Daniel Lesson 45

Hope from Detailed Prophecy – Daniel 11:2-4

In Daniel 10, 11, and 12 we’re encountering a view of history, the view of history given by the Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore this view of history is the starting point for all studies of history. Jesus Christ in His preincarnate form as God the Son appears to Daniel to give Him the most minute prophecy in all of Scripture. Now there are certain passages of God’s Word that are famous for one thing or another. The Sermon on the Mount is known for one thing, John 3 is known for John 3:16, and this section of the Bible is also known for something. This chapter, Daniel 11, was the first area of the Bible to be attacked by higher criticism. Historically in the third century the critics first began to attack the Bible here, in Daniel 11. The reason the Bible was attacked first in Daniel 11 is because it gives such an integrated view, or such a detailed view of history in prophecy that the skeptics argue that this could never have been prophecy. To argue that all of these details were given ahead of the fact is to imply the existence of the God of the Bible.

Now since the critic starts from the position that the Biblical God can’t exist, that’s his starting point, he’s dogmatic on this, he will allow for all other things, except the Apostle John couldn’t have written the Gospel of John, the Apostle Matthew couldn’t have written Matthew, it might have been written by any of the other two million people in the world, but it couldn’t possibly be written by the one the Bible says it was written by. And so this universe could have come into existence in eight million different ways, except by the way that the Bible says, by speaking of God’s word into nothing.

So here in Daniel 11, in the third century, we have a man by the name of Porphyry; Porphyry was a critic, a skeptic against the Christian faith, and he correctly saw that the place to attack Christianity and to undermine Christianity is to undermine the predictive element to the Bible. If you can undercut this you have destroyed the last piece of miraculous evidence available to contemporary man because fulfilled prophecy is a contemporary miracle. It’s always contemporary because we can look at it and say hey, look, it happened. So it’s a contemporary miracle. For example, the other miracles Jesus did, we weren’t there to photograph them, we don’t have sworn affidavits, so it’s indirect. But the only direct evidence of a miracle is fulfilled prophecy. So the critic argues that here is Christianity’s Achilles heel; if we can kill off the beast here, at the point of predictive prophecy, then we can undercut and destroy the entire Christian faith. So Porphyry did this, or tired to in the third century and he was answered by one of the great church fathers, Jerome. And we have the first commentary ever written on a book of the Bible against higher criticism, and it’s Jerome’s commentary on the book of Daniel written in the 300’s.

Wilbur Smith, one of the outstanding evangelical scholars of the past generation said: “The most important single work produced by the church fathers on any of the prophetic writings of the Old Testament, commenting on the original Hebrew text, showing a complete mastery of the literature of the Church and the subjects touched upon to the time of composition, is without question Saint Jerome’s commentary on the book of Daniel.” So here’s where the battle was first fought. And as we study the book of Daniel, particularly chapter 11 that we’re coming to this morning, understand, this has now been a battleground for 1600 years before you’ve looked at; 1600 years men have fought over the contents of this chapter. The anti-supernaturalist and the skeptics of the Christian faith say that this chapter can’t be what it purports to be; this cannot be predictive prophecy, it’s too overwhelming in its evidence for the existence of the God of the Scripture, therefore it must be destroyed, it must be assimilated into a human viewpoint system.

Why, we ask? Why did Jesus Christ see it as a necessity to give Daniel such a detailed unusual prophecy? Why was this particular unusual prophecy considered necessary? Why? Because the believer’s were being prepared for prolonged struggle. And this predictive prophecy was to give content to the faith technique. You cannot believe in nothing; you cannot believe in your own emotions, you can’t believe in anything, the Bible says, except genuine revelation and genuine revelation is not available today except in the canon of Scripture. So therefore God prepared, centuries in advance, believers for a long-term patient century long endurance. The faith technique applied over centuries is called hope, long-term patient endurance. And it requires an understanding and insight into history.

Throughout the times of the Gentiles God wants believers to know that in spite of this chaos, this crisis, this assassination, this change of administration, something here, something elsewhere, in spite of all this thing that looks so chaotic on the surface, My guiding hand is in control and with that assurance we can endure. Without that assurance we can’t. Israel is going to be like a little rubber dinghy thrown around on stormy waves of a great sea, the sea of historical chaos, and to maintain their orientation that little dinghy, as it’s being thrown from one wave to the other wave, they must have a stability and that stability is going to be the view of history given here. Israel is not going to consider her struggles as a passive victim.

Now this understanding that Christ has given so far we have seen involved an overall plot for history, that God has a plan for history, and we call that plan “doxological.” That’s a good vocabulary word, that means it has to do with the vindication of God’s character. That is the purpose of history for the Christian, nothing less; and included, we do not say that the purpose of history is to save men. Evangelism and the salvation of the human race is a subordinate purpose to that purpose. If salvation of men were the purpose for history, then we would have to say chance rules because in the final analysis all men are not going to be saved, and thus if salvation of all men was the purpose of history, then the purpose of history is never accomplished and the Promiser of the purpose has never fulfilled His promise, and thus not God but chance would reign. So salvation of all men is not the purpose of history. The purpose of history is praise of God’s character, by both those in heaven and those in hell, the doxological purpose for history.

And to carry out, in part, the means of this doxological purpose is the great angelic conflict. And we’ve studied and summarized the angelic conflict under five points last time, and the substance of what we said was that upstairs in the invisible realm we have this tremendous angelic conflict going on. Downstairs in the material realm we have physical historic struggles going on. Now, those of you who know what a synchronous motor is, where you change the armature of one motor and the other one tracks it, you have movement in one area and it’s transmitted into another area, that is very similar to the view here presented of history, that human movements down here cause an angelic tracking up here. So how do our spiritual movements influence history? Not just horizontally, the materialist and the anti-supernaturalists think that the only way you can influence history is directly by electing somebody or making a crucial decision inside the establishment of the power structure, by overthrowing the power structure by revolution or by doing something else like that. To them those are the only options to influence history.

But the Christian says no, there is another dimension of influencing history, there is this tracking that goes on and if we do the right things down here, then certain things are going to follow up here. The trick is to know what goes on up at the other end of the line and we can’t find what goes on at the other end of the line apart from revelation. So therefore we’re back to Scripture again. If we read the Bible carefully we’ll understand what goes on up here so we’ll do the right thing down here. So there’s this duality to history.

We see this duality at least three places in Scripture; two places in Daniel and one in Acts. We saw it once in Daniel 10 when we find that Michael came to the aid of the angel; the audio visual angel (we call him) comes in to the Medo-Persian Empire with a message for Daniel. As he comes close geographically to the Medo-Persian Empire he encounters resistance because Satan has a cloak of angelic demonic forces over the Persian power structure because Satan wants to subvert and turn the policies of the Medo-Persian Empire into an anti-Semitic orientation. So to accomplish this what he is going to do is try to keep all this intact and not let the message of Daniel 10-11 get through. Michael comes to aid this angel in this great battle that goes on.

Now Michael just happens to be the angel who is what we call the patron angel of the nation Israel. And we said Michael helped this angel blast through the block simultaneously with Daniel’s praying over those twenty-one days, and we deduced the fact that Daniel, thinking of our illustration of a synchronous motor, Daniel is doing his praying down here and his praying is having immediate repercussions in the unseen realm. We don’t know why this works, all we know is that the Scripture hints very strongly it does work this way, that a believer located here, who can’t see at all what’s going on, by his prevailing intercessory prayers, somehow, some way, allows Michael, or empowers Michael, or gives him some sort of divine authority to do this work of coming to the aid of the audio visual angel.

We see the second time this tracking occurs in Daniel 11:1, “in the first year of Darius, the Mede, I,” the audio visual angel, “stood to confirm and to strengthen Michael [him].” And when we went back and traced what was going on back in Daniel 6 in this first year of Darius the Mede, we found the same tracking kind of thing. This time Michael was in trouble because Daniel was in trouble but we had a Gentile who gave his blessing. Darius himself said as he put Daniel in the lion’s den, may your God whom you serve Daniel, deliver you. Now we don’t know whether that was a conscious prayer or something, but Darius’ word, “may the God whom you serve deliver you” apparently authorized in that case the audio visual angel to come to the aid of Michael. So human events down here cause angelic repercussions up here.

A further illustration, lest you be in doubt about the Old Testament’s application, is in the book of Acts. Two times famous church fathers were in jail. One was James, the other one was Peter. In one case the saints ignored it and James was beheaded and was lost to the church. The second time Peter goes to jail and this time the Christians say we’re not going to forget our brother in jail, we’re going to pray for him, and so they continue to pray and pray and pray and pray for Peter. And what happens to Peter? Does he get his head cut off? No. How does he get out of jail; he gets out of jail by means of angelic interference. So Peter gets delivered from jail when saints are praying. How does he get delivered? By angelic means. James doesn’t get delivered when the believers aren’t praying and he winds up losing his life.

So we come to a conclusion: is intercessory prayer crucial? You bet it is; if this view of history is right, it sure is because it’s precisely through intercessory prayer that the Christian wages the battle in the unseen areas. Some of you in our prayer groups have noted with amazement how you would pray for specific policies in certain areas of our country and we’ve seen some of that come to pass. Is it because it was just an accident or do you suppose that was a change of the same sort? Or is it the prayers of Christian activating unseen forces to work this thing out.

What I’m trying to get you to see here is that Daniel is not just a book of the future; Daniel is not just a book of prophecy, it’s a book of wisdom, how the Christian citizen can operate today. So let’s look at Daniel 11 and we’re going to go on to the content of what this message, direct from Jesus Christ through the audio visual angel to Daniel is.

Daniel 10:21, “I will show thee that which is noted in the scriptures of truth,” the word in the Hebrew, ’emeth, it comes from the word “amen” and it means that which is trustworthy, that which will stand, God’s plan. The angel says Jesus Christ has commissioned me, Daniel, to communicate to you a page out of the plan. And in heaven, it’s not pictured in the book of Revelation as a bound volume like this, the picture you get from Revelation is that you get a roll, and the book of Revelation at the end there’s a few last chapters in that roll and they’re sealed and the sections are waxed, and the angel of the book of Revelation starts peeling off the roll, he breaks the first seal and he peels the roll and holds it up, and it’s the call for judgment upon the earth in a certain way. And then he breaks the second seal and peels off the next layer of the roll, and he holds it up and it’s a judgment calling for something else to happen in history, and again, angels carry those judgments out in the book of Revelation.

So here the angels says now Daniel, I’m commissioned to show you a section of this divine plan of history, to show you how detailed it is we now go to this most amazing section of the Bible. Nowhere in all of the Bible will you ever, ever, ever see prophecy this detailed. In other passages it’s always vague, but here you have specific after specific after specific.

Daniel 11:2, “And now will I show thee the ’emeth [truth],” that is, the content of the book of truth, “Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia; and the fourth shall be far richer than they all: and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Greece. [3] And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his will. [4] And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken….”

Now we want to study this in light of a particular danger we all have when we come to a passage like this. We say, oh, isn’t this wonderful, isn’t this great historic plan fine, we can draw a little chart and here’s our prophecy chart. And what we get absorbed in is the heresy of fatalism, that all this, whatever happens is going to happen. In other words, means are not important. Now let me caution this before we start, this whole section of Scripture is made up of one politically chaotic act after another. The particular acts you are about to read of, and I’ll tell you what they were in history, these acts are known for their violence, for their deceit, for the nature of the power struggles, high level politics, dirty politics and all the rest of it. Now why are all these events put in here under the book of ’emeth? Because the angel wants to say to Daniel and to believers who are suffering under the pile of chaos, because what set this whole thing off? Remember what happened, the believers had gone over to the land, they’d been partially restored, they went into the land and they tried to build and the inhabitants said no, and there was a little dirty politics going on and they got a decree passed because they talked to the right man in the right place and bam, the restoration work was stopped. So at this point the body of believers become the victim, it looks like, of passively to a great gigantic political establishment that just crushes them. This is written to show that yes, the violence, the deceit, all these things are there, but above that is My sovereign hand, says Jesus Christ, not the kingdom of man but My kingdom is the one that’s the highest on the authority structure. So that’s the way this should be read.

Daniel 11:2, “Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia,” we know who these three kings are; first of all you have Cyrus, he’s ruling now, during chapter 11, then you have Cambyses. Cambyses, together with Cyrus, expand the Medo-Persian Empire to its maximum. Cambyses led an expedition to Egypt and reigned from 529-522 BC. These two men, Cyrus and Cambyses, in 35 years created the largest empire the world had ever known, an empire that stretched from the Aegean Sea all the way to the Punjab of India, an empire that acted as a vehicle ever since of exchanging western European thought and Oriental thought; it was the meeting ground of them both. That was the first of the three kings that would stand up.

And then there would be political intrigue, dirty politics, an assassination or two and a little sneak deal and a man by the name of Pseudo Smerdis would assume the throne, called Pseudo Smerdis because Smerdis was a pseudonym that he had because he was posing as somebody else; the instability of the situation is indicated by his length of reign, but it shows you the chaos that was involved in the power structure.

Now keep in mind, Daniel and the Jews in all this, if they looked at it from the human point of view would say how Lord, how can we ever get peace and stability in all this mess, this intrigue; we can’t police the rooms inside the palace, how do we keep order in this kingdom. And God’s message is believer, you don’t have to keep order in this mess, that’s an object where you trust Me to keep the order. The obligation of believers we’ll get into in just a moment.

The third king was Darius Hystaspes; this is the man who is the last of these three, sometimes called the first, Darius Hystaspes; his reign, 521- 486 BC, a powerful ruler but he was never able to give the kingdom its tremendous extant that the earlier kings had.

Now what was going on between the year 529 BC and 486 BC? You’ve got a lot of history here in that one sentence, “there shall stand up three kings in Persia.” Do you know what was going on? Two books of the Bible were written during those three kings: Ezra and Nehemiah. All the events of those Biblical books, and you can read them for yourself, went on during those three king’s administration. Zechariah, the prophet Zachariah, lives during the reign of the third one, Darius Hystaspes. So we have quite a long involved situation.

During all of this what was the command of the believers? Turn to Jeremiah 29:7; this was the only direction Jewish believers were given under all this mess. “And seek the peace of the city,” we could say or country, “to which I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it; for in the peace thereof shall you have peace.” That command of Jeremiah is given again to the Christian in 1 Timothy 2:1-2. Jeremiah 29:7 is reapplied to the Christian dispensation in 1 Timothy 2:1-2. We have the same instructions, “seek the peace of the nation where I have sent you, for in the peace of that nation will you have peace.” And the word for “peace” is shalom, and it means not just peace but health and welfare; it means prosperity.

Pray for the prosperity and health of your country because in its prosperity you will have prosperity. During the times of the Gentiles the material prosperity and health of every believer is dependent upon the fourth divine institution in which he functions. Ours is dependent upon the health of the United States; if we were in France it would depend upon the health of the French, the French economy, etc. It’s a very obvious truth but God says believers, during this age, the times of the Gentiles, cannot expect special treatment apart from Gentile society as a whole. This is different, in the Old Testament it was true, believers could establish their own independent economy and expect their own independent blessings but God says that’s not the way history works today; as I bless you it’s going to have to be inter-working with your national entity. So here’s why every believer ought to support his country; this is the divine viewpoint concept of patriotism. There is a hidden, selfish motive behind it, so to speak, because if you’re not, you’re not going to get blessed either. “…in its peace, you,” believer, “will have peace.

The Jews did pray for their country and many Jews were high up in the Persian administration. We know some of those men. Let’s look at the position of Daniel; Daniel was in the department of state of the Medo-Persian Empire. We know another man, Nehemiah; he was in the group of royal advisors. We know Nehemiah’s brother, Hananiah, he was in the royal advisors and they’ve even found a plaque that looks like Hananiah’s plaque in archeology. So we know that Jews were high up in the realm; we know that most of the banking was controlled by two Jewish families out of Babylon. So we know that the Jewish element was very strong and we can presume that most of these Jews at this time were believers. So here believers were part and parcel of a hostile power structure. Michael, in other words, and his people were wrapped up into Satan and his people, all mixed together in the Persian Empire, amidst all this chaos and struggle.

Those are the three kings; now it days in Daniel 11:2, “and the fourth shall be far richer than they all: and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Greece.” Who is this man? One of the famous individuals of history, Xerxes. The event described so innocuously in verse 2 is one of the most important historic events of our forefathers, because most of us here are come out of Indo-European stock; most of us have three or four generations back our families have come out of Europe. Therefore, our culture has been shaped by what happened here: the man, Xerxes, and the Greeks.

Xerxes ascended the Medo-Persian throne in the year 486 BC. He ruled until 465 BC. There was a Jewish girl who was one of his queens and her name was Esther, and the book of Esther occurs here, again showing the complete penetration of believers up into the very heart of the power structure they participated in it, they didn’t take this separatist attitude. Xerxes, when he ascended the throne, had a cousin by the name of Mardonius; Mardonius was kind of an agitator and he kept working on Xerxes saying, hey look, way back… as you know from Homer there was the Trojan War; now the Greeks beat the Trojans and Mardonius was a great agitator over this whole Trojan War thing. Here’s the Black Sea, Greece comes around here, you have the Dardanelles, and you have Turkey sticking out like this, the eastern end of the Mediterranean and Crete, and the Aegean Peloponnesian Peninsula. This is the Aegean and there’s where the scene began. Troy, the cite of the famous ancient battle recorded in the works of Homer, the Trojans got the worst of the deal. By the way, that war started over a woman, the famous Helen of Troy. And as it began and developed, the Greeks whipped the Trojans. And the Trojans never forgot it because they became allies to the Medes and the Persians. See, the Medo-Persian Empire extended all the way up into here, it was their sphere of influence. They had colonies along here.

And to add insult to injury during Xerxes reign the Greeks came over, across the Aegean and said to these colonies, you know, we’d like to trade with you but there’s only one thing; every time we trade with you we have to go through this whole deal with the Persian administration. You know, free trade would be great, and so they agitated in these colonies on the west end of Asia Minor and got them to revolt, and Mardonius said see Xerxes, see what they’re doing, the Greeks are after you again, there’s going to be a second Trojan War, except Xerxes let’s have a second Trojan War but you start it and you whip the Greeks, because they whipped you first. So Xerxes thought that would be a good idea and he got together the greatest invasion the European continent has ever seen since D-Day 1944, there has never been, between those two events, the Persian invasion under Xerxes of the continent of Europe and the invasion by the Allies on the beaches of Normandy in 1944, there was never any event of comparable magnitude. If Xerxes penetration invasion of Europe had been successful, then our culture would have been Asiatic. That’s how crucial this is. If Xerxes had controlled Greece he would have controlled Europe and Asia, not Europe, would have dominated the sphere.

So we have Xerxes starting out and Xerxes has a fantastic plan and his plan was so encompassing. And Xerxes starts moving west; Xerxes is landlocked, his army is basically a land army and it is not sea borne. He uses three army corps; he takes 50% of the Persian army, three corps, which amounts to 180,000 men. Now you can imagine the logistics; how would you like to serve 180,000 lunches every day; a lot of box lunches. You can imagine how he must have supplied 180,000 men, you just don’t march across a field and pick what’s in the field, after the first 2,000 men have marched across the farm there isn’t anything left. Historians who watched this magnificent motion westward of 180,000 men said they would come to a river and drink it dry; by the time the horses and the men got through drinking the river wouldn’t have any water in it. This is how massive this was. And so Xerxes was pretty sure of himself, he managed to hire some ships from the Phoenicians and others, and as his land army marched westward across the land, then these ships would dock and bring in supplies along the coast. [tape turns]

Now this looks like a massive operation and it looks really secure, in fact Xerxes thought it was so secure that [can’t understand word] the time he got to the Aegean he captured three Greek spies and the usual treatment for spies was to kill them, except Xerxes was so confident of himself he got the three spies and said come here, and he got them up on a hill and he had his soldiers marching by and he said to the spies, look at that, I want you to go back and tell you little puny Greeks what’s coming, go ahead and tell them and see if they can stop me, and then he let them go. So the three spies went back to Greece and reported what they had seen and this set up the Greeks, the Greeks began their defense against this oncoming thing.

Now the Greeks were very sharp on military tactics and they recognized immediately that Xerxes had a problem here. One of the elements of war that you’ve got to have is the element of mobility; you’ve got to be able to move your forces and what had happened here was that Xerxes had lost all mobility. Why had he lost all mobility? Because he can’t supply his soldiers; 180,000 men, a massive, massive movement but it must go along the coast. So what do the Greeks know? They know his exact line of march, they know exactly where he’s going to go, they don’t have to about raids in some other place, they can predict, Xerxes is going to come through, he’s going go across the straits and he’s going to come down the eastern coast of Greece, he’s got to because that’s the only place where he can supply those 180,000 men. So Xerxes gave away his whole route of invasion.

So the Greeks set up preliminary defenses; it’s going to take them some time, they get together and decide, this Peloponnesian Peninsula has got to be the place where they defend themselves. Why? Because it’s surrounded by water, Xerxes is weakest on water, if we can keep him from crossing the isthmus here, then we’ve got him knocked. So the Greeks dispatched small groups of soldiers to hold and delay tactics along this line or march and it was during that holding action that you have the famous action at Thermopylae pass, with 300 Spartan soldiers blocking the Medo-Persians 180,000 man army as they marched through. They’ve got to come through the pass and that pass was held for hours and hours and hours by 300 great Spartan soldiers, one of the high points of military history. And those Spartans would have held except for the fact they were betrayed, a spy told the Persians how to come around in back of them and Thermopylae was breached. But the Spartans and other men who bravely held the line died on this holding action, slowed Xerxes down until the Greeks assembled their fleet, and their idea was to knock out Xerxes fleet because if you can knock his fleet out what’s going to happen to his land army? His land army depends upon his fleet like the baby in the womb depends on the cord, snip it and he dies; destroy Xerxes fleet and his army has to retreat. Sound strategy.

Then we come to the next point, and keep in mind now, try to look at this as a citizen involved, the terror of seeing 180,000, that’s every person in the city of Lubbock, suddenly marching in one big group, and think of the chaos and the helplessness you’d feel. Jesus Christ is preparing Daniel for these kind of events in history, invasions as big as D-Day Christ says, those kind of invasions are all in My book, I have already charted them out. I have already decreed the outcome of them before they’re planned by man. So we have the invasion, and they come down the coastline of Greece and you have Peloponnesian Peninsula here, and they have a place jutting out here, Salamis Bay, and there’s an island here, and the Persians block the Greek fleet, the Greeks aren’t fast enough and they get all their fleet that they have assembled to defend themselves locked down in Salamis Bay, and Xerxes with his arrogance and his majesty decides he wants to sport. So he sets up a silver gilded throne on the side of a hill, and he’s going to watch the destruction of the Greek fleet. And he invites all the people to come and assemble and to watch this.

So the Greeks understand something else about Xerxes; one thing about the Greeks, they were disorganized people but they always knew their enemies weak points; they knew that he had to come by land and they knew something else. Xerxes was one of these proud asses and the best way to fight one of these people is to feed his pride a little bit and his arrogance, and get him to become impatient; use his weakness. So the Greek admiral gives a command, he says go out and start a foray and then retreat from both of these blocks and see if you can get those Persians to come into the bay closer. As you go into the bay, the bay narrows down like this; the Greeks are all trapped in here. The Greeks happen to have shorter ships than the Medo-Persians so they know if they can lure the Persian navy into these straits they can out maneuver them. And sure enough, the Persians fall for it, and Xerxes waves his hand and gives the order to the Persian admiral, go ahead, chase them in there, cut them down. And so as they come charging in from both ends, the Greeks keep backing up and backing up and backing up until they get them in a tight cluster, they disperse and they destroy one-third of Xerxes fleet in front of his golden and silver gilded throne. That day before the action was over 200 Persian ships go to the bottom and only 40 Greek ships, and with one-third of his force gone Xerxes can no longer logistically supply his 180,000 man army, they do a 180, they go back the same route they came, all the way back to Medo-Persia.

And the great invasion of Europe was thwarted; Europe is saved for Europe is saved for Europeans and thus the angel says, “the fourth shall be far richer than they all, and by his strength through his riches” to supply such a vast undertaking, an ancient D-day, “he shall stir up all against the realm of Greece.” Literally, “he shall stir up all the realm of Greece,” but in the Hebrew it doesn’t say Greece, because countries are not called by our names. In the Bible countries are called by the Genesis 10 name; somewhere all of you have your ancestors in Genesis 10, under one of the seventy men listed there is your great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather. It is too bad we don’t have super genealogies that would trace us all back to whichever one of those seventy men you come from, but the Greeks are all sons of Javan, and they are always known, not in the Bible as Grecians or Hellenists, they are known as the sons of Javan, and this categorizes them, they have a certain genealogy. And Javan is a son of Japheth. Japheth, who represents the third great Indo-European segment of humanity, is now going to attain the ascendancy of history. And Jesus Christ says I am going to resist Xerxes; Xerxes is going to learn, he’s going to stir up all of the sons of Javan, and he’s going to lose and the sons of Javan are going to become the third great kingdom. And now Palestine, including Israel, will fall, not under Shem, will fall not under Ham, but will under Japheth. And ever since that point the entire Middle Eat has been dominated by Europe, not by Asia. Why? This passage tells you.

Daniel 11:3, “And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great dominion, and do according to his rule [will].” In the Hebrew it says [can’t understand words] and that means the warrior king, he’s a certain kind of king, he’s a warrior king. Who was that man in history? He’s Alexander the Great, a man, a brilliant man, son of Philip of Macedon, who had, by the way one of the greatest men for his private tutor, Aristotle. Alexander was brought up under Aristotle. And so you have a man getting the best of Hellenistic culture and he stands up as a great warrior; in his 20’s Alexander conquered the world. Alexander came at this kind of thing, here again, a lot of things happened in the Peloponnesian Peninsula, Xerxes had come in this way and retreated back out and said I dedicate this invasion to the second Trojan War, I’ll get my revenge on the Greeks. And so when Alexander stopped here, he said I dedicate this to the second Trojan War and I’ll get my vengeance on the Persians. And this became Alexander’s holy crusade, that Europe would subdue Asia, not Asia subdue Europe.

In five years Alexander did what Cyrus and Cambyses had taken 35 years to do; amazing feat! Alexander was a very courageous individual, often times his own soldiers would be far behind him in battle, he’d be out fighting the enemy in the front, he was one of the great military leaders, he did not believe in leading men from the rear, he led them from the front. And Alexander as he invaded Asia he developed a technique known in the military as the phalanx. It was the phalanx that got him out of many a jam. When he assembled his men into the phalanx he used 16,000 men in each phalanx, and here’s what he did: he took men 16 feet deep and half a mile long, and they lined up with gigantic spears, one man behind the other, this man with a big long spear and then you’d have 16 men behind him and the 16^th man’s spear would just be out at the front, so you can imagine how long these spears were. So here comes 16 men, with spears all over their shoulders, at you, side to side, one half mile long; and somebody would give the order, “Forward, march” and there they’d come.

Now I would dare say that that would have a slight psychological influence upon you if you were in the front. If would also have an influence on you even if you were on horseback; this is one thing Alexander discovered, see the Persians had a lot of horses and Alexander didn’t have too many, but he discovered something, even the cavalry don’t like this kind of treatment. When they start charging this thing it’s just like walking into a porcupine. Horses don’t like it and men don’t like it, and they just keep on marching, and if one phalanx was broken Alexander just simply formed 16,000 men into another one, march right over the first one, keep on going. He used the brutal front approach. And this is how he conquered his way through the ancient east and his kingdom became bigger even than the Medo-Persian Empire.

And it says here at the end of verse 3, he will “do according to his will,” Alexander was known for this. Wherever Alexander went Alexander would impose his culture on all the other people. Alexander would decree, you will learn Greek, Greek will become the language of the world. Now Alexander didn’t realize it but you know Jesus Christ was preparing the world for the gospel because if it hadn’t been for Alexander the entire language of the ancient world would have been so diverse that the gospel would never have gotten out quickly. What did Alexander do under the sovereignty of God? He made Greek the lingua franca of the ancient world and what is the New Testament written in? Greek. So Alexander was quietly preparing, even though in his own mind he didn’t do anything of the sort.

Justin said of Alexander, (quote): “When he assumed rule he ordered himself to be called the king of all lands and of the world; Alexander met no enemy he did not conquer; he besieged no city that he did not take; he attacked no people he did not subdue.” And he went all the way over to the Indus Valley; that was the vast extent, from Europe to Asia, a mighty empire.

But Daniel 11:4 says something that no one would have believed before 323 BC, no one would have believed this, that such a genius, who in five years had done such a fantastic work, as it began to stand up he would be destroyed. 323 BC after a drunken brawl and orgy in Babylon, Alexander died. He died as an alcoholic and he died from various other diseases, some people think syphilis and a few other things. Alexander enjoyed things as he went along. And as he died in 323 BC he left his realm. It says: “And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken,” and one of the historians, Bevan, of the period says: “in the spring of 323 BC before Christ the whole order of things from the Adriatic, away to the mountains of Central Asia and the dusty plains of the Punjab, rested upon a single will, a single brain, nurtured in Hellenic thought. Then the hand of God, as if trying some fantastic experiment plucked the man away. Who could predict for a moment what the result would be.”

It says after his kingdom is going to be divided and we’re going to get into that, that’s a whole other story. We want to conclude by turning to Proverbs 21:1, the end of Alexander’s reign. Proverbs 21:1 gives us the principle. We’ve seen in these three Persian kings, and the fourth one, and the rise of the king of Greece, we’ve seen domestic politics, dirty politics, Pseudo Smerdis, we’ve seen the largest invasion of Europe of all time except D-Day in 1944, we’ve seen the most important counter invasion of Asia that was ever undertaken, and what does the angel from Jesus Christ say? What about all these great historic movements? They are written in our Lord’s book of life, in our Lord’s book of truth. Those great historic movements are all under Jesus Christ’s personal authority and control.

So Proverbs 21:1, “The king’s heart is in the hand of Jehovah; as the rivers of water he turns it whithersoever He will.” God is ultimately over all in history. And this should encourage us as intercessors to pray, which leads us to our application of all this doctrine. We are said in Revelation to be kings and priests. That means we as Christian citizens have two areas of responsibility. Priests, what is our job? Intercessory prayer, you know now what your intercessory prayer does; there’s no excuse now for not making intercessory prayer. The bulletin insert gives you some specific prayer requests that you can make as a believer priest to change history. You can change history in the quiet of your own heart, in the quiet of your own home, spare moments during the day with intercessory prayer you are silently working, an unseen tool that no unbeliever around you even has an inkling of, you can be deploying the weapon in front of his face and no unbeliever ever can penetrate what you’re doing. And through your own secret weapon, intercessory prayer, you can do your own part as a priest to influence history. Your prayers can activate angelic forces.

What about as our king? Believers have not always been kings, but in America we have citizenship responsibilities, we have the power to vote, so we have some limited kingship. What does it mean? Proverbs 21:1, God turns it wherever He wills. That’s not fatalism; you may think it until you ask the question: what is it that God wills? If His priests, if His own children, beloved, ask the Father for something, will He not give it to him? Didn’t the New Testament say that if a son asks the father for a fish, he won’t give him a rock? Now if that’s the case, doesn’t it go to apply Proverbs 21:1 that if we, the children of God, would ask our Father certain petitions that we could get them? And then if we know that we ask these petitions according to God’s will, we know that He hears them. And Proverbs 21:1 gives us the assurance the petitions will have their effect.

Next week we’ll see more of the chaos of history and how Christ rules.