Daniel Lesson 31

Growth of Beast-like Governments – Daniel 8

If we know our doctrine we ought to be able to spot the political schemes, movements, parties and leaders that are the most beast-like in their threat to the system. The Christian citizen ought to have discernment. Daniel 8 gives us a complete profile of this kind of thinking. We studied the near fulfillment of Daniel 8 in Antiochus Epiphanes, who from 171 BC to 164 BC led a reign of terror over Palestine. At no point in history has there ever been a man that has been selected by the Holy Spirit and picked out to be the incarnation of the spirit of antichrist as Antiochus Epiphanes. He is one of the most evil rulers of history. And yet personality wise he would have passed any popularity contest. He would have rated very high in the Gallop polls because he parted his hair in the right place and made the proper noises in front of the right groups. Antiochus Epiphanes was a master politician; he also had some skill in military leadership. He was a man who was plagued with what we would call bona fide political problems.

I’m going to recapitulate our study from last week and then we are going to expand that same study this week using three other historic illustrations so that we understand thoroughly the application of Daniel 8 to contemporary political operations. We found in Daniel 8 and its application in this period of time several characteristics of Antiochus Epiphanes. First we found out that he was an apparently innocent victim of economic, social and political pressures. He was not a man that just came off the starting block at 60 mph and decided he was going to impose his program on the citizenry. That is never the way the true beasts of history operate. They are always considered to be the innocent victim of political circumstances. That is the #1 characteristic, so don’t be misled by false sympathy to men like Antiochus Epiphanes who seem overwhelmed at their moment of history with a convergence of adversity.

Antiochus Epiphanes faced the great peace demands of the Roman Senate, he had to raise 15,000 talents of gold, in terms of contemporary currency would be in the billions of dollars, and the Romans demanded by taking hostage of his whole family that he pay those in annual installments for 12 years; if he didn’t, his son would be killed. Those were the simple Roman terms. Antiochus had to raise money; he lost his eastern provinces, he lost his western provinces, the only place he could raise the money was from the Jewish provinces, and therefore he (quote) “had to” raise taxes on the Jews. He (quote) “had to” strip the temple of its golden vessels. He “had to” suck the Jews dry of every piece of property they owned.

We also found a second characteristic of this which is another thing to watch for and this is something as some of you young people grow up and watch and work with the political picture you should be skilled at spotting this kind of argument; increasingly in our day it is being used, and it will be used with more frequency in the future, and that is Antiochus had to do away with the Jews and their religion because they were intransient, they were people who had an exclusivist religion that wouldn’t compromise with other groups. They were people that threatened the unity of the community. And because of this they were dangerous people. And so Antiochus “had to,” (quote, end quote), do away with Jews and their religion. It was a threat to the unity of their community. So watch for that; exclusivist religious claims always threaten the social engineers who would like to mishmash everyone into the same pot and people who don’t mishmash easily or who stick out, or who have a set of absolutes are always the victims of these people.

The third characteristic we learned was that such men like Antiochus Epiphanes have always touted political freedom. The word “freedom” has always been on their lips but it’s always been redefined, a freedom that would allow everything except allegiance to an absolute set of Scripture that would control every sphere of life; freedom like the Romans said they had in their Roman Empire. We have freedom in the Roman Empire the Romans said to the early Christians. We have freedom to worship Zeus, freedom to worship any god you wish except that God must be worshiped along with Caesar; now that isn’t too much to ask of you people, you’re free to go home and worship what you want to in your homes, all we ask is that you say that Caesar is Deus et Dominus, God and Lord; that’s all we ask, a simply political demand to keep unity in the nation, and if you can’t grant us that then you’ll be exterminated but we have political freedom.

That’s the freedom of the Antiochus Epiphanes of the world; it always will be the freedom of the Antiochus Epiphanes of the world because people do not understand the doctrine of the separation of church and state. We have legislators who know nothing of the doctrine of the separation of church and state; they think the doctrine of the separation of church and state says that the state has the right to grant religious tolerance to all religions. That is not the doctrine of the separation of church and state; the doctrine of the separation of church and state says the state doesn’t even have the power to say to the church that is has freedom because it’s not the state’s authority to give the freedom, since the state never had it in the first place. That’s the proper articulation of the doctrine of the separation of church and state and it’s that doctrine that no pragmatic politician on the scene today would ever believe. If you pinned him down he’d have to come up with a no; to believe that would be to threaten social engineers.

Finally we found out a fourth characteristic of Antiochus Epiphanes is that such a collision will always result in a massive confrontation between believers and the unbelieving government; it always has and always will. And believers who do not forecast properly, who do not plan ahead, who do not see the handwriting on the wall when it’s clear, then they are doomed to suffer that kind of persecution. Every time in history we have had a social engineer or social benefactor like Antiochus Epiphanes, like Caesar Augustus, like all of the communists, we have always had people that try to arrange society but in the final analysis are compelled to do away with the Christian community because that’s the only group of people they can’t get to worship Caesar. So we learn a lot about political wisdom from Antiochus Epiphanes. Hopefully we won’t have to apply those lessons in our immediate future but be wise.

I’m going to turn to one of the great political passages that deal with this principle; we’ll study that passage and go on to cite three historical illustrations of the same kind of thinking that led to the rise of Antiochus Epiphanes; the same kind of thinking that you see in the American electorate today. Turn to 1 Samuel 8, this is the ground document of political thought in the Bible. People always say that politics has nothing to do with religion; politics has everything to do with religion. People who separate politics and religion are making a religious claim by so doing. There is a separation of church and state, yes, but there is no separation of doctrine from politics. The Church as an organization has no business operating in the political sphere but Christians who know doctrine do. That’s the difference. We do not operate as Christians, we operate as citizens but when we operate as citizens we apply God’s Word and if people don’t like it they can lump it. But the attitude is that we are going to apply God’s Word and if some loud mouthed minority doesn’t like it, that’s too bad because we also are a minority and we are going to have our say too.

1 Samuel 8:10, this is the major warning against power of government that was given by the prophet Samuel in his day. This was true in 1000 BC and the 30 centuries of history that have come and gone since this passage was written has not disproved the words of Samuel. Originally these words were directed against the monarchy of Israel but in principle they apply to every political system…every political system. They had a fantastic freedom up till 1 Samuel 8; they had one of the most perfect systems of government the world has ever seen. They had what was called a theocracy, not a democracy, a theocracy. A theocracy is God rules, not man, and therefore they had freedom. Democracy does not give freedom; theocracy gives freedom because God is the One who defines what freedom is in the first place.

Theocracy, what did it give? First of all it gave a capitalist system. The Bible grounds all political freedom comes from economic freedom. Proof: to establish political freedom in Israel in the Old Testament God gave a capital investment to every Jewish family in the form of land. Therefore that land could not be taken away forever. We will see an incident where the power of the state tried to confiscate property from the private citizen and was stopped by God. God does not want decapitalization; capitalization, the acquiring of savings and assets in the form of property is God’s basis of freedom, and wherever you have a system that destroys capital, whether it is government sponsored inflation as we have today, or whether it’s a communist takeover such as happened in Vietnam, you have the destruction of freedom because you have the destruction of private capital.

There’s no way of getting away from capitalism because it’s God’s will for the first divine institution. Here’s what happens; communists say we do away with capitalism; capitalism is the source of all suffering and evil. What they have failed to see is that communism hasn’t done away with capitalism at all, it’s just shifted the capital. Here you have a group of people who own property, who have gold and silver assets, stocks, bonds, investments; they have freedom because of their material possessions and because of their material possessions they are called capitalists. Communism comes along and says that’s the source of all problems in the world, we’ll do away with capitalism. But the communists have to live in God’s world after all because it was Jesus Christ, not Karl Marx that created, and since that is correct it means that all they can do is not do away with capital, they can only shift the capital. So they say everybody give your capital to us. Have you done away with capitalism? You have not; you have simply shifted the capital from the hands of private citizens into the hands of the state. Now how has the freedom? The bureaucrats that control the capital. Who’s lost their freedom? The citizens who lost their capital. So wherever you have political workings you will have this concept—economic freedom. And they had economic freedom in the nation Israel and it was their economic freedom that gave them their political freedom.

Now look at 1 Samuel 8:10, “And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people that asked of him a king.” They want centralized government. They said our social problems are so great we can’t depend upon the free society any more; it is a failure, it hasn’t stopped the Philistines from invading our land, we need a more powerful government; we need the social engineers and bureaucrats to tell us what to do. We need Big Brother; in those days they called Big Brother a king, so Big Brother took the form of a monarchy. Now the reason they were having suffering was because they had cut the base; the base is the Word of God. The Word of God is your base and out here you gain the assets; you have a free market and a number of other assets; those assets then form the base for your political freedom. The free market is the source of all freedom WITH the Word of God operating. But in these dark ages of Israel the Word of God had been rejected by the population because of negative volition; because of negative volition the blessings that would only work when the Word of God was applied, they too failed. The free market won’t work unless you have a basic morality in operation. You can’t give and exchange goods without honesty in the market place. That presupposes a general morality which presupposes common grace. When the free market fails it is not because the free market fails; the free market fails because people fail, they fail to submit themselves to the Word of God. The problem is rejection of the Word of God; that was the problem here, and what happened in verse 10? Same thing that’s happening now, we’ve got all these problems but they’re never traced to a rejection of the Word; they’re always traced to the secondary levels. Now watch what happens.

They want a king so Samuel says okay; you’re going to get a king. You’ve rejected the Word so now Big Brother is going to come in and Samuel said I’ll tell you what Big Brother is going to look like; 1 Samuel 8:11, “And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.” That would include the military establishment but also the bureaucrat establishment, and there’s lots of ways Big Brothers can take your sons, he doesn’t have to draft them, he can manipulate the job market so that no one can get a job except they go with the government; that’s taking your sons too. Verse 12, “And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. [13] And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.” So you have the development of a massive bureaucracy; people that are wasting their labor in unproductive directions under the management of Big Brother.

1 Samuel 8:14, “And he will take your fields, and your vineyards,” there’s the process of decapitalization, the shifting of riches and assets from the hands of private citizens into the hands of the bureaucrats. This can be done by direct confiscation through taxes; it also can be done by indirect confiscation through inflation, either way the result is the same, he has taken your fields, “and your vineyards, and your olive yards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.” That’s the principle of progressive decapitalization, the best of them are taken, just like in this country the most productive people are the most penalized people. The more you make the more you’re taxed; in Israel it didn’t operate that way. In the Old Testament it was a flat rate of taxation across the board and whether you made $5 or $5000 it didn’t make any difference, 10% was the income tax of Israel. God knows what He’s doing and God realized ahead of time that was the most equitable form of taxation and that was what was done in the Old Testament.

1 Samuel 8:16, “And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. [16] And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work,” non-productive, non-free enterprise work, “his work,” government work. [17] “He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.” Now in the Scripture, understand this because it’s hard to apply this if you don’t, in the Scripture slavery means you are producing for someone else, it doesn’t mean the picture of the black slave on the southern plantation. That’s the concept of American type of slavery. Wrong; the slavery we had in this country was far worse physically than the slavery they had in the ancient world. This kind of slavery was a slavery in which many of us are slaves by this definition, because this definition says you are a slave to whoever it is that you owe money too. People in debt for this, for that, and you’re making payments. The Scripture says to the degree that you make your monthly payments to pay financial debt, to that degree you are a slave. That is the Biblical definition of slavery; it is linked one to one with economic means of production. If you’re heavily in debt the Scripture calls you a slave. Fundy’s say do you believe in Jesus as your Savior and as your redeemer, forgetting what the word “redeemed” mean? One who gives you economic freedom. We walk around saying Jesus is our redeemer, never realizing that spiritual truth is based on a prior truth, economic freedom. Redemption from Egypt primarily was economic; the Jews were slaves because they had no capital. What happened when God took the Jews out of Egypt? He gave them capital; the Egyptians gave them jewelry, gold, silver, they walked off with tons of gold from Egypt; that was redemption; they did not have debt. Man was not made to be a slave to the system.

Samuel continues and the key point is 1 Samuel 8:18, and this is the pathetic thing and it shows that people reap what they sow in history. “And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen” for yourself would be a more accurate way of translating it. In other words Big Brother’s burdens are going to become so great, you’re going to become so economically indebted, that you’re going to cry out. That’s what he is talking about in every day life, it’s not some high theoretical thing off in the wild blue. And God says “and the LORD will not hear you in that day.” Now why? Because God says you made the choice, that was your choice, you wanted to violate the principles of the Word. God means what He says. You can see by verse 19, “Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us; [20] That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles”

And “nevertheless” is the word that can be written over three great men of ancient Israelite politics. Turn to 1 Kings 10, Solomon; in many ways Solomon was the greatest leader Israel ever had; in many other ways he was a disaster. But keep in mind the principles we are seeing, the danger of turning the fourth divine institution into a monster. Again, by way of review, these divine institutions are spheres of operation in every day social life. I didn’t even invent the term; the man who first set this forth was the Prime Minister of Holland who was a great Christian at the turn of the century; Abraham Kuyper. He was a Bible student; he wrote the classic work on the Holy Spirit, that was his specialty in theology. He taught this under the doctrine of sphere sovereignty and he said that the Scripture outline, there are certain segments and spheres that are relatively autonomous to themselves. And all social evil, all social suffering comes because these spheres are not in balance. So Kuyper’s critique of social evil, of economic losses, of all sorts of all problems in society came about because of the imbalance of these spheres. Translated another way what he said was that all social upheaval and sorrow come about by transgressing the modes of operation that the Word of God sets up for society.

So we have the first divine institution revolving responsibility, the individual responsibility; that is called #1 because the other divine institution’s can’t function if that drops; if you have a mass of people who will not accept responsibility the other divine institution’s cannot work; there is no way they can work. And you cannot have responsibility unless you have authority. The second divine institution is marriage; the third is family, and family is the place where authority begins. If you keep all these spheres in balance you have a minimum of problems in a fallen world. The fourth divine institution is the closest God-like institution of them all because it was the fourth divine institution that gave man the power of making law and judging. It was the delegation of force into the hands of man; it was a device of coping with the results of the fall. However, beginning with the trend that Samuel is talking about, here with Solomon, later with a few other men, what always happens is that instead of this nicely balanced sphere here is what get finally. The fourth divine institution becomes bigger and bigger and bigger until it encompasses everything. Communism is the logical result of this kind of program. The only difference between the communist and the average western politician is that the communist says what he’s doing and the western man doesn’t but they’re both doing basically the same thing by making the state God over all.

Solomon did this in 1 Kings 10:14, we have some of the things he did. To help in understanding these three examples let’s set up three categories; we’ll call all three religion. One we’ll call the state religion or public religion; the other we’ll call prophetic religion or Biblical religion, and we’ll call the third one pagan religion. All men are religious, even the atheist makes religious claims; the statement that there is no God is one of the greatest religious statements ever made. So all men are in one of these three camps, and to study a political system or state and to critique these men you can use these three categories as tools to measure what’s happening here, why are we having all this problem. Keep in mind that the state or public religion is the popular view, every day man in the street view. And it is always a mixture of number two and three; maybe 50% number three and 50% number two, or 10$ number 2 and 90% number three, it’s always a mix. So what we have to do is critique the public religion and find out what percent influence comes from the Biblical prophetic side and how much comes from the pagan side. It’s always that mix.

Now up to the time of Solomon you had a state religion that was kind of a messy prophetic religion; remember when you read the Scripture you’re reading history through the eyes of men in number 2; you’re reading these men’s view of history, not the average public person’s view of history in that day. But watch what Solomon did to the state religion and how he imported pagan elements, increased the percent from the pagan side. And it was all done innocently.

For example, 1 Kings 10:14, “Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and six talents of gold.” Kind of interesting, the books read 666 on them. And this turns out to be if we take one talent equal to 50 pounds and take gold at its current value, around $170 an ounce, we take 532,800 ounces a year, which comes out to 90 million dollars in gold this man got every year. 90 million in gold, he’d have the people in Fort Knox jealous. You didn’t pay your taxes with checks, you paid him with gold. Solomon wanted gold. This is his income so it shows you the tremendous wealth he had. Look at verse 21, “And all king Solomon’s drinking vessels were of gold, and all the vessels of the house of the forest of Lebanon were of pure gold; none were of silver: it was nothing accounted of in the days of Solomon.” In other words they had so much gold why bother with silver. Just so that we don’t miss the point, verse 27, “And the king made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones,” who needs silver, you can go out and pick a rock up off the street. Now the problem is this is an idiomatic expression, but there’s no way of interpreting it except that the price of silver plummeted because the price of gold increased. Silver was not in great demand, everybody had it. It’s just phenomenal the wealth that this man had.

Now here’s the point, Solomon has a problem. Solomon says I want this economic prosperity to continue, so how do I get economic prosperity? Solomon says, as the author of Proverbs, God wants me to subdue the earth wisely, so I have to sit here and figure out principles of investment, principles I can use to run this nation so I can continue economic prosperity. How do I do that? Solomon came up with a plan, it sounds so modern it’s spooky. His plan was that what we have to do to increase domestic economic prosperity is increase world trade and decrease the military threat. If I decrease the military threat I have a decreased defense budget and I have that much more money I can spend in other areas. If I increase world trade I have a greater exchange of goods, due to division of labor, scarcity of resources, and I have economic prosperity.

How is Solomon, in order to gain this economic prosperity, how is he going to go about it? He went about it by increasing his state department to the point where he had negotiating teams for every country of the world, and he made tremendous international treaties. So the means for it was treaties; treaties with every nation under the sun. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. And these deals were sealed in marriage. In that day they were realistic. Every time Solomon made a treaty he had to pick up an extra wife that went along with it. What was the deal? Here’s the deal. In the ancient world they knew they were living in an autonomous world; one nation here, one nation here, there was no world government over them both, so how do you make documents secure. You don’t make them by signing a document. Does that make the document secure? No, Pharaoh says I don’t care if you sign a document, give me one of your daughters, I’ll marry here, I’ll give you one of my daughters and you marry her, now you will keep the treaty. In other words this was a way of securing the treaty by an international marriage that went along with the treaty. This shouldn’t seem unusual, if you know the history of Europe you know the intermarriage that went on between the Hapsburgs, the House of Windsor and all the rest of the royal families of Europe. This went on. People from one nation basically do not trust people of the other nation so the way you maintain agreements is through intermarriage. If there is a family mix then we have security.

Do you know why men act this way in history; historians record this but they never say why is it that nation after nation after nation always do this. Because the fourth divine institution comes after the third and when men get spooked by what’s happening in the area of politics there’s something in their own soul that goes back to some more fundamental institution, and that’s the third and the second. And so under the pressure of political history men have always reverted back to the second and third institution; there’s where our real security is. This is why these royal marriages have been promoted down through history.

1 Kings 11:1, Solomon’s gimmick was going to be by international treaty supported by royal intermarriage. “But King Solomon loved many strange [foreign] women; in addition to the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites. [2] And of the nations concerning which the LORD said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go in to them,” why? “Neither shall they come in unto you,” because God told them what to do and He told them why they should not do this, because “surely they will turn away your heart after their gods. Solomon clave unto these [women] in love.” He had 700, he had quite a collection.

1 Kings 11:4, “It came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God,” and so on. Verse 7, “Then did Solomon build a high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon. [8] Likewise did he for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and sacrificed unto their gods.” These were unconverted women. The Bible is not against the intermarriage of these particular groups of people per se, the book of Ruth is written to straighten us out there; you could marry a Gentile woman if the Gentile woman would first confess Jehovah as her Savior. Under that condition okay, but if she didn’t and she maintained her allegiance to her own pagan deity, not okay.

Now let’s go back to the three religions to see what Solomon had done to transform his state. You have the state religion; you have the pagan religion, you have the prophetic religion. What Solomon did by marrying these girls was to allow their pagan elements to come into the public state religion. He deluded the state religion by these marriages of convenience with the result that the national structure was destroyed.

Now we have to critique Solomon and say what went wrong and why did it go wrong? Solomon had sought economic prosperity; here’s what he gained back. As a result of these marriages he gained enemies, kingdoms began to defect in his own day. 1 Kings 11:14, “And the LORD stirred up an adversary unto Solomon, Hadad the Edomite; he was the king’s seed in Edom.” Do you know where Edom is? Right next door to Solomon’s key seaport. Here’s the Sinai, here’s the Jordan River, Nile delta over here, right here Solomon had his key seaport for his world place. Of all places to have an enemy, five miles away from his sea port. So did Solomon gain security? He picked up an enemy right next door to his key seaport.

Did Solomon gain prosperity? The man that he made the treaty to and the girl that he first married was an Egyptian princess, daughter of Pharaoh. Do you know who was his enemy? Right after Solomon died the entire country was broken up in civil war because of an invasion and political pressure from the Pharaoh. He really scored on that one.

Why did he not get what he thought he was going to get with all the deals? The reason he didn’t was he failed to raise one question and answer it correctly. What is the basic question that ought to have been asked? What was it that Solomon wanted? Economic blessing. Why did he want it? Because he already had the fore fruits of economic blessing, he saw all the gold, all the silver, this is great this, I like this, I’d like some more but he failed to ask one question: where did the initial blessing come from? God gave it to him. So in his equation he forgot a factor. On one side of the equation ought to have been these initial political economic and social blessings came because of the grace of God, but when he went to the other side of the equation to try to work out what he was going to do in the future, he dropped the factor. He came over here and said now what I’ve got to do is manipulate this term, this term, this term and he forgot completely the major term on the other side of the equation, which was God’s grace. He dropped that out of his reasoning completely, he became totally disoriented to grace and tried works to manipulate the situation to bring about this thing that he lusted after. And what happened? The equation worked, God’s grace is necessary, the whole thing came down.

A second illustration, we’ll drop one in the interest of time. Come to Ahab; 1 Kings 18, this is a king years, years later but another outstanding illustration of the same principle we see with Antiochus Epiphanes. You could say Ahab had a problem like Solomon. Here was Solomon, frustrated with all that gold, needing a way to continue the prosperity, had to come up with some solution. Now we have Ahab, he’s got a problem. Here’s his problem, he married Jezebel, who happened to be the daughter, of all things, of the leading Baalist of the ancient world. This guy didn’t make a mistake, he made a beauty, instead of just marrying any pagan girl, he married a girl that was trained from childhood to be a fanatic for her dad’s religion. Ethbael was the king and priest of Tyre, and he had several daughters, one of which was Jezebel. And this was the girl that Ahab got his eyes on and finally married. So that was his first problem, married to a pagan religious fanatic that was going to get her way.

The second problem Ahab had was he had fantastic drought, agricultural reversals like crazy throughout his administration. Crops failed, the cisterns dried up that they stored rain water in, couldn’t irrigate, nothing went right, no production, people starving, unrest, all that. Then to top it off he had the Syrians pressing down from the northeast. He had all these problems that came in on him. He realized that the northern religion, the state religion of the north, had already been seriously diluted. The pagan elements had come in very rapidly, had deluded it, the sin of Jeroboam, which is the sin of a state religion conceived after the manner of men; you have Ahab thinking look, I’ve got disunity in my nation, we’ve got to pull together to solve these problems, I can’t perpetually have this disunity that’s occurring. Where was disunity occurring? From the other side: prophets. No matter what Ahab did he just couldn’t get the pagans and the prophets together, to hold together to solve these problems.

So he said these people just won’t work together. His resentment comes out in many passages. Look at 1 Kings 18:4, it shows the gimmicks that he and his wife thought up to solve a problem. “Obadiah took an hundred prophets, and hid them by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water,” when Jezebel cut off the prophets. Evidently the administration decided, just like Antiochus Epiphanes, that the people who stick with doctrine have got to go. Everybody else we can manipulate except those darned people with their doctrine. And because those stubborn people with their doctrine can’t be manipulated by the political machine, we get rid of those people; we pick them out as a special target. So there you have an official policy.

But in 1 Kings 18:17 it shows you his thinking that was behind the policy, “And it came to pass, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto him, Art thou he who troubles Israel?” I like his cute reply, verse 18, “I have not troubled Israel; but you, and your father’s house, [in that you have forsaken the commandments of the LORD, and have followed Baalim.]” So you can obviously see that relations weren’t too sharp with the prophets. We could show other numerous texts, 1 Kings 20:35, we have a prophet arguing that Ahab is going to meet his death.

So we go on and build up the tension and then the real collision hits with chapter 21. The policy has been made official; those people with Bible doctrine are going to go. So to show what happens Ahab does two things. He installs Baalism as the official state religion, there’s no more contests now, not between the pagan and the prophetic, now the state religion is the pagan religion by order of the government. Exactly what Antiochus did; same lesson occurs over and over. That’s what the Caesars did, that’s why the Christians had all their problems; this is a lesson that is going to occur over and over and over and over again in history; we’re seeing the same thing play right out in front of our face today.

All right, Baalism; beyond Baalism we have state power. Let’s look at the state power, 1 Kings 1:21, “And it came to pass after these things that Naboth, the Jezreelite, had a vineyard,” private property, “which was in Jezreel, close to the palace of Ahab, king of Samaria. [2] And Ahab spoke unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs,” so the state appeals to the private citizen. Baalism has already come in, and the state religion; the reason being Baal is a fertility god, maybe he can get us out of the famine problem. But the government has become bigger and bigger and bigger, so Naboth is given an offer. “Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs because it is near unto my house, and I will give thee a better vineyard than it,” so the government proposes confiscation of private property with just compensation. Verse 3, “And Naboth said to Ahab, The LORD forbid me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto you.” Therefore, to which divine institution does private property belong? The first and third, family and individual, or government. Answered by the Bible, family and individual citizen. The government has a right to very limited areas of property and it cannot confiscate according to God’s Word. Now people do that all the time now but this is the ideal.

Verse 4, “Ahab came into his house heavy and displeased because of the word which Naboth, the Jezreelite spoke unto him.” But Jezebel came to him, verse 5, “and said unto him, Why is your spirit so sad,” see Ahab was a depressed man, a leader under tremendous pressure. [6] “And he said unto her, Because I spoke unto Naboth, the Jezreelite, and said unto him, Give me thy vineyard for money or else,” and he wouldn’t give it to me. And to make a long story short Jezebel figures out a gimmick, we’re going to get the land, we’re going to kill Naboth. Verse 15, here is God’s answer. “And it came to pass, when Jezebel heard that Naboth was stoned, and was dead, that Jezebel said to Ahab, Arise, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth, the Jezreelite, which he refused to give thee for money; for Naboth is not alive, but dead. [16] And it came to pass, when Ahab heard that Naboth was dead, that Ahab rose up to go down to the vineyard of Naboth.” Then [17] “the word of the LORD came to Elijah, [18] Arise, go down and meet Ahab,” and it goes on and it describes how he predicts the end of that administration. They violated private property.

Now what’s the lesson of all this? What can we say is basically the lesson? We saw Antiochus Epiphanes, we see it in Caesar Augustus, we have seen it with Solomon, with Ahab, and Samuel predicted it. What happens every time to cause this problem? It’s the same thing over and over and over and over again. The principle is this: you start with God’s blessing; you fail to give thanks for those blessings and recognize the grace factor. Therefore to get the same blessings that you have, perpetuate them and increase them, you deny their source. You try an idolatrous source because your trust now shifts from orientation to grace to orientation to works and when you shift your trust orientation and orient toward an idol, which is just a figment of your imagination, you start this tremendous defamation, all the divine institution’s get screwed up, one takes over the other, it’s always the state that expands in this process, one thing leads to another and in the final analysis, because God’s Word is God’s Word, you will not get what you want. That’s the lesson idolatry. Men fail to trust, it’s that simple. So what is the lesson behind Antiochus, that fierce beast that slaughtered believers? Was he a monster? Was he kind of a Frankenstein? Not at all. He was just simply a man in a high place that refused to trust God’s Word.