Daniel Lesson 43

Angelic Mediation – Daniel 10:10-13

We are now in the last section of the book of Daniel; these last three chapters together form the climax to the book. The book of Daniel shows a progress over Daniel’s life; seventy years of progress, all the way from interpreting the dream and vision of a Gentile king down to his personal encounter with the Lord Jesus Christ. Last week we left Daniel concerned about Israel’s last two years of frustration in the land. They had returned under the decree of Cyrus, under the political sponsorship of the Medes and the Persians. No sooner had the remnant returned to the land but that resistance began. And Daniel is perplexed because not only is the blessing not going to come for yet 490 years plus but also when the Jews return to the land they can’t even do a simple project like building the temple without having a massive amount of resistance, troublemakers, people who always reject the Word of God, always trying to work around little schemes to prevent its being taught.

So the message that we have here, lest we lose the forest for the trees, the message is that of wisdom, wisdom toward life and wisdom in the middle of a persistent resistance against your personal sanctification. When you seek doctrine, you seek to apply it and it seems like the more you apply it the more resistance there is, then this book is for you because Daniel faces precisely the same point. The more the Word of God is honored, the more that it goes forth, the more that people seek to apply it, the more static, the more resistance they receive. In particular their petition and petition and petition for God to do something and God seems to delay and delay and delay. And they’re drawing the unwarranted conclusion, and this is a major conclusion we all tend to draw, is that God’s delay in answering prayer proves God’s inattention to our needs.

Daniel was troubled with this, Lord, are you really concerned for our needs, do You really have us on your heart? And if You have us on your heart, then Lord, why is it that when we petition and petition and petition the answers are so slow in coming. So Daniel is going to give an answer and in Daniel 10, for the first time in the progress of revelation, Jesus Christ gives, as the author of history, the answer why, although God is not inattentive, why delayed answers to petition comes so frequently. Remember this is the period of the rise of the kingdom of man. From 586 BC and the fall of the kingdom of God in the Old Testament, all the way down to the return of Jesus Christ is a period known as the kingdom of man, or as Jesus Christ called it, His terms was “the times of the Gentiles.” This is when political hegemony is centered in the Gentiles, not in Israel. If there exists an Israeli state it exists only by Gentile permission. This is the shape of history from the fall in 586 BC to the return of Jesus Christ. And during this period of history certain things happen.

In Daniel 10 we are given various doctrines that can be applied to that kind of situation; when we petition, petition, petition and the answers are slow, slow, slow in coming. And when it looks like the kingdom of man goes on and will crush us, then what do we do? Daniel has to do with the event of the exile. We are working with the exile, and as with the exile so also with the various other events of history, there are doctrines to be associated with that event. With the exile we have the doctrine of faith; faith technique applied over a long range, which the Bible calls hope, to be distinguished from what most people mean when they use that word hope; we do not mean what they mean. Hope in the Scripture means the day in day out persistent use, stubborn use, of the faith technique, long range faith. The exile is a picture of people using long range faith, the development of the faith technique.

We have God, the doctrine of God and His attributes also revealed in the events of the exile, two attributes of God in particular, God in His sovereignty who controls all the nations in His hands; God who is in back of history, that chance does not rule, that God has not forgotten, God is not impotent, God reigns in history and He has a plan, a purpose and a path. And that doctrine of the sovereign attribute of God is important for you as a believer when you face sustained pressures because your temptation is to flake out in your personal trust in God’s sovereign purposes. And believers flake out all the time because they are unable to continue trusting beyond two minutes; if we have more than two minutes pressure we can’t take it. The Word of God is designed to train your soul so you will be able to take it, so you will be able to endure, so you can go on and on and on and on, trusting without getting bumped out of fellowship by your disbelief. God’s sovereignty!

Another attribute that comes in here that is being taught through the period of the exile is God’s grace. God is being gracious to all men everywhere by letting history go on. If God really responded to our petitions to end it all, then millions and millions and millions of people would die without Jesus Christ. And because God loves the human race, God allows history to go on, working it out so that the people who are the elect ones will believer, with no coercion to their volition, but they will be given the opportunity to believer. Had God terminated history then these people would die and go to hell. Because God loves man and He is gracious He keeps history going. So we learn from the period of the exile about the long range use of faith, about the basis of that long range use of faith in God’s sovereignty, and in His grace. And then we also learned about the chastening function in sanctification; we learned about the enemies of sanctification and how they are constantly at work to oppose our spiritual progress. Those are three central truths that are emphasized again and again trough the exile period.

Now all during this kingdom of man the believer faces tremendous pressure in all five of the divine institutions. We want to understand the kinds of pressures, the pressures are not just on believers behind the iron curtain, they are on you and you are foolish if you don’t see where these pressures are being applied to your soul. Satan is a genius and his object is to knock you out of the ball game. And he’ll do it in all sorts of ways. One of the ways he has is to maintain a constant pressure on all five of the divine institutions. Take the fifth divine institution, the problem of the international struggle among countries and because Satan is constantly stirring up wars, as Isaiah 14 says, it means that people have to sacrifice property and lives to maintain a strong defense and safety in Satan’s world, the Nehemiah 4:14 principle of the just war. So Satan causes us sacrifice and suffering by constantly stirring it up and we have unbelievers who can’t take this. That’s what’s wrong with our country today; people who cannot trust the Lord and over a long time period give up and they want us to disarm; they want to cave in to the fifth divine institution type pressures. And it requires stubborn believing citizens who have applied the Word of God and say no, we are going to have freedom and we will kill if necessary to keep that freedom.

Satan maintains pressure on us through the fourth divine institution, the judicial system. We have people inside the judicial system who are clods and the system works in spite of the clods that are in it, as in all other areas, not to single out the judicial system, all society has its clods. But the judicial system becomes sensitive because it’s a divine institution. And so we have juries who have maudlin sentimentalists on them who will not convict men after police have arrested someone after he has been brought before trial by jury, we have these people let go because the criminal is more important in the eyes of the jury than the victim of the crime; the victim is a totally meaningless person, so juries let people off. We have a court system with human viewpoint concepts of law grounded on social good rather than the Word of God. We have a penal system grounded upon jail instead of corporeal punishment, capital punishment and restitution, the three Biblical means of penal systems. So Satan is working corruption into the fourth divine institution and we must resist it.

The way to cop out of the fifth divine institution is to go to passivism and disarmament; the way to cop out of the fourth divine institution is terminate all citizenship involvement, have your own little fortress at home, don’t get involved as a citizen, never vote, never inform yourself on issues because it’s Satan’s world anyway so why fight it, that concept. That’s just passive retreat; just like you must maintain a firm military you must maintain a firm citizenship.

The third divine institution, the family; Satan maintains pressure on us here through the world system to destroy authority and particularly to destroy the concept of accumulated capital. It’s a very interesting verse, lest someone think we’ve drifted away from the text. Turn to 2 Corinthians 12:14 you’ll see one of the verses that completely attacks how Satan wants to change family life today. Most of the systems, such as social security, are grounded on the principle that the future children will pay for their aged parents, and yet in 1 Corinthians 12:14b what do you read? “…for the children ought not to lay up for the parents but the parents for the children.” Now either you believe that’s the Word of God or not, but if you do believe that is the Word of God then obviously modern social security is the wrong concept the way it’s currently set up because parents are not laying up for children; children are laying up for parents. In fact, grandchildren are laying up for grandparents; great great grandchildren will be laying up for great great grandparents under the existing system and again it’s a satanic distortion through human viewpoint politicians to break down the third divine institution. Other ways the third divine institution is being broken down is through the concept of inheritance tax, to prevent the accumulation of capital in the family. All the tax structures in the United States are designed to smash family wealth. Wealth is not a crime; it is the misuse of wealth that is the crime.

The second divine institution is also under assault. The second divine institution is made difficult by all the human viewpoint concepts of what success in marriage means, of the concept that range from having a perfect ideal relationship with someone, which is impossible this side of Eden, to the hell with the whole thing. And these are two extreme views but they are satanic views promoted by certain vested interest groups right now.

Then we have the first divine institution of responsibility and free enterprise and that’s being attacked today. So we’ve just surveyed every one of the divine institutions: responsibility marriage, family, jurisprudence and international relations. We found in every one of these sectors Satan, under the kingdom of man concept, is trying to destroy these. We therefore live under the same kind of pressure situation Daniel did. And we are going to make petitions at times and those petitions are going to seem like a long, long, long time in being answered. This is all to place ourselves for the answer that Jesus Christ is now going to give Daniel. Why God, says Daniel, why are the petitions so long in being answered in the kingdom of man and during this era of history?

Daniel 10:10, Daniel has just viewed the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ is going to give Daniel a tremendous amount of information but He’s going to do it through an intermediate agency as all apocalyptic literature. If you noticed in verse 6, when he looked upon the Lord Jesus Christ, this is Jesus Christ in His preincarnate form; he heard a voice, “the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude.” He couldn’t make out, he doesn’t say he heard the words, the word for voice means the noise, so Daniel looked upon the Lord Jesus Christ and he heard Christ saying something but he couldn’t hear what the words were. Now he’s going to have all the words explained to him by what I’ll call an audio visual angel. In all the apocalyptic visions of Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah and the book of Revelation you have these audio visual angels; they run the motion picture tape and teach the people what’s going on.

So in Daniel 10:10 we have the angel prepare him for some instruction. “And, behold, an hand touched me, which set me upon my knees and upon the palms of my hands.” He’s on the ground, with his face toward the ground because he fainted physically from the awesomeness of the Theophany of Jesus Christ. And having fainted he is not in a position to learn much; you can’t learn while you’re sleeping. The angel here just grabbed him, “behold, an hand grabbed me,” and actually the word “touch” here means to hit, it’s the word to slug somebody.

Angels seem to have a great deal of joy in slugging human beings because we see this in at least two other places. Gabriel, in Daniel 8:18 when he came, he slugged him. And then Peter’s in the jail in Acts 12:7 and the angel comes in and it says “he smote him on the ribs,” it means he punched him right in the rib cage to wake him up. So the angels probably have a good time about this and they’re quite strong beings so it’s a pretty healthy blow, and this blow was so strong that it knocked Daniel up off the ground, I don’t know where he hit him but he hit him in such a way it knocked him up off the ground, set him on his hands and knees and where it says “set me upon my knees,” the Hebrew says it set me to staggering on my hands and knees. In other words, he hit Daniel so hard that Daniel literally couldn’t get up to his feet. He was kind of half knocked out wobbling around on his hands and knees. You don’t get the force but in the original language the force definitely is there.

Daniel 10:11, “And he said unto me, O Daniel, a man greatly beloved, understand the words that I speak unto thee, and stand upright: for unto thee am I now sent. And when he had spoken this word unto me, I stood trembling.” Now verse 11 continues the preparation for learning. First of all the angel encourages him, “O Daniel, a man greatly beloved,” and in the Hebrew it’s the same word we encountered before by Gabriel, it says “a man of treasures” or “treasuries.” Why is Daniel called the man of treasures? Because from God’s divine viewpoint He’s looking down at Daniel’s soul and he sees the soul of a mature believer; he sees that there is positive volition to the Word of God demonstrated by the fact that this man has taken a break from his work, he has a spiritual problem a crisis on his job and he’s taken a three week leave of absence to leave work, use up his vacation time when he could be spending it up in the resorts of the mountains, which they had up north of this area. Instead of going up there for a nice cool vacation Daniel spent it down on the hot Mesopotamian plain with the Word of God, because he had to get this issue straight in his life or he just couldn’t go on like he was.

So God looks down and he sees a treasure, one treasure in his soul, which is that tremendous determination Daniel had of positive volition to the Word of God. To God that is a treasure. He doesn’t look down and see Daniel’s high IQ or his low IQ, or his education or lack thereof. God looks down and He sees a treasure, the treasure is positive volition. He sees something else; He sees the enlightening ministry of the Holy Spirit in Daniel’s soul. He sees that Daniel, constantly over seventy years is a believer taking in the Word, learning, learning, learning, learning. Another treasury that God sees in Daniel’s soul is that He sees divine viewpoint; He sees the fact that this man has begun to understand, he has begun to pull the whole thing together. Daniel keeps after God over and over and over and over to subordinate his environment to the Word. Daniel prays over his major decisions, he asks for the illuminating ministry of the Holy Spirit to enlighten his mind to doctrinal principles that can be applied on the job, off the job, in society, by himself, wherever he is, this is a man who’s looking to subordinate the earth under his feet by the authority of the Word of God. And that is a treasury in God’s sight. He looks down at Daniel and He sees Daniel having a tremendous capacity for love because Daniel has taken in the Word of God and therefore has the capacity to love, a capacity to love God, people, and his neighbor. Daniel has this great inner capacity for. And finally, one of the things that was always interesting about Daniel was that he was an extremely happy person; he had a deep seated joy and satisfaction about his whole life, something that few men ever attain.

So this angel says now Daniel, I want to report to you. This is not the Lord Jesus Christ, by the way, the vision of Christ fades out in verse 9 and verse 10, “a hand touched me,” and the hand is one of these lesser angels that comes to him, and the lesser angel now explains what Daniel has seen before. When he saw Christ he couldn’t hear the words, now the angel is going to play it back and tell him. Daniel 10:11, “And he said unto me, O Daniel, you are a man of treasuries, God loves you,” God is attentive to you, Daniel, even though He hasn’t answered your petition, God is well aware of your trials Daniel. So the second thing the angel does before he begins to teach is he encourages.

Now the angel says “understand the words,” so the third thing that the angel does, he declares the issue of teaching and all learning is understanding, not having an experience. The angel says what I want you to do is understand, and the word here is the Hebrew word that stresses conscience and it means in the mentality of your soul to take what’s coming in here and plug it into your divine viewpoint framework, to understand it, sort it out and learn it. The angel was not interested in giving some great ecstatic experience to Daniel. The end of it all, ecstatic experience of not, the end of the whole lesson was understanding; content, content, content, that’s the goal of all learning. So he defines the objective of the lesson; to understand the content of what is taught.

“…understand the words that I speak unto thee, and stand upright,” now this word is a word for stand, and then the word is used again as a noun and what it means is to “stand in your standing place.” Now what does that mean? If you look through in a concordance how this is used over and over and over in Scripture, it means to stand under a solemn time when God is teaching. People stand before Moses when he reads the Law. In other words, he’s saying all right, stand at attention! He gets the command in to start the whole thing off, “ten hut” and then he goes on.

Now let’s see what he says after this. “And when he had spoken this word unto me,” it’s not “had spoken,” it was “while he was speaking.” “While he was speaking I stood trembling,” so you see before Daniel was on his hands and knees, now after this treatment he’s standing up, “yes sir.” He’s up there at attention and he’s still trembling physically from what’s happened. Now the angel is about ready to start, and in verse 12 he issues a command, “at ease.”

Daniel 10:12, “Then said he unto me, Fear not, Daniel,” okay, now I got your attention, relax, you can break your stance but just stand here and pay attention. So you see the procedure before any teaching takes place look at the preparation that goes on. The lines of authority are established, respect for the teacher is established, the objective of the lesson is established and finally he has his undivided attention. Now verse 12, “for from the first day that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself before thy God, thy words were heard, and I came, not am come, “I came for thy words.” So the angel says now Daniel, I know what you’re thinking; you made a petition back here some twenty-one days ago. You think that because you haven’t had an answer to this prayer, because the answer to that prayer has been long delayed that God hasn’t paid attention, that God is inattentive.

And that’s our tendency as I said when I introduced this point. The whole idea behind this passage is don’t reason backwards, from delayed prayer petitions to God’s inattentiveness. He’s saying God was attentive, you’re prayer broke through the moment you opened your mouth twenty-one days ago; your words were heard and not only were your words heard but like Gabriel in Daniel 8, I was dispatched back there twenty-one days ago, so God instantly set in motion the means of fulfilling this man’s prayer petition. So verse 12 undercuts the tendency to reason backwards from delayed answered prayer to God’s inattentiveness. The angel says whatever the solution to the problem is it can’t be God’s inattentiveness. God was attentive, God did hear and He dispatched me, He gave an order and we mobilized.

Now beginning at verse 13 we have one of the most difficult doctrines in Scripture, one of the most complicated doctrines in Scripture, but a doctrine that, nevertheless, has been revealed here and is necessary for us to understand. This doctrine will have a hard time going down some of you because some of you are so ingrained in your human viewpoint idea of history, your human viewpoint idea of man, and your human viewpoint idea of social forces. You have, although you won’t admit it, basically a materialist view of society, in which you argue that all things that you observe around you, various movements and so on, can be explained totally in terms of material, social factors. The explanation you’re about to get should blow your mind because God is going to totally challenge that entire human viewpoint concept.

Daniel 10:13, “But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia. [14] Now I am come to make thee understand…. Now what is the prince of the kingdom of Persia, and Michael? What’s all this about? This is about a gigantic angelic conflict going on in history. Here’s the eastern end of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Mesopotamian Valley and Israel is down in this area. Daniel is located here. This whole area is under the hegemony of the Medo-Persian Empire. This angel says that when I was dispatched from the throne room of God… we know how long it takes because Gabriel took six minutes, we timed it in Daniel 8, so within six minutes that angel should have been there at Daniel’s. Now why was there a twenty-one day delay before the angel could get to Daniel.

All right, the delay is due to a massive angelic barrier over the Medo-Persian Empire, that if you take a map of the earth and you delineate on the map of the earth, the outlines of the various countries and the human political boundaries, the Bible insists that above the human political boundaries are angelic boundaries, that angelic powers coincide in their spheres of influence with the political maps that we all see in our books, and in this case “the prince of the kingdom of Persia” is not a man; “the prince of the kingdom of Persia” is an angel who’s a commander of all the fallen angels over this kingdom. As commander his job is to isolate believers. His job is to prevent answers to prayer; his job is to keep these people in the Medo-Persian Empire in darkness, to frustrate every attempt to comfort believers. His entire network is to knock out believers, to knock them off the line, to keep them out of fellowship, keep them from growing and he’ll use all sorts of subterfuge to do it, but nevertheless, the angel is in charge here.

And the angel that is coming in, we’ll say he came in from the southwest and he’s coming in to Daniel; within six minutes he got to the edge of the Persian Empire from the throne room of God. At that point he began a tremendous war, a war that he called for reinforcements and had to send for Michael, for reasons which we’ll see in a moment. The Bible is consistent within itself. That’s the overview and angelic conflict delayed the prayer because the fallen angels were not interested in Daniel getting the kind of information he was about to get. You see, Satan has a whole scheme that he’s going to turn the Medo-Persian Empire loose and move off to the west. And certain things are going to happen between the king of Persia and the kings of Greece. And as a result of the interaction between the Persians and the Greeks you’re going to have tremendous developments develop culminating in Antiochus Epiphanes, the man who is the forerunner of antichrist.

This is a whole satanic plot and Jesus Christ is about to blow it with a fantastic jewel of intelligence. So the angels that are in charge of the Medo-Persian Empire don’t want the whistle blown on their little game. They don’t want the believers to see the big picture in the game plan. So therefore the angelic conflict. Now we go to the angelic conflict and certain passages that have to do with this.

Okay, doctrine of evil. We’ve got to start with the doctrine of evil and in the doctrine of evil this is the basis for the doctrine of the angelic conflict. The doctrine of evil says this: the origin of evil is not by virtue of creation but by virtue of the fall. That’s the heart of the divine viewpoint. Evil was NOT created by God. If you do not hold to this your only alternative is to argue that evil is inherent to existence; it’d be like the Hindu’s in India. Evil is inherent in existence, one solution, or you can ignore it like Christian Science does, but apart from those solutions the only solution that is truly viable is the Christian one, and that is evil began, not by God’s creation but by man’s moral responsibility. Man chose to fall, so that’s the start of it.

But behind this is the angelic conflict. So turn to Ezekiel 28:11, this is the classic passage on the fall of Satan. We want to study what’s going on in this unseen realm. You can’t rely upon normal tools of empirical knowledge; you must rely strictly on divine revelation. Verse 11, “Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, [12] Son of man,” this is an address to Ezekiel, “take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyre,” the “king of Tyre” represents one of Satan’s persons, he is actually a literal person just like King David was a literal person, but King David pictured the Lord Jesus Christ and the king of Tyre pictures Satan. “…the king of Tyre, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord GOD;” certain things are going to be said to this king that don’t fit the king, like certain things are said about David that don’t fit David. Why? Because both men are vehicles of typology; they’re types of a greater figure. “Son of man, take up this lamentation, Thus saith the Lord God, Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty.” Notice that, Satan is the most wise creation of God.

Satan is not some character with horns that runs around with a pitchfork. Satan is always pictured in Scripture as brilliant, absolutely brilliant, from his first appearance in Genesis 3 to this appearance here, “full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty.” There is beauty, there is a certain order. We use these terms in theology to describe the problem; Satan is absolute evil but he has relative good, and this is why believers in the position of Christ have absolute righteousness and they have relative evil. Those are two different concepts, two different principles. The one that I want you to see basically is this one: Satan is absolutely evil, [tape turns] and he is the quintessence of rejection and rebellion. But in himself he has what appears to us as wisdom, as beauty, as things are good. So there’s relative good in Satan, and relative good in all of Satan’s promotions. You cannot spot satanically oriented means, people, movements or organizations on the basis of the absence of good or presence of good; Satan can put forward good.

Ezekiel 28:13, “Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God” now a bunch of stones are listed here; hold the place here as we read verse 13 and also look at Exodus 28:17. Ezekiel 28:13, “Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God, every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold,” now look at Exodus 28:17 “And thou shalt set in it settings of stones: the first row shall be a sardius, a topaz, and a carbuncle, this shall be the first row. [18] And the second row shall be an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond. [19] And the third row a ligure [jacinth], an agate, and an amethyst. [20] And the fourth row a beryl, and an onyx, and a jasper….” Now what is Exodus 28 talking about? The breastplate of the high priest. Now if anything, verse 13 of Ezekiel, the passage we read about on Satan, appears to suggest some priestly role that Satan originally had. We don’t know what but the juxtaposition of these rocks, these valuable stones and the way they’re handled here suggests that Satan had some sort of priestly role originally.

Let’s finish reading Ezekiel 28:13, “the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created.” He is talking here about music; Satan had as one of his functions to lead in musical worship of God, the angels sang, Job 38. Music was something that existed before man, it’s the language of angels. What angelic music sounds like we don’t know, but the Bible says that music began before man’s language.

Daniel 10:14, “Thou art the anointed cherub that covers; so here’s a position of intimacy with God, “and I have set thee so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. [15] Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee.” [16, “By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.”] And then it goes on, in verse 17, “Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee.” So here’s the fall of Satan, when Satan rebelled against his tremendous position that he had before God.

Now turn to Isaiah 14:12, [“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!”] the other central passage on the fall of Satan. Why go over these passages; some of you have been over these passages before; you don’t see any reason to go over them again. The reason is that these passages show what is most satanic about us. For example, notice in all of these illustrations, both in Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14 you have the essence of sin itself and nowhere in any of these passages is anyone drinking, is anyone having sex, is anyone doing something else? Now it’s not to say that those aren’t related, but the point is those are but the fruits of the basic attitude. Read these passages asking yourself, what is the most satanic type attitude? And you’ll see very quickly that what the world calls evil is not what the Bible calls evil. Evil basically goes back to this rebellious autonomous attitude and it couldn’t be expressed better than in Isaiah 14:13-14. These are the five “I wills” of Satan. Here is the essence of evil.

Isaiah 14:13, “For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God,” that means above the angels, “I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: [14] I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High.” That is the essence of evil, “I will be like the Most High.” I will assume to myself the divine prerogative; I am but a creature but I will act like the Creator, I will become like God. That is evil.

This is the fall of Satan, the beginning, but only the beginning of a long battle. We want to go through some verses that deal with sections of that battle. We can’t study the whole doctrine but I want to acquaint you with the fall of Satan and what has happened in the background. We sit here and yet the Bible would testify that flowing within this room, right at the moment, are both good and evil angels, that there are forces competing for your attention right at the very moment, and to the degree that you are mature, to that degree you respond to the Word. To the degree that you’re kind of spiritually lethargic, to that decree you can be a sucker for these kinds of influences that are literally in the air around us. I’ll try to arrange them so we can just go on through the Bible starting here without flip-flopping back and forth. To do so I rob myself of the ability to develop it in a chronological way.

To show you the magnitude of the battle turn back to 1 Kings 22:19, the Bible argues that there is an angelic council that runs the universe at this time. This angelic council still operates and still functions and has both good and evil angels in the council, kind of like a United Nations organization. God the Father presides, yet there is evil in the council. Now this is a meeting, one of the rare glimpses in the history of man that man saw the meeting of the divine council. “And he said, Hear thou, therefore, the word of the LORD: I saw Jehovah sitting on His throne, and all the army [host] of heaven standing by Him on His right hand and on His left.” So in this council on the right hand, presumably, are the elect angels; on the left hand the fallen ones. Verse 2, “And the LORD said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead? And one said on this manner, and another said on that matter. The Lord brought up a matter for discussion before the angelic council and the idiom of verse 20 indicates there was a discussion among all the angels in this angelic council.

Now if this doesn’t twist your mind about how history goes I don’t know what will. But this passage is arguing, as well as many passages, that what makes history, these events that happen around us are actually results of this spiritual interference that’s going on constantly in society. It’s masked out, no sociologist can ever get his grid so he can filter out what’s the human and what’s the spiritual, but the Bible indicates there’s an interface between these unseen forces operating in society and men. So here’s one. A ruler of a nation is going to make a very bad decision, and do you know who’s behind it? Angelic powers! And army is going to lose a battle and do you know who’s in back of it? Angelic powers!

How? 1 Kings 22:21, “And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the LORD, and said, I will persuade him. [22] And the LORD said unto him, By what means? And he said, I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And He said, Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also, go forth, and do so.” [23, “Now, therefore, behold, the LORD has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and the LORD has spoken evil concerning thee.”] Is this God as evil? No, God is using evil means to punish wicked men, turning evil back upon themselves that they may reap the results of their own rebellion. Ahab was a liar from the word go, and so how ironic that he’s misled by a lying spirit. God, then, has this tremendous angelic force operation.

Job 1:6, another meeting of the angelic council, “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.” See, Satan still occupies a seat in the divine council. He’s not going to be thrown out until the tribulation after the Church is raptured. Some theologians think, and it’s a matter of discussion, that the whole purpose of the body of Christ is to replace the evil ones on the left side of the Lord in the angelic council that runs the universe. Verse 7, “And the LORD said unto Satan, From where do you come? And Satan said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down it?” Where is Satan, he’s not just in hell, he’s walking to and fro on the earth. Verse 8, “And the LORD said unto Satan, Have you considered My servant, Job, that there is note like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, who fears God, and shuns evil,” He brings up the matter of a believer and you know the story. Satan has a little deal to say well, Job is a believer, Lord, but he’s not going to bite the hand that feeds him; give a little trial to Job and he’ll flake out, and the book of Job develops that but our point this morning is just see the angelic council, see its interference in history.

You saw it in 1 Kings 22, interference in the life of a nation; you see it in Job 1, interference in the life of an individual, and there’s more testimony to this. Turn to Isaiah 24, God talking about the nations on the face of the earth, talking about the ultimate judgment that will come before world peace can be brought about, these forces must be dealt with. Do you see now why we’re premillennialist; do you see why we argue that the one thousand years of perfect peace cannot come to pass until the unseen forces are dealt with. You can’t just get world peace by dealing with man; you’ve got to also deal with the angelic powers behind man and no UN is qualified to deal with the unseen powers behind man.

Isaiah 24:21, “And in that day,” that’s when Christ returns, “that the LORD shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of the earth upon the earth.” Two spheres of judgment, “the high ones” are the angelic powers that interfere with history and “the kings of the earth” are men upon the face of the earth. So there are two parts to world history, not just one part, not just the human role but also the angelic role.

Revelation 12:4, this tells us what a vast horde Satan has. The Apostle John, in a way very similar to Daniel, gets a vision, and it’s a vision of that moment in history when Jesus Christ was born of the virgin Mary, and in this vision John the Apostle is going to be told what no shepherd in the field saw that Christmas, what no wise man from the East saw, John the Apostle is going to see. And God says John, that first Christmas when Jesus Christ was born, here’s what really happened. Verse 3, “And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and, behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. [4] And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven and did cast them to the earth; and the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered, to devour her child as soon as it was born.” What is that story a picture of? That Satan has access to one-third of the stars of heaven, which is another synonym in Scripture from angels. And from that passage we deduce that Satan has at least one third of the angelic kingdom on side. One out of every three angels is a fallen angel and one of Satan’s messengers. So when you say to somebody, oh isn’t he just an angel, you’d better be careful which kind.

Now back to Daniel and tie this together; we’ll look at Daniel and then one New Testament verse to apply it. Daniel 10:5, when Christ first appears to Daniel in this vision, “Then I lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, a certain man clothed in linen,” the linen is a priestly garment and here is a mind-blowing point about how Christ appears in this vision. Jesus Christ appears as the great priest, the priest-king. What is the role of the priest? We know the role of a prophet; the role of a prophet is to bring God’s Word down to men, but what is the role of a priest? To bring men to God. So therefore Christ in His priestly role does what? Brings men to God. What is the subject of Daniel 10? History. Can you put it together and figure out what Jesus Christ is trying to say by the way he appears to Daniel? He is saying I am the priest who is working through every realm of history to bring men back to God. That is the divine viewpoint of all history; history is His story, Jesus Christ is the great king-priest who is working every event together for good, bringing men back to God, replacing Satan in his priestly role. Jesus Christ knocks Satan out and takes over.

Now do you see why in verse 13, “the prince of the kingdom of Persia,” the fallen angel, didn’t want to get this information to believers. Why, if believers got hold of this information they’d realize that God can’t answers right away, that there has to be delays because God is not just working with men, He’s working with the angels too. And so if there’s a delayed prayer petition it’s not God’s inattention to you; it’s the fact that to get the answer to your prayer He may have to go through 8,900 other things before he gets down to that point. There is a rational and loving reason why God’s prayer answers do not come fast, because of all this delay. Here it was three weeks.

Now if Jesus Christ is the priest, and His role in history is to bring men to God; Satan defected from his role, and now takes men away from God, where do we stand in the whole thing. What is our response to this revelation that Jesus Christ is the great king-priest of all history and the fact that we are locked into a deadly, deadly battle. People laugh at the angels, oh yeah, that’s what the Middle Ages believed. Strange, no one has ever offered me a proof against the existence of angels. I have it on pretty good authority that there are angels and they do exist, and they interface with history. Unless you are an equally credible person as the Lord Jesus Christ, or unless you can come up with some sort of experimental technique that denies the existence of angels, we must continue to believe in angels in the 20^th century, if we’re to be thoroughly Biblical. We are locked in a fierce combat that requires the same kind of soul that Daniel had; thou art “a man of treasure.” How do we get that? Romans 12:1, that’s our response. Still in the darkness, still with delayed prayer answers, but now we can love God because we understand well, yes God, I see now there’s more to history than I ever thought before; I was blind before, Your words gave me life upon history so now I understand You Lord, I understand that there has to be delays in this because You’ve got other purposes to work out. It’s not just me, it’s not just the body of Christian, it’s the whole of all creation and all of history.

Therefore, Paul says, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service,” or your spiritually mature service. Romans 12:1 is a priestly job and it requires the positive volition that comes, “presenting your bodies a living sacrifice,” that’s the way we partake of the angelic conflict. You can be a victim of the conflict, be a casualty, be knocked out, fall apart and be so thick spiritually that you don’t even know why, or you can take a passage like this and go home and say yeah, I see there are a lot more factors operating than I ever dreamed of. And we’ll put these things together as we go through Daniel and hopefully by the time we finish we’ll have a coherent picture of all history.