fantastic administration that has lasted, a fantastic constitution, but we had a galaxy of geniuses. We had a Jefferson, a Franklin, a Hamilton; we had a galaxy of geniuses. But Rome had one man, Augustus and single-handedly Augustus established the Empire. This was the strength of his genius; maybe he prefigured something that is coming. Augustus was a wonderful man and his genius was shown by the survival; he was a handsome man, fine features, he would have been an advertisement for shampoo, shaving lotion or anything. He would have been a fine acceptable politician; he didn’t even part his hair so you couldn’t argue over which side of the head he parted his hair on. But he had a tremendous ability.
Here’s what Dr. Tenney says of Augustus. “The cessation of the bitter civil wars that had distressed Rome for nearly a century inaugurated a welcomed peace. The moderation and sagacity of Augustus fostered confidence in his rule, and his wise refusal of [can’t understand word] dictatorship,” by the way, he refused dictatorship but he became a dictator. Do you know how he did it? He walked up to the Roman Senate one day and said now fellows, I don’t want to be dictator, you know how it is, Julius Caesar and all the rest of the boys, so I don’t want to be Caesar, so I’ll tell you what I’ll do, right now I’m the one that’s the victor and all power is in my hands but I’m going to be a nice boy and I’m going to give all the power back to you. All I ask is that you delegate me certain authority. And so Augustus pulled one of the shrewdest deals ever pulled in history. And he was probably sincere in pulling off the deal. He gave the power back to the authorities and it appeared for all intents and purposes that he was just a servant of the Roman Senate, the real power was backed with the aristocracy, there was no dictatorship, Augustus was just acting as a servant and he himself thought so, he’d just simply given the power back, I’m just a delegated public servant doing my public duty. “He spared the lives of all his opponents who asked for pardon.” See, he wasn’t a cruel man, munching on a cigar in a smoke-filled room; he was a nice guy. “He refrained from wholesale slaughter of his enemies,” a wonderful welcome from those cruel Caesars of before, “in which his predecessors had indulged. Augustus even demilitarized the Empire by discharging 300,000 from the army, and by settling them in colonies in their own town. In times of economic stress he paid for free grain, out of his own purse for the people.” He was a wonderful man, he was a philanthropist. Keep this in mind, Daniel calls this a monster.
Now I want you to feel a sense of conflict, a conflict between what you’re going to feel right now is unfair of Daniel to call this a monster that crushed; when we look at the man he’s so nice, he’s a philanthropist, he’s sincere. “In times of economic stress he paid for free grain out of his own purse for the people. He erected numerous public buildings at his own expense.” …at his own expense, he wasn’t the kind of charitable politician that is so charitable towards the poor that he votes your money to pay for them. “He reformed the laws concerning adultery and usury,” so he was moral, all the fundies would have said yeah for Augustus, he put through the blue laws. “He enforced just assessment of taxes,” tax reform, this would have gotten all the votes that he hadn’t gotten before on all the other issues, tax reform. “He improved the organization of the government. The catalogue of his numerous achievements carved in the wall of the temple” in Turkey” credits him with the erection of 14 temples, restoration of 82 public buildings, together with extensive construction of aqueducts and roads. Piracy and brigandage which had flourished in the last disorganized days of the republic and civil war were firmly repressed. A salutorious esprit de corps sprang up in the Empire so that people began to pride themselves on being Romans and to become conscious of a new unity in the world.”
And here we have everything looking great; here we have the letter written by a Roman retired Colonel about Augustus. This era was known as the Pax Augusta, the peace of Augustus, and you can see, this is written from a contemporary, a man who had lived in this era. So this letter that I am now going to read shows you how people of that day thought. Keep in mind, Daniel calls this a monster that has been created. But here’s what the people say, Daniel’s wrong, the Word of God can’t be right, we see philanthropy, we see welfare, we see social reform, tax reform, blue laws, all the rest of it. These are signs of prosperity, morals and ethics. Listen to this Roman colonel:
“There is nothing that man can desire from the gods, nothing the gods can grant to man; nothing that wish can conceive or good fortune bring to pass which Augustus on his return to the city did not bestow upon the common wealth, the Roman people and the world. The civil war is ended, foreign wars were suppressed, peace was reestablished; the frenzy of conflict everywhere lulled to rest. Validity was restored to the law, authority to the courts.” Law and order, he would have gotten all the conservatives on that one. “Prestige to the senate, the power of the magistrates was reduced to its former limits except that two were added for eight existing praetors; this traditional form of the republic was revised. Agriculture returned to the field, respect to religion; to mankind security of possession; old laws were carefully amended; new legislation enacted for the general good. The Senatorial panel was rigorously if not drastically revised.” He took care of all of the red tape in the Senate. “Distinguished men who had office in and once triumphed were at the solicitation of the Emperor induced to adorn the city with their presence. The dictatorship, which the people persisted in offering him, he persistently refused.”
Now so far this is a model, and keep in mind, the ancient world thought this
was the model government that had come to pass. By the way, while the ancient world was thinking of this, do you
know who was born under the reign of Caesar Augustus? Jesus Christ was born just precisely in the time when people
thought that everything was solved. It
looked superfluous, why have Jesus come, we’ve got Augustus.
Now Augustus showed the spirit of the kingdom and this is where we begin to touch the sinister nature, in one of his plaques in Turkey, and here’s what he wrote of himself. These are Caesar Augustus’ own words, so you can hear from his own lips how he viewed his role in history. “May it be my privilege to establish the republic safe and sound on its foundation, gathering the fruit of my desire to be known as the author of the ideal constitution, and taking with me to the grave the hope that the basis which I have laid will be permanent forever.”
And so the Romans of Caesar Augustus’ day thought that what the Romans had pulled off is what the Greeks had never been able to pull off. You see the Greeks, and here’s where we get into the monster nature of it, the Greeks had two philosophers known all over the world, Aristotle and Plato. And Aristotle and Plato grappled with the problems of how to bring about a perfect polis, a perfect city state, in which men could dwell and be brought to their maturity. These philosophers spent hours and they’d write books and stimulate thinking all over the world, how can we have the genuine perfect society in which men can flourish, for it was their conviction that what made man an animal was just living in the rural countryside. And if man could be brought into the polis, into the city, into organized society, we could civilize him. And so we have the Greeks with all these ideas, but the Greeks were weak and they never could get together to put into effect the ideas.
Now the Romans add something. The Greeks had the ideals and the Romans had law and administration. These two were married at 30 BC with the reign of Augustus. Augustus fulfilled the ideal of the classic polis on a worldwide scale. Therefore in 30 BC there arose what people thought in that time as the perfect society. Some of the particular things I want you to notice. From Caesar Augustus forward in time the supreme standard of all was Roman law. Underneath law we have race, color, and religion…underneath Roman law. The integrator can’t be race because the Roman kingdom included the colored races of North Africa, it included the Carthaginians, it included the Jews, it included the Spaniards, the Greeks, so you couldn’t have race as the integration point for the kingdom. You had to now have something man-made.
There had to be an integration point that wasn’t natural; not race, not family, but now humanistic law became the integration point for the Roman kingdom, and you had all religions subservient to man-made law, and the religions that agreed with Roman law were the legitimate ones and the religions that would no go along with Roman law were illegitimate religions. Man’s law determined what is true and what is false. And the way you entered the kingdom is not by physical birth, the way you entered the kingdom was education and education became the great citizenship qualifying device because if it’s not by race that you enter the family it must be by submission to the law and you can’t submit yourself to the law without education and find out what the law is. So we have the concept that’s brought forth in fruition to public education. Why do we have public education instead of private education in this country? One reason; because if you have private education you don’t have unity, you threaten overall society, so we actually adhere to the Roman concept.
But now we’ve got to come down and pinpoint, what happened? Augustus was all right, he was a nice man, but later on in the first century you had a man by the name of Caligula, another man by the name of Nero, and these men were eccentrics and weirdoes, and they were the ones that did tremendous things, horrible things. When Nero wanted a party, he had no outdoor lights, so he crucified Christians and put tar all over them and burned them so he could have outdoor lights for his party. And while everybody was having sex on the patio the Christians were sizzling on their crosses as they were crucified. And so this was a frenzy of the later Caesars. And people say oh, but that was just because Nero was a quack, just because Caligula was a quack. Huh-un, it is because the monster nature of what Augustus created is now surfacing.
It isn’t just because Nero was a freak; it’s because these men did happen to be a little weaker and they couldn’t stand the pressure because they were men trying to act in the role of God Himself and men finally break down in such a roll. We have Tiberius, Augustus’ successor, pleading with the Senate, while he is the Caesar, please gentlemen, I am not God, I am only man. And then we have Vespasian, the father of Titus, the man who destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD, when he’s dying on his death bed he looks up at the doctor and with a sarcasm of an [can’t understand word] on his face, he looks at him and he says I suppose now I’m becoming a god. So even the men who occupied the roles of the Caesar did not want to become gods, they resented it because the awesome responsibility weighed them down and broke them as men and they did not enjoy it. But it was inevitable given the presupposition on which the Roman Empire was built. So we have men acting as gods breaking down and turning into animals.
And finally by the third century you have a massive economic collapse under Diocletian, and by the way, the first time that magic solution to all problems, wage and price controls, that was an attempt by Diocletian in the third century and it failed in the third century, and you know something, it’s failed ever since. Now owuldn’t you think someone along the way, someone in the Senate, in the House, someone in Congress, might suddenly awake to the fact that we have tried this solution about 1005 times before and every time we try it what is produced? What was produced under Diocletian? He said to the farmers, you’re not going to charge any higher prices for your food, food prices are stabilized, I said so, decree of Diocletian. So what did the Italian farmer do, in a wage price control economy? What every entrepreneur does in a wage and price economy, he cut his production. If I’m not going to get a good price for my crop… so what was the effect of waging price controls under Diocletian? The same effect of waging price controls down through history, scarcity of goods. It’s always the result of wage price controls, always has been, always will be. And so by the third century the presuppositions had worked themselves out and everywhere Caesar went he was called Dominus et Deus, lord and god, lord and god, because he was the sole source of law and the lawmaker in any society gets deified eventually.
And so what now can we answer to those questions that we asked about the monster nature? How did the Roman Empire act differently from all the Empires that had gone before? Because the Roman Empire was the first empire ever known to man that publicly admitted man is the source of law; that publicly admitted that man’s reason, not a dream in the temple where the gods give me a law code, we scientifically by our reason over emotion, we engineer our own law; man is his own lawmaker. That was how the Roman Empire differed from all that had gone before. What was the man-madeness about the fourth kingdom, those iron teeth, and those brass claws, that were made by man and unnatural? A social order by human engineering; that was what crushed people finally. It crushed the Caesars and turned them into raving maniacs because they couldn’t stand to play the role of God. It crushed the people so they couldn’t produce goods, finally. It crushed the masses so they turned into mobs of the “bread and circus” in the city of Rome.
And finally it tried to crush the very Christian movement itself because the Christians were placed into the position of being in the war on the saints in principle. And here’s how it went. It originally started and became a public issue when the Christians volunteered for the Roman Legion. To be admitted to the Roman Legion you had to say Dominus et Deus, Lord and master to Caesar, lord and god, and you had to confess that Dominus et Deus, that he was Dominus et Deus, lord and god or you couldn’t get in the army. So that was where passivism developed in the history of Christianity, not because the Christians didn’t want to fight in the military, but because they refused to take the loyalty oath to Dominus et Deus, they refused to confess Caesar is God. And from that time forward the Christians were in trouble; from that time forward the Christians were always a painful minority that would never yield to man made law. It was always God’s law first, then Caesar’s, but never Caesar first then God’s Law. And so the Christian, in principle then, were the ones that defied Caesar.
What now is the continuing nature? One question was how they crushed, how is it that the Romans crushed where the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks didn’t? The Roman crushed by amalgamating every one into one engineered melting pot. You see, you lost your identity. The Romans could have, in fact at one place they did, there was one famous Roman aristocrat who in his living room had all the idols of the gods and then he added one for Caesar. The Romans were synthetic; you could add Jesus to the religion, as long as you said Dominus et Deus to Caesar. But if you dared to bring in a god who forbade you to say Dominus et Deus to Caesar and the state, woe to you, you were crushed. That was the nature of the Roman Empire.
Now what about the continuing nature of Rome and the future [can’t understand king] king. We can predict, with perhaps startling accuracy, what is going to happen in the western world, what is going to happen all over, because communism that is taking over Asia is a Christian heresy. It borrows its concept of the millennium from Christianity, it borrows its system of progress from Daniel 2 and 7; so communism everywhere it goes follows the same principle, it’s just more consistent and that is, man-made law, man-made solutions will totally order a (quote) “perfect” society. The society will be run by sincere people, the philanthropists, who out of their own pocket, pay for food for the poor, for the minorities, they will be blessed by the lord of the new perfect order, and they will appear to be nice, handsome people like Caesar Augustus, but the one principle that will be signaling the resurrection of Daniel’s monster is that man-made law will have precedence over God’s Word, and that any believer who dares not to conform to man-made law, who dares not to place his first allegiance there, and then his allegiance to Christ, such a person will be eliminated from the perfect order because he’s a threat to the order, his allegiance is outside and over and above and beyond the order. He can’t align himself to anything inside the society.
And to show you that the spirit is here and since we have so many people interested in education, I thought an appropriate spokesman for the continuing monster nature would be none other than the famous John Dewey, who in a book, A Common Faith, said this, articulating the same spirit of Caesar Augustus. He said: “I cannot understand how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the basic human division to which Christianity is committed, namely the saved and the lost.” And Dewey says until that is totally eradicated from society we can’t have our perfect democracy. As long as Christianity insists there are two classes of people Christianity is an obstruction to the perfect order. So therefore, we find as we look into the future the beast who most likely will be another Augustus, he will be like this man, a handsome man, a philanthropist, he’ll be a nice guy and everybody will go along except those who have the discernment to see what’s happened.
Now one of the great scholars of this period, Dr. Cochran [sp?], said that the Romans should have learned from Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar showed very quickly in his life, because he was volatile, he showed very quickly where it was all going, but the Romans were asleep and they didn’t notice, and it took two or three hundred years later before they realized it. We live in the 1970’s, the end of the 20th century and we’ve had lots of warning. We’ve had the Julius Caesars, Daniel has given us his warning of the so-called classical culture, which everybody kisses and adores in the university; Daniel calls it a monster because it’s man-made, it’s starting point is with finite man. We’ve had Daniel’s warning, we’ve had the Caligulas, we’ve had the Neros, we’ve had the King John in western culture, we’ve had the Czars, we’ve had the German Kaisers, we’ve had the Hitlers, the Stalins, we’ve had enough warning down through history not to buy this line, but like the Romans, we failed to listen, and like the Romans western society will be trodden down by the monster eventually on a worldwide basis.
What’s the whole point? Your starting point, you either start with the supreme authority rooted in the Word of God of the Scripture, or you start with your supreme authority in man’s reason. You have to make the choice, I can’t do it for you, a nation can’t do it for you, a nation won’t do it for you, a school will not do it for you, you can only come to that crossroad where you have to decide personally and individually whether you are going to start your life with the criteria of what seems right and what seems wrong, legislating outward from your finite limited nature what must and must not be, or you must wholesaledly submit to the Word of God in its total authority over every area of life including what you reason. That’s the choice and that’s where we have to take our stand.