Daniel Lesson 29

Profile of Kingdom of Man Leadership – Daniel 8:1-14

You recall that Daniel 7 was a panorama of history viewed as to its basic moral content. We had symbols; symbols which are not impossible to understand, symbols that were given that every mature believer who is really interested in the Word should understand. We saw the symbol of the sea that symbolizes God’s view of the human race since the fall, that apart from Bible doctrine the human race, corporately, is unstable. The human race is a breeding ground for trouble, and this is why there are certain restraints in the Word of God; this is why the Bible authorizes capital punishment, why the Bible permits believers to be in the military in just war conditions. And while these conditions may seem to some to be very bad and immoral, it’s precisely because of the sea nature of humanity, its unstableness, like water, it takes on the shape of its container, liable to the winds that blow upon the sea, and tips the sea up into great waves that become extremely dangerous. So in Daniel 7 we saw the human race as a sea tipped up by the four winds of heaven, which would be spiritual forces operating on the sea or spiritual forces operating on the fallen human race.

We saw that after the human race is agitated by these spiritual forces there emerged four great kingdoms, since 586 BC: the Neo-Babylonian, the Medo-Persian, the Greeks and the Romans. Each of these kingdoms are pictured by symbols, symbols that draw attention to the non-human nature of the kingdom, that the kingdoms that begin with man end less than man, they end as animals. And so all four of these kingdoms have animal symbols. Animals have a spirit, animals have a soul, but animals do not have the image of God. Animals do not have conscience; men do and therefore these symbols teach that the result of the four kingdoms always socially is a destruction of conscience and its replacement by human good. We saw that the fifth kingdom, God’s kingdom, came in with one like the Son of man, meaning that the symbol of the fifth kingdom is a human being who has a conscience, man fulfilling his destiny.

So we find then that there are certain applications that come out of chapter 7. We want to review some of these applications before we begin chapter 8 because chapter 8 presupposes that we are very familiar with chapter 7. As we’ll find out shortly, Daniel himself sees chapter 8 as but a continuation of chapter 7, and therefore Daniel would have us understand carefully his first vision. The applications of chapter 7 means that socially the real battle is not with what we would call common ethical standards. The main fight that the believer has with his environment socially is not over what are considered moral issues. We can take prohibition as an illustration. Put down the booze; that is not the issue in Scripture, the Scripture goes much deeper than that, and we had an entire generation of believers off the track in their anti-booze crusade that never worked and the reason was because they concentrated at the wrong point. It was a strategic error that was made that resulted in practical failure. And the strategic error was that believers shot at the wrong target; the true target against which the believer fights is the question of ultimate authority.

Who is ultimately in authority, God or man, that is the issue, not the lesser things. The lesser things will take care of themselves if the first and primary issue is settled, and that is God, not man, is the ultimate standard of truth. God’s Word, therefore, is an absolute, and will be followed, regardless of what the state says, regardless of what pressure groups say, and regardless of what minority groups happens to be making the loudest noise at the moment, it is what the Word of God has to say period. So the ultimate issue is the ultimate authority of God or man, that man is not to design his kingdom from the ground up by social engineering; he is to follow the wisdom principles of Scripture. Where does this conflict appear? It appears obviously and centrally in the legislature of our nation because it’s here where all the social engineers are gathered together trying to autonomously build the perfect society. Men who may be very brilliant and trained but the more we hobnob with them and write letters, have conversations over the phone, the more convinced I am that these men, sincere though they may be and many of them are, these people are very sincere but the problem is they are very ignorant of Scriptural principles. The state does not give the Church religious freedom. This was the whole point of Puritan theology for over 100 years; the Queen of England does not give us religious freedom, she doesn’t have the power to give us the freedom because she never had the authority to begin with. That’s separation of church and state.

Some of you have the idea separation of church and state is something like this; the state gets together and the state runs the whole show and the state says we will allot the church this area of freedom over here, and you think that’s separation of church and state. It is not; separation of church and state says the state never had the authority to say one way or the other; that’s separation of church and state. The church and the state are two separate distinct spheres of authority. As pastor-teacher I have authority within the church and I’ve been given it by the Word of God and I’m not answerable to any court in the land, as long as I stay within the proper jurisdiction of the Word of God in the local church. The state cannot say whether I’m right or wrong because the state doesn’t have the authority to say whether I’m right or wrong. That is separation of church and state, and you can easily see when one takes that position how very, very fragile and how very close we are to confrontation in today’s society because of the sea, it goes back to the symbol of the sea again. Thousands and thousands of thousands of voters, like the molecules of water in the ocean, whipped into a frenzy by the wind, whichever way the wind blows they go and when the wind says the state grants freedom to the church, they say yeah, we like that principle, forgetting that for someone to grant freedom to the church means they had the authority to grant freedom. Separation of church and state denies that the state had authority to grant such freedom.

So that’s one of the applications of Daniel 7. Watch out for the monster. And the Christian citizen slogan always is: watch the teeth and the claws of that fourth monster; the teeth and the claws, watch them. And whenever the Christian voter considers a piece of legislation or a candidate for office, ask is this going to give freedom for the rise of the fourth beast, that’s always on the Christian voter’s mind, that is the one who thinks Biblically.

Now there’s a second application that will help us in our citizenship responsibilities as Christian that comes from Daniel 7, and that is that the leadership of the fifth and coming kingdom is already known. We do not have to look for a human being as the ultimate leader and solution to our problem because the ultimate leader has already come, the God-man Savior, Jesus Christ. It is He who is THE Son of man; the Son of man is a symbol for the whole kingdom but remember we said those symbols were both the leader of the kingdom and the kingdom. And who is the Son of man and who is our leader? So already we know who the leader will be for the coming kingdom and it’s to Him we give our allegiance. We have received an inoculation against a tendency to gravitate to human messiahs and Christ substitutes. We do not have to look for a leader with great charisma as the one who is going to give us the perfect society. We don’t have to look for a Marx or a Lenin, because we already have our Savior, and He has proved His qualifications to lead by His life and His death. So therefore we are assured that our leader is competent for His office. What other political leaders do you know that have died for you on the cross for your sins? Obviously none, and obviously therefore there never will be one qualified as Christ is qualified. So Christ has demonstrated publicly that He has been called to the office of the fifth kingdom; He has demonstrated publicly His perfect qualifications for office. Therefore if we are Christian citizens we’ll always remember that, keep that in the back of our minds. It prevents you from getting sucked into some sort of social panacea.

Now we come to Daniel 8 and in Daniel 8 we arrive at a profile of the leadership of the kingdom of man. Daniel 7 was a profile of the kingdomS, the four great stages that gave us a panorama of history. Chapter 8 does not give us a panorama of history; chapter 8 zeroes in on a specific point and the specific point is what is the quality of leadership of the kingdom of man. What kind of characteristics do you want to beware of? So I go into this, as I have approached Daniel since we began the book, and if you have studied Daniel under other teachers may find this approach kind of different in that I am not approaching Daniel primarily as a book of prophecy. And I do that because the book of Daniel in the Hebrew canon is not in the prophetic book, it’s in the wisdom book and therefore I approach the book of Daniel as a political handbook. It has prophecy in it and we’re going to study the prophecy as we go along, but the primary reason for Daniel is to equip you as a citizen fighting for your life within the kingdom of man, to give you things to look for, to give you lessons that you can learn from history and not be doomed to suffer by repeating the same lesson.

So as we go through particularly Daniel 8 the thing on our minds will be yes, this is interesting prophecy, and it is, but there’s more than prophecy in Daniel 8, there are principles that you can apply today in the political scene as a Christian, with your citizenship obligations. And what you’re going to be looking for in Daniel 8 that will help you follow the filling of the Spirit in the area of citizenship responsibility is watch the portrait that is now going to be painted of the antichrist. Daniel 8 introduces the antichrist….THE antichrist, there are lots of antichrists but this is the man, the beast, who will take over the world, and here we are going to have the benefit of a previous partial fulfillment; his name—Antiochus IV or Antiochus Epiphanes. Technically his full name was Antiochus Theos Epiphanes, “Antiochus God manifest” he called himself. That’s why his name Epiphanes; of course the people of Epiphanes day had another name for him, they called him [not sure of word: sounds like epimones] which is the Greek word for idiot. So everywhere the people talked about Antiochus Epiphanes there would be this undercurrent in the crowd, yes, Antiochus Epimones, and it would sound so close that when you said it it looked like you were saying Epimones but you were really saying you idiot. And this is how the people greeted him, those with doctrine, Antiochus Epimones.

So we have here a historic setting and when you start to see the attributes of Epiphanes Epimones and you start to study his personal life and his character you are going to be shocked, because some of you have the idea the beast is some sort of a character that creeps up from the sewer and meets with the mafia in the back room, does a lot of plotting, has a perpetual scowl on his face, growls good morning or something like that, and that’s the image that you have of the beast.

We’re going to see the character of Antiochus, he was a fantastic fellow, he was humorous, he was a philanthropist, he was in the ancient world one of the fine men that were known, he was a model leader, just like Augustus that we studied before. And I point these historic lessons out to you that you can apply them today. When the beast appears he is not going to be some person with “beast” written all over his T-shirt. He is going to be a person who is very attractive, a person who is going to hit it off right with a lot of people; a person who is going to demonstrate human good like you haven’t seen human good before, a fantastic individual. And this is the kind of thing we’re going to look for in Daniel 8. So we have a lot to look for in Daniel 8 and we’ll take a lot of time going through Daniel 8 to make sure we understand what the Holy Spirit is warning us, because apocalyptic literature is warning literature to prevent suffering. God is saying I am leaving actively into [can’t understand words] history, I’m taking hands off for a while believers, and while I’m leaving, and I’m leaving you hands off, I’m going to tell you things to do and I’m going to tell you some things not to do. And don’t blame Me if you don’t listen to what I say and you screw up and you suffer. So apocalyptic literature is warning literature.

Today we’re primarily concerned with observing details of the text of Daniel 8; in ensuing classes we’ll be dealing with the interpretation problems of Daniel 8, the history, the background, who was Antiochus, what did he do. We’ll also cover that famous period of Jewish history that is not covered in the Old Testament; if you have an apocrypha, and if you like to prepare by reading for this, you ought to get one anyway. The apocrypha is a book that was attached to the Catholic Old Testament; if you have a Catholic Bible it’s already stuck in the Old Testament portion. The apocrypha is not inspired Scripture but the apocrypha does give history, valuable history and two books in particular you ought to read, just for your own… it’s an adventure story is what it is and its true history, 1 & 2 Maccabees. Read it and you’ll understand one of the most thrilling chapters of Jewish history, their freedom war against Antiochus Epiphanes. It’s all described in 1 & 2 Maccabees and has heroics like you can’t believe, just fantastic stories, and it lays the basis for the New Testament. Again, it was not included in our canon because the canon was closed earlier.

Even within 1 & 2 Maccabees there are notices like this: Judas Maccabees, Judas the Hammer (the word Maccabean means the hammer) and after you start studying you’ll understand why he was called Judas the Hammer. He destroyed four armies with a small band of guerillas, a fantastic individual. But Judas the Hammer got together and he found parts of the stones of the temple, and he didn’t know what to do with them, and so he piled the stones off to the side and he said I am going to wait until a prophet from God comes to tell us what to do with the stones. That tells you there was no prophet to tell them, and therefore shows you that prophecy had ceased, and thus the canon was closed in this era, and thus 1 & 2 Maccabees is excluded from the canon because it was not written by the gift of prophecy. It was written as an accurate history book but that’s all it is. However, I recommend that you read it just for your own benefit and education; you’re reading about something that happened between the Old Testament and New Testament, between Malachi and Matthew; apocrypha fits chronologically in there, so that’s where you can place it.

Daniel 8:1, “In the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar a vision appeared unto me, even unto me Daniel, after that which appeared unto me at the first. [2] And I saw in a vision; and it came to pass, when I saw, that I was at Shushan in the palace, which is in the province of Elam; and I saw in a vision, and I was by the river of Ulai. [3] Then I lifted up mine eyes, and saw,” now the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar is 551 BC. This is still the time of the Neo-Babylonian Empire or the first kingdom, not the second, the first. This is two years later from chapter 7. The last era of the Neo-Babylonian Empire has come, Belshazzar in his increasingly corrupt administration is making inroads into Daniel’s thinking, Daniel is a high government official, and it’s at that time when he’s troubled as he sees the administration becoming more and more corrupt, that God gives him this vision. Great troubles are lying ahead for Jews living inside the kingdom of man, they must be warned. So we are going to be warned in this vision. This is a follow-up vision. Notice in verse 1 it says, the “vision appeared unto me,” the word “vision” shows it was not a dream. Daniel 7 was a dream.

Daniel 8 occurred sometime when he was awake; we don’t know what he was doing, whether he was having lunch or sitting in his study, praying or what, but it was while he was awake, all of a sudden this vision takes over. And in the vision all his empirical sight is eliminated. A visionary experience is when you can look out, stand at a point, look out and you don’t see what you’re looking at. In other words, the external world just disappears, and it is replaced, you’re not blacked out, but in a vision experience you’re actually seeing something else that’s out there. So this is what he’s saying, there was a vision, not a dream, “a vision appeared unto me, after that which appeared unto me at the first.” That which appeared to me at the first is chapter 7. And “after that” is something that follows, so this follows and completes the first vision of two years ago. He’s had two years to think about that first vision and now after giving me two years to think about it God gives me another one.

Then in verse 2 he says, “And I saw in a vision;” so this tells us that it wasn’t literal in the sense that he didn’t literally go to Shushan, he was in Babylon when the vision occurred, but in his vision he had gone to Shushan and where is Shushan. This is significant. Here’s the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, Turkey, Eastern Mediterranean, Nile Delta, Persian Gulf and you have the Tigris-Euphrates River. Babylon is there and Shushan is up here, up to the north, toward the mountain. At this time Shushan is but a small city, it hasn’t been built up, it doesn’t have a profound history, they have a fortress three, that’s the word “palace,” I was in the fortress at Shushan. But here’s the significant thing; Shushan is going to become, later, the capital of the second empire, the Medo-Persian Empire. Now this vision occurs decades before. Shushan is not the capital now; it will become the capital.

Moreover the Jews are going to face some of their earliest trials of anti-Semitism at Shushan. It will be at Shushan where Esther defends her people and the entire book of Esther is written at Shushan. It will be at Shushan where Nehemiah obtains the decree to rebuild. At Shushan, then, will the Jews have to apply the doctrine they are now about to learn, and therefore to help them apply the doctrine, to make it fit to the situation, God says okay, when I teach this doctrine Daniel I am going to put you in Shushan. And that way it will telegraph to the believers that come along after you die that look, this vision was given right here in the palace where we’re going to have to apply it. Mordecai is going to read this, Mordecai is going to need this doctrine, and it’s going to be here right where the vision was.

Daniel 7:2, “And I saw in a vision; and it came to pass, when I saw, that I was at Shushan in the palace; which is in the province of Elam,” see right at this point Shushan is in the expanding empire of Cyrus; Daniel is down here in Neo-Babylonian Empire, it’s not even the same country. So he’s transported in a vision. “…and I saw in a vision, and I was by the river of Ulai.” Scholars don’t know what that river is; apparently it’s a canal, manmade type canal.

Daniel 8:3, he says “Then I lifted up my eyes, and saw, and, behold, there stood before the river a ram which had two horns: and the two horns were high; but one was higher than the other, and the higher came up last. [4] I saw the ram pushing westward, and northward, and southward; so that no beasts might stand before him, neither was there any that could deliver out of his hand; but he did according to his will, and became great.” So in verses 3-4 we have the ram vision. Now we have to look carefully at the ram and we notice in verse 5, “And as I was considering, behold, an he goat came from the west on the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground: and the goat had a notable horn between his eyes. [6] And he came to the ram that had two horns, which I had there seen standing before the river, and ran unto him in the fury of his power. [7] And I saw him come close unto the ram, and he was moved with choler against him, and smote the ram, and brake his two horns: and there was no power in the ram to stand before him, but he cast him down to the ground, and stamped upon him: and there was none that could deliver the ram out of his hand.”

So in this vision instead of having four images or five, we have two images. We have a male sheep and a male goat. And the contest between these two is one of power. The sheep is a more gentle animal than the goat and the goat overpowers the sheep. So the contrast between these two visions is one of relative power. We look at the two symbols and we ask ourselves where did these come from? Daniel was schooled in the wisdom of the Babylonian astrology; the ram in astrology is one of the signs of Aries, and the goat is a sign of Capricorn. And these animals are applied because in what they call astrological geography Persia was associated with Aries and later on Alexander and the Greeks will be associated with Capricorn. Furthermore, the ram was well known in the ancient world for when they held a military review the Persian king would review his soldiers and march at the head, he would always carry in front of him instead of a diadem a ram’s head. So the symbol of the ram and the goat, strange as it may seem to you, would have been easily understood by a person living in that day. It was common knowledge who the ram was.

And if we are in doubt as to who the ram is, just look at verse 20, because this chapter, written like all apocalyptic literature, has three parts. It has the vision, it has the request for information and it has the interpretation. Like Daniel 7 it’s a vision that’s… you can visualize it like an angel running a movie projector, the angel shows the picture on the screen, has sound, Daniel listens, Daniel is puzzled by the symbols, he says whoa, stop the picture and he turns to the angel and asks the angel, what does this mean? And the angel says Daniel, this means this, this means this, and that means that. So we have the three parts, verses 1-14 of this chapter is the vision; verses 15-16 is the request, and the rest of the chapter is the interpretation. The same three parts that Daniel 7 had, apocalyptic literature is structured this way. It’s the same way in the book of Revelation, you’ll have a vision, you’ll have a request, and you’ll have the interpretation.

Now verse 20 obviously falls in the third part, the interpretation part of the chapter. And if you’ll look at verse 20 the angel tells very clearly what that symbol means. “The ram which you saw, having two horns, are the kings of Media and Persia.” one animal, two horns, two parts, Media and Persia. And we know that in history this is very accurate because now if you come back to Daniel 8:3 and you read about those two horns you’ll notice something. It says the “two horns were high, but one was higher than the other, and the higher one came up last.” This means that you first have the Medes; then you have the Persians. The Persians that originally were just kind of a sub group of the Median Empire and then under Cyrus they attained power. They came later but they became stronger. So the last horn in verse 3 comes up but becomes bigger than the first horn. All of these horns again, royalty, kingship, state power.

Now verse 4 describes what the ram did. “I saw the ram pushing westward, and northward, and southward,” now those are three directions of movement of the Persian Empire. And they represent the movements of Cyrus. The first one, it says “I saw the ram pushing westward,” he pushed westward so that in 547 BC he destroyed Lydia. Here’s the Turkish peninsula, here’s the Dardanelles, the Black Sea, Cyprus is down here, and you have Lydia located just about on the west side of what is now Turkey. Cyrus went in here; that was the famous time when his opponent had all the cavalry and he decided he’d knock out the cavalry and how did he do it? He did it by pushing a wall of camels ahead, and the horses couldn’t stand the smell of the camels and so they did a 180 and took off, and there went all the cavalry. It was a brilliant military move and Cyrus pulled one of the great tactic maneuvers in history here. So Cyrus moved westward to Greece and he conquered Lydia in 547 BC. That’s the ram moving westward.

Then it says the ram moved northward. This would picture the strike that Cyrus made against Ekbatana, which was the capital of the Medes in 550 BC, it was here where he finally hit his father-in-law, remember he married the daughter, his father tried to get this daughter killed because he had this dream about the daughter having a great vine come out of her womb that would reign over the world, so he finally married this girl and then he took care of her father. He moved northward to Ekbatana.

Then it says he moved southward. Cyrus moved southward to hit Babylon in 539 BC. This is yet future to the time… in fact all these events are future because this vision is 551 BC, and of the three dates I just gave you, do you notice something is going to happen very shortly. In 550 BC, that was the date I gave for the destruction of Ekbatana, in 550 BC Cyrus is going to make his move. One year before Cyrus surprised the Medes God’s intelligence system gave the complete battle plan to Daniel; Daniel 8, the ram would push north. Daniel could have advised the Medes on exactly what was going to happen months in advance because God said so right here.

And it says he pushed northward and southward, “so that no beasts might stand before him,” and this is true, nobody could win over Cyrus, he did as he pleased, it says, he “did according to his will,” it shows you again that the kingdom of man has been given sovereign power by God to do what it wills.

Daniel 8:5, “And as I was considering,” so we now come to the he-goat. “As I was considering, behold, a he-goat came form the west over the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground,” this is the story of Alexander; this is the third kingdom. In Daniel 7 we have four kingdoms; we have the Neo-Babylonian, the Persian, the Grecian, the Roman. In this chapter we have only two; Persia is the ram, Alexander and the Greeks are the goat. And you’ll notice something here; it says the goat came from the west. Where did Alexander come from? He came from the west. Remember the battles he fought? He fought his way down the Turkish peninsula, Darius III had him outmaneuvered at Issus and Alexander used one of the great famous tools that he had, nobody else in the ancient world had devised this, it’s called the phalanx.

Some of these phalanxes would have thousands and thousands of men with spears 25 feet long and these men would line up shoulder to shoulder and they’d hold this spear out with the back of the spear trailing behind them, and then the man in back of him would rest his spear on the shoulder of the man in front of him, and the third row back the man with the 25 foot long spear would rest his spear on the man in front of him, and then Alexander would give the order and then they’d go and it was just like a bulldozer, just plow everything forward. You can imagine you see this whole wall of men with 25 foot long spears just marching right toward you it tends you to make you decide you’d like to be somewhere else at that moment. So the phalanx was a tremendous tool that the Greeks used. And the only people that finally found out how to handle the phalanx were the Romans, but the Greek phalanx was Alexander’s salvation at Issus.

Then later on he did the famous battle, the clean up, the mopping up battle against some of the Persians when he had all his camps, he [can’t understand word] along the edge of the river, he didn’t seem to camp at any one place, and the Persians would sit on one side of the river and watch and they’d send their spies over and they’d see Alexander just riding his horse back and forth, and at night they’d have a march and the group would march down here and then they’d march up here, and finally the Persians just dismissed the whole thing and the moment Alexander saw that they were getting tired of this movement back and forth, boom, he struck. He moved his soldiers 15 miles upstream, he forded the stream by night, came down and attacked them and wiped them out, and that was the end of the Persians. Now he did all this in five years, thereabouts. It took Cyrus 35 years, and it took Alexander, in his 20’s, only 5 years to do it; it shows you what a man he was.

Daniel 8: 5, the “he-goat came from the west over the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground,” that’s a reference to speed, the goat travels so fast he doesn’t touch the ground. And that’s a prediction centuries before it happened, that Alexander would come into the ancient world like a whirlwind. The ancient world had never seen anything collapse like this; everywhere Alexander went nothing got in his way, he just kept on marching, marching, marching, marching, marching, he marched all the way east to the Indus River. Before Alexander died he had one empire stretching from Europe to the Far East, a tremendous empire. It says the goat “had a notable horn between his eyes.” That’s Alexander in particular, the goat being the entire Grecian Empire.

In Daniel 8:6, “And he came to the ram that had two horns … and ran unto him in the fury of his power,” and you remember when I narrated that portion of history and Alexander when he crossed the Dardanelles up here, he had a public ceremony for his soldiers, he lined them all up and he had an official ceremony in which he dedicated himself to the resumption of the Trojan War. Years before Xerxes had moved west, and Xerxes when he had passed this ancient site of Troy said I will pay the Greeks back for what they did to King Priam; I dedicate myself to a restoration of the great sacred war of Troy. And of course Xerxes failed and then Alexander when he went back there he dedicated himself to the resumption of Troy. You see the Greeks and the Turks, of course it’s just the Turks today, but the Greeks have always been very sensitive about this whole area; they still are. Look at Cyprus, the mess that’s going on there. Historically the Greeks have always been concerned about who it is that lives on the Aegean. They always will be, and you have to understand when you work with the Greeks that’s just their mentality and it goes way, way, way, way back in history. They are sensitive about this area and they get mad when people start coming in here, particularly when they had Greek colonies here and the Persians started attacking the colonies. That really hacked the Greeks and so this is why in this prophecy the he-goat in verse 7 has anger against the ram. It’s not just a military confrontation but there’s great animosity, and animosity is rooted in these two people.

Daniel 8:7, “And I saw him come close unto the ram, and he was moved with anger against him,” great anger is the Hebrew word, “against him, and smote the ram,” he vindicated what he felt was the Persians butting into the Greek sphere. “…and he broke his two horns; and there was no power in the ram to stand before him.” Verse 8, “Therefore the he goat waxed very great: and when he was strong, the great horn was broken;” that happened in 323 BC at a drunken party in Babylon. Here a man in his 20’s who had conquered the world in five years, they intermarried with a lot of the Persians and they had too much wine, women and song, Alexander died before he was 30 years old as an alcoholic. So it shows you what kind of an individual he was, he couldn’t take prosperity. He could not take responsibility; genius though he was, he died an alcoholic.

So it was precisely “when he was strong,” it says in verse 8, predictions, this is all prophecy at the time it was written, “Therefore, the he-goat grew very great; and when he was strong, the great horn was broken, and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heaven.” That’s like the leopard in Daniel 7 that had four heads. What were these? They were Alexander’s generals that divided up his Empire; to Egypt went Ptolemy, and so we have a whole line of rulers called the Ptolemy’s, that’s where Cleopatra came out of, that group, if you can’t remember anything remember Cleopatra. Babylon and Syria went to another line, the Seleucids from Seleucus, it’s out of this line that will come this horrible person that we’re going to see in this chapter; Antiochus comes out of this Seleucid dynasty. Then Macedonian and Greece was given over to Cassander and Thrace was given to Lysimachus. So we have these four great divisions in Alexander’s Empire.

And then it says in Daniel 8:9, “And out of one of them came forth a little horn,” now be careful, the little horn of verse 9 is not the little horn of Daniel 7 in many ways; in some ways it is and in some ways it isn’t. That’s what makes this chapter difficult to interpret. Turn back to Daniel 7 to refresh your memory. Remember what we did with the fourth beast. Daniel 7:8, remember the fourth horrible beast came up and he had ten horns, that one, that was the fourth beast, he had ten horns. “I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them another little horn, before which there were three of the first horns plucked up by the roots; and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and mouth speaking great things.” So Daniel 7 gives us the four kingdoms and tells us that the Roman Empire gradually is going to issue into these ten kingdoms. Three of these kingdoms will be destroyed and produce this little horn. That’s all in the future. There will be a ten nation confederacy, three of those nations are going to unify and out of those three nations that unify will come this monster man. That’s the monster of Daniel 7.

We are now in Daniel 8 dealing with Greece, and out of the four, these four men that come out of Alexander, out of one of them comes this monster, not out of the four horns but out of one of the horns came this little horn. Daniel 8:9, “And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceedingly great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the desire [pleasant land],” literally in the Hebrew. Now the word “the desire” is a code name for Israel. And it says that one of Alexander’s generals or one of these people, one of these dynasties is going to produce this man, he’s going to go south, he’s going to go east, and he’s going to go against the desired. It doesn’t tell you what compass point because prophecy is flexible; we know which compass point because we know who he was. That’s Antiochus, he’s located in Syria and so he goes toward Israel, that’s toward the desire, he goes south toward Egypt and he goes west toward the remains of the Persian Empire in those areas to get money. There’s a big story behind it and a very instructive which we won’t cover this morning. So he goes south and he goes toward the desire. Verse 9 tips us off that something is going to happen to Israel. Where is Israel while Daniel is having this vision? They’re deported; they’re not in the land. So verses 9 contains a hint that Israel will be restored to the land by the time this whatever it is occurs.

Daniel 9:10, “And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them. [11] Yea, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host, and by him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was cast down. [12] And an host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression, and it cast down the truth to the ground; and it practiced [continued], and prospered.” Now it says the “stars of heaven,” cast these stars of heaven, an image which reappears in Revelation, everybody says Revelation is hard, yeah, but all you have to do is just read the rest of the Bible where these images are defined, and fortunately in this chapter we know that the stars are because all we have to do is check with the angel and ask him hey, what are the stars. Oh, the stars, I’ll tell you: Daniel 8:24, “And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power; and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practice [continue], and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people,” Israel. So, who are the stars that he cast down? The regenerate born again Jews, they will be cast down.

As we continue looking at verse 10 we find that he waxes great, even to the host of heaven, that would be the army or the nation of Israel, which again shows that the nation has been restored. Verse 11 says, “he magnified himself even to the prince of the host,” now what would the prince of the host be in verse 11? You think of a Jewish leader, but if you keep on looking in verse 11 you see it can’t be a Jewish leader because it says, “and from him” literally, “the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was cast down.” Now that sanctuary has to be the temple in Jerusalem and the temple in Jerusalem isn’t some human’s temple. So the word “his” must be God’s. So the “prince of the host” here is actually Jesus Christ. It is Yahweh and as we know Jesus is God, and He is always called the prince of the armies of the Lord, the captain of the armies of the Lord in the Old Testament, and here’s a preincarnate title of Christ, “the prince of the host of the stars,” that is, He is the head of the nations. Daniel 9:11, “And from Him,” from Christ, “the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of Christ’s sanctuary was cast down,” you can see what kind of a monster this person is.

Daniel 9:12, “And a host was given him, against the daily sacrifice by reason of transgression,” so verse 12 tells us something else; it tells us that God’s plan is to give this horrible person power because it says “of transgression.” Now we’ve got a lot of details, let’s summarize what we’ve got so far about this man. We’re going to use these later on to solve the interpretation problem.

The first point about this man: he is going to come out of Alexander’s empire, that’s the first thing we know because the horn comes out of him, verse 9. He comes out of Alexander’s empire.

The second thing we know from verse 10 is that he is going to persecute severely the Jewish nation. He is going to persecute the Jewish nation.

A third thing we know from verse 11, is that he is going to concentrate his assault against the religious foundation of the Jews. He is going to attack the very religious foundation and faith of the Jew. That’s the third characteristic of this person in history. We’re going to see why, Antiochus told us in history why he did this; it’s very clear why Antiochus did this, and when I give you this you can easily see how using Antiochus’ reasoning any politician today could do exactly the same thing. It’s so moral, it’s so nice sounding, it just sweeps you off your feet with the loftiness of his great ideal and motivation for having to just do away with this Jewish problem and why he was right and the Jewish people were wrong; it sounds so convincing.

The fourth thing we know about this from verse 12 is that the persecution is due to some transgression the Jews themselves are guilty of, “the transgression,” so the Jewish people themselves are guilty of some transgression that allows God to let this beast have free reign over them.

Now Daniel 8:13-14, “Then I heard one holy one,” in the Hebrew it’s kadesh, we don’t know whether it’s a believer or an angel but “I heard one saint speaking, and another saint said unto that certain saint which spoke,” so while Daniel is watching this, he’s got his eyes on this picture, all of a sudden he notices hey, besides the angel that’s running the projector there are two more angels in the room, they’re carrying on a conversation while the picture is going on. For a while his eyes are distracted from the vision and he listens to what these angels are talking about and he hears these angels talking to each other, and one asked the other one, “How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, and the transgression of desolation, to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot? [14] And he said unto me,” so the second angel that is carrying on this conversation, they’re talking to each other in this room, Daniel looks over to them and apparently the angels as they talk they see Daniel is turned to look at them, and so one angel asks the other one, how long is this going to be? And the angel that’s talking to him turns over, so he answers the question of one angel, but he also answers it to Daniel, and he makes sure Daniel hears this answer. “And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” And in the Hebrew it reads this way: “Unto two thousand three hundred evenings and days, shall then the sanctuary shall be cleansed.”

Historic footnote at this point, this is one of those places where those of you who always want to make days into ages in Genesis show the problem because here we’ve got the same expression used in Genesis. And there was evening, the Jewish day begins with evening, there was ‘ereb and boqer, evening and morning, day one. ‘ereb boqer, evening and morning, day two; and everybody wants to make those ages, it is the most literal expression you can get in the Hebrew language for a literal day. So just as in Genesis, so here, these have to be literal days. In other words, we’re talking about a period of approximately seven years that this is going to go on.

Now there has been a group in history that tried to have not a day/age theory but a day/year theory. It was the Seventy Day Adventists, who on the basis of verse 14, predicted Christ’s return in 1844. This was the verse that they used to say Christ was coming back. Needless to say the day/year interpretation didn’t work because these are not meant to be years, these are meant to be days and it has been fulfilled; we know history. “Two thousand three hundred days” or about seven years.

Now there are other parts of this passage we want to look at before we close. Let’s look at Daniel 8:15-16 quickly, let you see what Daniel is thinking about, get introduced to the world of angels. “And it came to pass, when I, even I Daniel, had seen the vision, and sought for the meaning, then, behold, there stood before me as the appearance of a man. [16] And I heard a man’s voice between the banks of Ulai, which called,” we don’t know who this was but many commentators suspect this is Christ preincarnate, because he’s right by the river, he sees the image of a man but the voice is coming out of the water, from within the water it says, and the voice says, “and said, Gabriel, make this man to understand the vision.” Do you know what Gabriel means; you see the “el” on the end, that’s God in Hebrew, and Geber, from which we get Gabriel, the first part of that, means male or hero, or a warrior. So we have God is the warrior, Gabriel, “make this man to understand the vision.” By the way, this is the only one of two angels with names in the Bible. Extra Biblical tradition has dozens of the angels with their names; the Bible is very careful because God doesn’t want us to worship angels, but this is a tip off that angels have names just like you do. You know the two names in the Bible for angels, one is Michael and the other is Gabriel. And here Gabriel is an angel that is sent as a communications man.

Daniel 8:17, “So he came near where I stood: and when he came, I was afraid, and fell upon my face: but he said unto me, Understand, O son of man: for at the time of the end shall be the vision.” Notice that phrase in verse 17. Verse 18, “Now as he was speaking with me, I was in a deep sleep on my face toward the ground,” whatever it was just shocked him, “but he touched me, and set me upright.” Literally it says grabbed me. You see Gabriel reaching down grabbing Daniel by the nap of the neck, hey, would you stand up here and listen to me. So he grabbed me and he set me upright. I mean he just lifted Daniel right up off the ground; Daniel is flat on his face and Gabriel comes along and picks him up and lifts him straight up. John had the same treatment in the book of Revelation. Everywhere you see these angels they have to pick us up off the floor. “But he touched me, and set me upright. [19] And he said, Behold, I will make thee know what shall be in the end time [last end],” and this means not just the end in the sense of last end, in the sense of time, but it means like the ninth inning in a baseball game, that kind of an end, an end which fulfills it, it’s not just the end of time but it’s the completion, “the completion of the indignation, for at the time appointed the end shall be.”

Now there are two phrases that are going to cause us a lot of trouble and we’ll just introduce them this morning. The end of verse 17 and the end of verse 19 insist that this passage is fulfilled in the end time. Yet, the passage has to do with something that occurs to the Greeks. And that wasn’t the end time, so we’ve got a problem here we’re going to have to solve.

He says in Daniel 8:20, “The ram which thou saw having two horns are the kings of Media and Persia. [21] And the rough goat is the king of Greece: and the great horn that is between his eyes is the first king.” The ram is Medo-Persia; verse 21, the goat is Greece, the great horn is the king, the first king, that’s Alexander. Verse 22, “Now that being broken, whereas four stood up for it, four kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation, but not in his power.” And that’s true, the Ptolemys and Seleucids were not as strong as Alexander.

Daniel 8:23, “And in the latter time of their kingdom,” that is in Alexander and his four generals, the latter time of the Grecian era, before Rome, before the New Testament, in the latter time of their kingdom, “when the transgressors are come to the full, a king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences, shall stand up.” That means he’s very wise, he’s brilliant. [24] “And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power,” he’s going to get a little help from his friend, “and he shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practice, and shall destroy the mighty and the holy people. [25] And through his policy also he shall cause craft [deceit] to prosper in his hand,” not craft but graft but craft, that’s wisdom, this guy is a fantastic politician, “and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace shall destroy many,” not by war, by peace, human good, you watch this, we’ve got to learn, we’ve got to study find out everything we can from Antiochus Epiphanes that we may be read to see how this keeps on happening in history, over and over and over, the people that cause the greatest suffering in the world are always the peaceniks. The people for peace are always the ones that screw up. They’re the ones that ruined Vietnam; they are the ones that ruined the Belgian Congo. Thousands and thousands of blacks in Africa lost their lives because of the peaceniks in the United Nations.

It’s always the same old thing, “by peace he shall destroy many, he shall also stand up against the Prince of princes,” that’s Christ, “but he shall be broken without hand.” Now that is a cryptic statement that he will be destroyed supernaturally, without any person doing it, he will be destroyed, and then it describes Daniel’s end. [16, “And the vision of the evening and the morning which was told is true: wherefore shut thou up the vision; for it shall be for many days. [27] And I Daniel fainted, and was sick certain days; afterward I rose up, and did the king’s business; and I was astonished at the vision, but none understood it.]

So what is the lesson that at least we can draw this morning, not having solved any of the great interpretation problems yet in Daniel 8 we can draw this great truth from this, the Romans 8:28 truth. Though this monster is going to come on the scene and though he is going to run down and persecute the saints like they’ve never persecuted before in history, or ever will, his time is limited, 2300 days, he will not get away with it. The time has been decreed; no longer, not 2301 days but only 2300 days. This man will meet his doom not because of some human freedom fighter; he’ll meet his doom because of some supernatural intervention by God. The message of Daniel 8 is a message of comfort and exhortation to suffering believers. When the government machine is run by this human good monster, and it will crush you and grind you down, you can be assured our God is still sovereign, and He will demonstrate His sovereignty by ending the machine in due time.