Daniel Lesson 28

Fifth Kingdom in light of the New Testament – Daniel 7:15-28

In Daniel 7 we will finish the famous vision of history given with the four kingdoms and it’s wise to recall that Daniel 7 differs from Daniel 2 in that Daniel 2 gives the sovereignty and the glory and the power of these kingdoms, and Daniel 7 gives us the moral content of these kingdoms. This explains why the symbols are used the way they are, why are animal-like monsters used to depict the kingdoms of Daniel 7. These monsters are used because they picture the animalization of man, the dehumanization of man that occurs through the pressure of the kingdom of man. Man starts with man, man winds up as an animal. How does man wind up as an animal? By destroying what is not animal like about his being. What is not animal like about man’s being? His conscience. And so the conscience is destroyed and we have therefore society at large destroyed and becoming animal-like, reliance upon human good instead of God’s righteousness, etc.

This is why all of these kingdoms are seen as coming forth from the sea. They do not come out of each other, they come out of the sea, and the sea was doctrine-less humanity, which like water, has no shape of its own, has no inherent stability, is always unstable and filling every container in which it is placed. So water becomes a symbol of people without the Word of God, and it’s from the water that the animals and the beasts come. And when they come from the water it’s because the water has been agitated into a storm by the four winds of heaven, angelic forces in history. Remember that all four of these kingdoms arise, not primarily because of human plots or some gross individuals. These kingdoms are said by Daniel in Daniel 7 to arise not because they are individual men, but because of vast spiritual forces at work in history. So don’t, and we’ll see this much better next week beginning in Daniel 8, don’t ever get it through your head that the architects of the kingdom of man are some creepy looking individuals that come out of smoke-filled rooms discussing plots and counter plots of history. There are plots of history, there have always been plots in history, but the plots are only successful when you have a mass of anti-doctrine people.

Now the plots that have come from history and are still going on in history, communism being one of the most outstanding plots of history, when we have these kinds of plots and plans, always understand that basically at the heart of the plots and plans are not sinister people but sincere people. That’s going to be the theme of Daniel 8, how the beast in history was Antiochus Epiphanes, one of the most fun, humorous, nice guys that the ancient world had. And yet he turned into a monster. And the Word of God’s testimony is that the kingdoms do not begin as monster setups, they begin very nicely, with lots and lots of human good, with lots and lots of social engineering and that’s the fountainhead of it all. You’ll see this very clearly as time goes on in Daniel.

Again it is good that we understand that this is why the Son of man appears as a symbol in Daniel 7; the Son of man is not just a simply view of Jesus Christ. The Son of man in the Aramaic it means a manlike being, and just as the others were animal-like beings, this is a manlike being. And the difference between the fifth kingdom that is a manlike being and the previous four kingdoms that are animal like, is that it’s the fifth king alone where true humanity shows itself socially, corporately and in all other ways. And so it’s pictured here as the Son of man, that is a man like being, one like a Son of man.

Now why is there this great conflict? Again we go back to what is the kingdom of man; we always have to keep this in mind because it’s the kingdom of man that’s being warned against in Daniel. Those of you who are used to hearing Daniel taught in a prophetic conference have only seen one part of the book of Daniel. Daniel is not just a manual on prophecy, it is an entire handbook on the Christian citizen, how to live politically in the kingdom of man. So we have various points made and the points about the kingdom of man is that the kingdom of man ultimately is man’s socially engineering attempt to solve his problems, to bring man along, an environment where they can reach their destiny. Communism today represents the most obvious illustration of the kingdom of man schemes. In communism we have a situation where you have a massive outflow of hostile doctrine illuminating people to the pseudo goal of a total state organization.

The chief means of the kingdom of man is always the power of the state. We got back to our chart on divine institution’s and remember that there are certain spheres of power and influence of power and these spheres must always be kept carefully separate one from the other. Any time you start mixing these spheres you are in trouble. We have already done it in America. For example, in America we have the ruling that a marriage is not legal if the state doesn’t approve it. Who gives the state to authority to decree marriages or not; according to God’s law marriage is separate and complete from the state. Marriage has preexisted the state for they had marriages before the flood but they did not have government before the flood. So obviously the institution of marriage is not dependent at all upon what the state thinks or what it doesn’t thing. True, the state must set up regulations for marriage, but the state does not make marriage. A marriage is made at a wedding when the oath is taken; that oath is taken by the volition of two individuals and no one else. The state can only recognize legally what has in fact transpired but the state does not make marriages and the state does not break marriages. The state, in short, has nothing to do except stand as a bystander and look at the institution of marriage and guarding some of the rights included in the individual. So that’s one illustration of how you have to be very, very careful about what is proper for the fourth divine institution, which is the state, the second divine institution which is marriage, the first divine institution which is responsibility, third divine institution which is family.

Now after 586 BC the kingdom of man had certain characteristics. These characteristics are seen in the four monsters, the Neo-Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans. The Neo-Babylonians brought into existence in 586 BC the concept of total economic controls and the destruction of the free market. The Babylonians are the ones most noted for their economic control, and therefore the destruction of capitalism began with the rise of the kingdom of man. Christians who are biblically centered will always be against socialism because socialism is Satan’s counterpart to the free market economy. The Bible is totally, from cover to cover, pro capitalist.

In fact so heavily pro capitalist are the pages of Scripture that it is absolutely infuriating to certain modern elements of our society to read one of the parables of Jesus in which Jesus discusses labor and management. And in one of these parables Jesus goes and makes what today would be the most obnoxious position possible when He says there was once a man who hired workers from dawn to dusk and when he hired the workers in the morning he agreed to X amount of wages, and then along toward afternoon when most of the work had been done He chose to hire someone else for the last couple of hours of the shift, and He chose to pay them X amount of wages. And the people that were hired in the early morning griped for the owner, the manager, that he had no right to pay the man whom he hired in the afternoon the same wage that he hired the person for in the morning. And Jesus’ answer was, and it’s a complete upholding of a free market, that the management has the right to dictate whatever wages they wish; if the laborer doesn’t like it he can leave. Obviously Jesus would not be too welcome among most labor/management controversies today, but that’s because most labor/management controversies today are not pro Biblical; they refuse to recognize the authority of the principles of the free market. Jesus was free market all the way. So this is another illustration of the state intruding upon the first divine institution.

It began with the Neo-Babylonians. The Persians were known… they were known for their economic destruction, the Persians were known for their internationalism, they were famous for their idea of getting all sorts of different religions together under the same house. Cyrus started that policy and with internationalism we have anything that threatens unity is bad, unity is placed above the truth. And then with Greece we have the contribution of the third monster to the stream of history in which man can design the perfect state using autonomous reason. And so Reason with a capital “R,” Reason unaided, unguided, by the standards of God’s Word is sufficient to design the perfect social order. We will sit down with our slide rules and engineer the perfect solution. That began with the third monster, the Greeks.

And then the Romans; the Romans were responsible for introducing bureaucracy and manmade legislation. So there’s more and more emphasis with each monster on the manmade one, until the fourth monster has the iron teeth and the bronze claws, social engineering. God says bad, wicked, and it’s precisely the human element in the fourth monster, the teeth and the claws that are metal, metal that is made of man, and therefore that which does the destruction. And it’s God’s viewpoint, in spite of almost every political [can’t understand word] on the horizon today that it is precisely the manmade part of the social order, precisely those that are created by autonomous reason that are the most anti humanitarian of all parts; it is the teeth and the claws that do the destruction.

Rome is later to break into a final configuration of ten nations which vie for power and so the final theme is that we are going to have out of Rome and out of the bureaucracy a group of ten nations. Who these ten are we do not know but we do know that before Jesus returns there will be ten kings, or ten kingdoms vying for power across the globe. And this will be the modus vivendi of international relations.

Now we have several applications to this before we get on and discuss more about the Son of man, applications which are contemporary. One application concerns our position as citizens in a declining kingdom under Rome. The United States obviously has declined in its power and influence. What does that mean? Principles from Daniel, it means that as believers today we are going to have our divine viewpoint challenged like no other generation of believers ever has in the history of America. And it means therefore that you as an individual are going to have to assume the responsibility to train yourself and your family with doctrine. And if you are not taking in doctrine on a systematic basis you are a loser. We have losers throughout Christian and it’s weak people, very weak individuals. The average Christian cannot defend his faith today. He has been trained, he has been equipped for the battles of yesterday. This happens time and time again in the history of war and it happens time and time again in the history of the war of ideas. Tactics have to be revised because of progress that has been made. The average Christian organization and average Christian church is run as though we were fighting a battle in the 40’s and 50’s. And people cannot understand why we are training in a different way; it’s because you are outmoded. We are trying to train you for the battles of tomorrow, not the battles of yesterday. It’s the same doctrine but you have to be sharper, and that’s one application out of the fourth monster; we are fighting the monster.

Now to get down to a specific; we have legislators that design legislation, innocently, we’re making no claims that they are a group of sinister criminals that are designing piece of legislation; that’s not the point, they are nice, sincere well-motivated people, but people who do not recognize the doctrine of sphere sovereignty, known in most circles as the separation of church and state. And therefore very dangerous pieces of legislation are being written. One of those is the ERA which threatens the policy of every church which prohibits women from the pastorate and that is an invasion of the church by the state. Therefore ERA represents a threat to the separation of church and state and for that reason we oppose it. Another piece of legislation that concerns the child-care act has some legitimate motivation behind it, it is not wrong, it is right for the state to take care and defend the physical being of children. With that there is no quarrel but this particular piece of legislation has things wrong with it. The first objection we have is the fact that certain agencies are given total and complete jurisdiction over all private education and over all child care centers, even charitable ones. They need some jurisdiction but when the state comes in and says we are going to accredit your private school, what it is saying it is we are going to dictate to you how many hours of this subject and that subject you can have. That is a violation of religious freedom. The state does have legitimate authority in some spheres, but it does not have the authority to dictate curriculum content, teaching methods, counseling methods, etc.

Back to the fifth kingdom which we saw began in verse 9, the Ancient of days and the Son of man. In the vision of the fifth kingdom there are two beings seen, the Ancient of days and the Son of man. Every once in a while we’ll have some hasty amateur Bible teacher look at this and say the Ancient of days is the Father and the Son of man is the Son; it’s not quite so simple. Daniel sees in his vision the Son of man representing humanity and Ancient of days representing deity. The Ancient of days is the judge; the Son of man is representative of the entire kingdom, as we proved last week. We asked two questions, what is Jesus Christ’s relationship to the kingdom, and we said Christ is related both to the Ancient of days and the Son of man. The Son of man is interpreted in the context not as an individual any more than the beasts are individuals; the Son of man is the symbol of the entire kingdom. And we said Christ is related to the Ancient of days by Revelation 1:13-18 because there Christ is pictured as having the exact same appearance as the Ancient of days, proving that in Revelation 1 Jesus is God, with all due apologies to the Jehovah’s Witness cult. Jesus, according to John’s picture in Revelation 1:13-18 is the Ancient of days, and there is no question that the Ancient of days is God.

The Son of man, Jesus is related to the Son of man, He uses the title Son of man, Matthew 26:64. Jesus is the Son of man because Jesus is the type, He is the leader, He is the preexistent king of the kingdom of God, the fifth kingdom. So Christ is related both to the Ancient of days, as God, and to the Son of man as man. Jesus Christ in other words is God and man, true humanity, undiminished deity, united in one person without confusion forever. Jesus Christ is related to both.

Last week we raised a second question and it’s that second question that we must concentrate on this morning. The first question was Jesus Christ’s relationship to the Ancient of days and the Son of man. Now as we look at Daniel 7 we notice something happening. We notice in Daniel 7:14, “There was given him,” this Son of man, “dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.” Then Daniel asks the angel about this and he says, I beheld “Until the Ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the Most High; and the time dame that the saints” plural “possessed the kingdom.” So obviously the Son of man is not just Jesus. But verse 22 talks about a giving of the kingdom; verse 14 talks about a giving of the kingdom.

When the angel turns to Daniel he says here’s what it all means, Daniel 7:26-27, again we have a giving of the kingdom. Verse 26, “But the judgment shall sit; and they shall take away his dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end,” that’s the beast, [27] “And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominion shall serve and obey him.” So verse 27 speaks of a giving of the kingdom.

Three verses in chapter 7 talk about the same thing, the giving of this fifth kingdom to the saints. Now our second question: the second question is when is this kingdom given? There seems to be two opinions as to when the kingdom is given. Turn to the New Testament and see the two opinions; apparently there are two contradictory answers given. One is given in Matthew 28:18, in connection with the great commission. In Matthew 28:18 Jesus quotes excerpts from Daniel 7, just before the great commission. Jesus says prior to His ascension into heaven, “And Jesus came and spoke unto them, saying, All power [authority] is given unto Me in heaven and in earth.” According to verse 18 the giving of the kingdom occurred when Jesus ascended into heaven and sat at the Father’s right hand. That was the giving of the kingdom, that was when Christ came before the Father and was given the kingdom. “All power,” that means all political and all authority, exousia in the Greek, legal authority, all authority has been given, not only on earth Jesus says, but has been given in heaven. Those aren’t empty words. Do you know what that verse is saying? Jesus Christ, as God-man… God-man has control over Satan and every fallen being. Jesus Christ as God-man, that’s what different, and in His humanity Jesus sits at the Father’s right hand and in His humanity He reigns; the kingdom has been given to Him. Fine, that appears to be one answer. The New Testament seems to point to the fact the kingdom has already been given; it has been given at the point of the ascension of Christ.

But then we have another scene in the Gospels, Matthew 26:64. During His trial Jesus again refers to Daniel 7. He pictures Himself as the Son of man coming to receive His kingdom. “Jesus said unto him, You have said,” remember the high priest asked Him if He was the Son of God and he said you said it, “nevertheless, I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven,” deliberate imagery borrowed from Daniel 7 that can only mean He is at that time coming to receive His kingdom.

So now what do we do? We have seemingly two answers; we have one answer, the kingdom was given after the cross when Jesus ascended, that’s one answer. But we also seem to have an answer that when Jesus comes again He is given the kingdom. They both can’t be right and yet it appears that the New Testament demands that both are right. How can the kingdom be given two times. Is it the same kingdom? Is it given to the same people? Something’s going on here. Postmillennialists, the idea and the doctrine that the millennium can be brought in by the Church, things are going to get better and better until Jesus returns, the postmillennialist argues that the great commission comes out of the giving of the kingdom of Daniel 7. Said one of these writers: “to reduce the great commission to the premillennial program of just preaching the gospel as a witness to the world that is to grow worse and worse until it plunges to its doom and destruction is to emasculate the gospel of Christ and wither into pitiful impotency.” In other words, the postmillennialist argues that the kingdom has come and now we are to show signs of this kingdom in history. So the kingdom has been given, he says, and the great commission was the giving of the kingdom.

How are we going to answer this? Are we going to say that there’s a contradiction in the Bible, that we have a kingdom given at two places; if it’s given at two places it must be given, taken away and given again. How do we have this prophecy of Daniel 7 actually fulfilled? As always, if we look long enough and patiently enough there’s another passage of Scripture that explains it. 1 Corinthians 15:20; in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 we meet a vital, vital principle of the interpretation of prophecy. This passage answers the question of these apparently two givings. “But now Christ has risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept.” The “first fruits of them that slept,” that is a term that would have been readily understood by any Old Testament saint. What is the first fruits? The first fruits is the first part of a harvest. So Paul is using the concept from the agricultural world of a harvest. The first fruits are the first stage of the harvest, but the harvest goes on. Prophecy will speak of the harvest as a unit, but the harvest doesn’t occur instantly, it is accumulated by stages. The first fruits is the first stage of the harvest. So there are two things, there is the overall picture and then there are the parts of the overall picture. There is the one harvest predicted and then there is the first phase, the first stage of the harvest, that’s the first fruit, so it says “Christ is risen … and become the first fruits of them that slept.” So notice the passage begins with a concept of gradation or stages to one overall event.

1 Corinthians 15:21, “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. [22] For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,” now this goes back to the fundamental principle of creation. Notice it says “by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.” There’s some vital points of doctrine here, “by man” refers to two things. First “by man” means literal “Jesus” is meant. If you are going to allegorize your interpretation of Genesis and you’re going to argue that Adam was just a symbol for man, to be consistent in this passage you’re also going to have to argue that Jesus was not a real man, He was just a symbol and you can’t do that. Jesus was literal and so Adam must be literal. And here is one of those passages that argue for a literal Genesis, with all due apologies to fence sitting Christians who do not have courage to take one side or the other on this issue. Jesus is not a symbol, nor is Adam.

So Paul starts with creation and in verse 21 he says “by man came death,” he means something more. He not only means the literal Adam, but he also means a literal fall. He means by this that death was not in the world before man, therefore all fossils postdate man; all fossils, whatever their strata, are to be dated after Adam. “By man came death,” death was not introduced by an angel, it was not introduced by Satan, it was introduced by man. There’s a reason for this and this is a reason that shows how the Bible is all put together very, very carefully. Why is it that creation had to be cursed, not through animals but through man, and through man the curse came upon nature? Why is it nature was put under the curse by means of man? Because of man’s position. Man was created to reign over nature; if something is screwed up in nature it is man’s fault. This is the original of ecological difficulties, the fall. Man ruled wrongly over nature and ruined nature, and so the fall was an expression of this, a cursing upon the ground because of what man has done. So man, not angels, I’m trying to get you away from some of the ideas that there was a curse before Adam; the curst that is mentioned in the Bible came only by means of a human act.

So Christ is risen from the dead, He’s reversed it. “By man came death, so by man the resurrection of the dead.” Now what does this mean? Man fouled up nature. We start off with what we call mortal nature. What’s the definition of mortal nature? It means liable to death. When God made Adam’s body, God made Eve’s body, they did not have to die; they could have died, they did not have to die. There’s a difference. We’re getting into some fine points here so be careful of vocabulary. We’re going to talk about immortal and mortal nature. Mortal nature today means die, but it didn’t always mean that. It means it could have died but it didn’t have to die. The body that we are given, flesh, blood, bones, is the same body Adam had now transformed by the curse. It is a mortal body. Adam was given a mortal body for a period of a test and if he had passed that test, he would have received an immortal body to go on living forever, without any fear of ever having to die in the future. But he didn’t, he flunked the exam. And as a result the mortal body now became a mortal body that dies.

Now what this passage is arguing, and you have to catch the thought behind verse 21, it’s so radically different from anything that you’re used to thinking, that you have to say whoa, put on the brakes, let’s stop here and take it slow and easy because this is a radical different concept of history. The idea is that nature was cursed, animals received their death; plants were morphologically transformed by an act of man. Man is the lord of creation. Now not only has man’s position as lord of nature caused the fall of nature, it is also true that man’s position as lord of nature will cause the rise of nature. And this means that Jesus Christ had to become man, He had to get down, so to speak, with us so He could assume the creation position of man to lead back, and so Jesus Christ obeyed. He had a test like Adam, would He or would He not pass the test? Jesus Christ passed it, He went all the way to the cross in perfect obedience, and because Jesus went all the way to the cross in perfect obedience, He rose from the dead.

So now we have immortal nature, and Jesus is the first hunk of the universe that has been transformed into immortality. Jesus Christ today has immortality in His humanity. What does that mean? It means that if you look at Jesus’ hands you see scars on His hands; you see scars on His side, His body that He has is a body directly related to His old body; there’s not a totally new body, it bears marks and the people who saw Jesus after He rose from the dead looked at Him and said, yeah, that’s Jesus. So he wasn’t looking like a Martian after He rose on the third day, He looked like a person that they knew; there was continuity between His old mortal body and His new immortal body. He had the same color hair, the same expression on his face; He had the same height, same stature and so on. So Jesus’ resurrection body was linked to His mortal body.

So what was different? In His resurrection body Jesus could no longer die…could no longer die, regardless of the trial, regardless of anything else, He was beyond trial. And so by the time you have immortal nature created you have the trial behind; not future, behind! There will never be a time when God curses immortal nature with the sin of death because by definition immortal nature can’t be cursed by death. So Jesus has immortal nature; it means He is not liable to another curse, not liable to another test. It also has very peculiar characteristics from the standpoint of physics and chemistry in that this body takes up space but can disappear; it takes up space, yet mass can move through it; Jesus could be standing in the aisle in His resurrection body and you could walk to Him and He’d disappear, you’d walk through the spot and He’d reappear, and He wouldn’t have moved. Now how can this be? We don’t know. Yet if you went up to His hand and you touched His hand you would feel it, it wasn’t a spirit. And that’s what happened.

This is the whole problem of why the disciples got shook, scared and everything else. They saw Jesus appear in the room, and in those scenes of the post resurrection life of Christ the Greek indicates that He was standing there, it wasn’t that the disciples were sitting around, did you hear about this, did you hear about that, and all chewing on their hamburgers wondering what was going on and Jesus walks through the door. That’s not the picture. The picture is more spooky than that; the picture was the door was shut and they were sitting in a room and suddenly Jesus appeared standing there; He had been standing there all the time, and that’s what was spooky, the fact that someone could be standing there totally invisible and unsensed to your empirical vision, and yet all of a sudden then become visible. Well obviously if that happened to you you would think well, Biblical categories, you’ve got a spirit here, it’s kind of like a ghost that you can put your hand through. And Jesus said no, you come here a minute and touch me and see that I have bones and flesh. And so he held out His hand and they had to come and reach for it and there was mass, it took up space, it was empirically sensible. So we don’t know what this immortal nature is; it is not sheer spirit, it is body but it has this strange attribute of being able to appear and disappear to the empirical senses. We don’t know how or why but that is the characteristic of immortality.

Now look at it again; if it is true that you have the first man, Adam, and through him comes death down upon nature, and beside death in nature, confusion and so on. The second Adam, if He resurrects from the dead, then through Him you’re going to have a new creation. That is, the future universe will not be some weird ninth dimension science fiction universe with spooky towers between the planets; the future universe is going to look empirically much like the universe we live in today, and yet it’s going to have the same kind of physical and chemical quality that Jesus’ resurrection body has to it. It is impermeable to cursing and disorder. There will be no disordered elements on the second universe. It will be perfect order. That’s why in Revelation 21 it says, and there shall be no more sea; what is the sea a symbol of? Chaos, no more chaos, perfectly ordered physical and chemical systems. We don’t know what they’re going to look like; we just know that it’s going to look something like the world today. So don’t get any ideas of some spooky universe, it’s going to look like the one we’re in: trees, in Revelation 21:22, things that grow and so on, very material. And if you have problems with this it shows you how you’ve absorbed Platonism from the culture, that this to you can’t seem empirical, how far away from the Bible you’ve strayed.

Now in 1 Corinthians 15:21, having set that as a background, now we’re prepared to understand the resolution of the controversy. “For since by man dame death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.” So by Adam the physical universe suffered, so by Jesus Christ we have the vanguard of the change. Now verse 22, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” “ALL,” not just the saved, but the unsaved are going to be made alive, “all will be made alive.” And this refers to the resurrection both of the quick and the dead, the resurrection of the evil and the good. The people who spend eternity in the lake of fire, this is what makes it so horrible, they have indestructible bodies that are going to be pain sensory, over and over and over and over and over; the resurrection of the evil. So even in the future there will be a resurrection for those who partake of the lake of fire, and that’s going to enable them to survive eternal punishment.

1 Corinthians 15:23, “Every man in his own order” and there’s the key word, “every man in his own order. In the Greek it is tagma, it’s a word for rank, it was used in the army for the rank in your marching body; you’d have the vanguard, you’d have the main body, and you’d have the rear units, and various ranks, rank one, rank two, rank three, rank four, rank five, so the word tagma was taken from the Roman military parade and it’s a picture of a parade that Paul has here and he says every man is going to pass into the resurrection when his unit passes the grandstand. So, so far using the picture of a military parade, we have the first unit marching by and it has one man in it, Jesus Christ, just one person. So far only one person has marched by the grandstand. Now he says, “Christ the first fruits,” that means the first fruit of this harvesting; Christ is in the first unit, “afterward they that are Christ’s at His coming,” the second group marches by, that will be the Church at the rapture, those that are Christ’s will be the second group. Then he skips in verse 24 to the end, “Then cometh the end, when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father,” so there’s a gap between verse 23 and 24, then comes the end. Paul’s not concerned with the other units. What are the other units? The other units will be all the Old Testament saints at the Second Advent when Christ returns to earth, at the end there will be all the saints of the millennial kingdom so he’s got at least three groups following.

Now what is this saying? Every man in his own tagma, it’s the same resurrection administered in sequence. So what does that teach us? Finish reading verse 24, “Then cometh the end, when He shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father, when He shall have put down all rule and all authority and all power. [25] For He must reign, till He has put all enemies under His feet. [26] The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” So the last enemy that is going to be destroyed is death and we know that can’t go as long as you have a mortal universe. So obviously before the enemy of death can be destroyed you’ve got to have immortality; the universe itself has got to be made immortal. “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. [27] For He has put all things under His feet. But when He says all things are put under him, it is clear [manifest] that He is excepted who did put all things under Him,” that is God the Father. [28] And when all things shall be subdued unto Him,” Christ, “then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.” That’s the eternal state, when God the Father receives the kingdom.

So what do we say? The one resurrection, the inheriting of the kingdom, occurs by stages, that’s the point. So now let’s look at some of these stages. One point, 1 Corinthians 6:2-3 just to show you one of the stages in the future, the Church is going to be in an administrative position in the future. “Do you not know that the saints shall judge the world?” This is referring to when the Church gets the kingdom, the Church is going to go into its eternal state, the Church receives a resurrection body at the rapture, and at this point the Church assumes its eternal position as the administration of the King. “And if the world shall be judged by you,” Paul says, and look at the clods to whom he wrote it, Corinth, Playboy city of the ancient world. And this is the place where he says the saints in Corinth are the ones who are going to share in the judgment of the world, and he says “…are you unworthy to judge the smallest matters?” In other words, can’t you guys get along together; you’re going to be judging the world so get trained. Verse 3, “Know ye not that we shall judge angels?” Another function of believers in the future, “we shall judge angels. How much more things that pertain to this life?”

Now we’re prepared to finish Daniel 7 so let’s turn back to Daniel 7 and see if we can answer that second question: when is the kingdom given? The kingdom is given to Jesus at the ascension; when Jesus Christ ascended He personally received His part of the kingdom. Jesus has the kingdom today, personally. The Bible says that, that is why He could dispense the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit did not come on the day of Pentecost because people agonized in their closets; the upper room probably never had a closet in it. They didn’t eat bird seed and go through all the asceticism that the neo-Pentecostals insist upon. They got the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost because it was prophesied to come on the day of Pentecost. That was when God gave an order to the Holy Spirit, go down there, boom; that was the day of the order. The reason why Jesus said stay in Jerusalem was so they’d all be in one place when it happened. It wasn’t to bring the Holy Spirit down upon them; there’s no such thing as agonizing to receive the baptism of the Spirit. Nowhere in the New Testament are we ever commanded to seek the baptism of the Spirit. So the first part of the kingdom has been given. The kingdom has been given to Jesus, that’s Matthew 28; no problem.

But the kingdom hasn’t been given to those who are Christ’s yet. That will happen after the rapture. So, the kingdom will be given to the Church when it receives the resurrection body, which will be after the rapture; the kingdom is given to the other men at the end of the millennium. Whenever you get the resurrection body, Jesus’ life gives you the model. The kingdom is given when resurrection occurs. So in answer to the question, when is the kingdom given? Whenever you receive the resurrection body, that’s the answer. And we receive our resurrection body at a different time than Jesus.

Now Daniel 7:28 is exactly opposite to our attitude today. This whole problem with the Son of man and the Ancient of days Daniel did not understand because he did not view the God-man with his own vision. So in the last verse of the chapter he says, “Here is the end of the matter. As for me, Daniel, my cogitations much troubled me,” isn’t that a nice sentence out of the King James, “my countenance changed in me; but I kept the matter in my heart.” This vision promised so much but seemed so far away. It promised an end to the persecutions of the Jew, suffering under the heel of the Babylonians and under the heel of the Persians, in the future under the heel of the Greeks and under the heel of the Romans. It is a liberation book, it promises political freedom, it promises God is going to judge. It promises that fifth and future kingdom, but it’s in the future, and there are so many things about it Daniel doesn’t understand—who’s the Son of man, who’s the Ancient of days, I don’t understand it. And “my cogitations troubled me” means I don’t have enough data to think through this prophecy, I don’t have the data at my hands. So he says there’s nobody I can talk to, nobody else even had this much revelation, so I kept it in my heart, I didn’t discuss it with anybody, but my countenance changed, I was troubled, and I thought about it and thought about it and thought about it.

Now the application of Daniel 7 to our Christian experience is this: chapter 7 plus the New Testament equals happiness, equals stability. The New Testament solves the problems Daniel could not solve in verse 28. The New Testament gives us enough data because we know who Jesus is, we have seen part of that Son of man, we have seen the leader of the kingdom; it’s as though we’ve seen Nebuchadnezzar, we’ve seen Cyrus, we’ve seen Alexander, we’ve seen Augustus Caesar, now we see Jesus Christ. All five men the head of each one of those kingdoms is now played out in history. Because we have history on our side we don’t have to be troubled with Daniel, we can be optimistic because we know that “all things work together for good” and it’s not just a slogan, we now understand history and we see the process.

Next time we’re going to study one of the most famous men of history who was the exact opposite of the Son of man, Antiochus Epiphanes.