Daniel Lesson 47

Antiochus Epiphanes – Daniel 11:18-35

Daniel is a book that is designed to prepare believers to live in a hostile history. When the overall power is not in believer’s hands but in unbeliever’s hands, humanly speaking, when Satan still has the surface appearance of authority, in spite of Jesus Christ’s victory, then a certain plan of operation is called for; believers must now this plan, be trained in this plan and apply it. Daniel 10, 11 and 12 is the most detailed prophecy contained at any point in Scripture and therefore is one of the places where critics love to assault the text, claiming that this was something written after the fact.

We have found so far in our study of Daniel 11 that there are certain tactics that are commanded to believers operating in the kingdom of man, techniques for the Christian citizen. The first basic technique that Daniel wants us to know is that we must have the ability to apply the faith technique on a long-range, which equals hope. And this means that the Christian citizen will have a long-term view of history; he will look backwards and forwards and he will not look just at the immediate situation. This is something that is lacking, the historical perspective. This is necessary and a technique to be used by the believing citizen according to Daniel.

A second technique is what we’ll call a relative influence of believers as king-priests. As kings, kings are rulers and the citizen has at least some areas that he can decide policy; one of the most obvious is in voting. Until the millennial kingdom comes we can’t hope to control the overall environment but we can affect certain areas. And as priests we are to make intercession for our nation and we have found so far in this study of Daniel that intercessory prayer has some strange influence in the angelic sphere, such that intercessory prayer activates the elect angels in the salvation and sustenance of society.

We have seen a third thing that we were warned about in Daniel and that is what we will call premature efforts at building the millennial kingdom. In Daniel 11:14 you recall that one of the power plays between the king of the north, the Seleucids, and the king of the south, the Ptolemies, that certain zealous believers in the nation Israel, it says in verse 14, “shall exalt themselves to establish the vision,” this means they became super patriots and “the vision” is the vision of the millennial kingdom, and they tried to bring in the millennial kingdom by violent political means. Believers are always frustrated living in the world, and there’s always a tendency on the part of everyone of us at times to want the kingdom to come immediately and we have to discipline ourselves to watch it, because whenever believers begin to move into areas where it will properly only be directly controlled in the millennial kingdom and try to bring in a perfect organization, “they shall fall.” These believers fell because power was transferred from the hands of the Egyptians to the hands of the Syrians and that prepared the way for the rise of the antichrist.

So ironically it was believers who were to fight evil that created evil. So Daniel warns us as citizens through human good and human viewpoint tactics we can often build more evil than the unbeliever could build; it’s an irony of being a king-priest. Believers can be offers of some of the best satanic principles going. In Matthew 16:21-23 Peter has a great scheme to help Jesus. Jesus says that He is going to die on the cross and Peter says well Jesus, I don’t think you should, here’s my advice and here’s my program. And Jesus Christ replied to Peter, as He stared him face to face, “Get thee behind me Satan.” Those are pretty cutting words addressed to a believer, but those words imply that Satan can influence the minds of believers to the point where we can actually parrot Satan’s wishes under the guise of Christianity. This is an occupational hazard we all face, “Get thee behind me Satan.” That’s one passage and Daniel 11:14 is another one.

To update that a little bit and to show you one contemporary illustration of Daniel 11:14 where believers tried to established the vision and failed, we can cite public school concepts. Believers in New England tried to establish what they felt was a Christian culture and they believed that the best way of doing this was mass education and they believed that the state ought to be the one who educates. Today when I challenge there’s a little barrier that goes up in most of your minds that says well, if you destroy the public schools there’d be no education. That’s obviously showing that you don’t know too much about history because public education just began about 100 years ago; how do you suppose that people who lived before 1850 ever got educated? There was no public education. Obviously there was private education, a very simple alternative. So the issue is not education versus no education; the issue is the means of doing so.

As a modern illustration of Daniel 11:14, New England believers, under the pressure of Unitarianism and Horace Mann, tried to establish what they called the common school. Now Horace Man is considered the father or public education. Horace Mann was an apostate; he was a man who was raised in the Calvinist Biblical culture and who as an early child rejected the Bible doctrine taught to him by his parents. Horace Mann made a crusade of rejecting Bible doctrine and obviously therefore became the father of public education. To show that here was a person who has, as in verse 14, tried to establish the vision, listen to the words of Horace Mann himself:

“The successive generations of man, taken collectively, constitute one great commonwealth. The property of this commonwealth is plagued for the education of all its youth up to such a point” now listen to this one, here’s the millennial vision coming out; see Horace Mann actually thought the public school would bring in the millennium; “the education of all its youth up to such a point as will save them from poverty and vice. The common school is the greatest discovery ever made by man. Other social organizations are curative and remedial; this is preventive and an antidote. Let the common school be expanded to its capabilities; let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes and the penal code would become obsolete. Men would walk more faithfully by day and every [can’t understand word] would be more enviable by night.” Now isn’t that an amazing prophecy.

To show you how accurate this prophecy was, there was a man in the United States Senate, Zachary Montgomery, and he had a long argument why public education was wrong. Now keep in mind Horace Mann’s statement that all we had to do was have public education and crime would dissolve. Zachary Montgomery in 1860 pointed out this: In Massachusetts, which had public education since 1650, there was one criminal for 946 people in the population. The state of Virginia which in 1860 still had private education only had one criminal for 6,500 people. Obviously exactly the reverse of Horace Mann, state education increases crime, not decreases it. It increases it because it destroys the authority and responsibility of the parents; it cuts down the parent’s direct interest in their children and therefore is a promoter of crime. So state education promotes crime; state education is one of the main sources of crime in the United States. Therefore we have a sad, sad case where we today are suffering in our country because believers have, as Daniel 11:14 puts it, tried to “establish the vision.” Horace Mann and the Christians that he surrounded himself with tried to establish the vision and we are reaping the results because as the Bible says, “they shall fall.

Last week we ended with verse 17 and the reign of Antiochus III. We are studying two great powers in the eastern end of the Mediterranean. To the north you have “the king of the north” which is the great Syrian power and “the king of the south” which Egypt. The kings of the north represent one sphere of Greek power, from Alexander’s days, and the king of the south represents another line of power from Alexander’s days. And up to verse 17 we saw that the king of the north gradually took over Palestine from the king of the south. He did it by a complex power play, secret negotiations, assassinations, several wars and various subtlety peace treaties. All of this according to this vision, which remember, this vision is given by the angel direct from the Lord Jesus Christ so it’s a prophecy of what’s going to happen by the author of history.

Now in Daniel 11:18 we find how Antiochus III finally met his equal. “After this shall he” that’s the king of the north, “turn his face unto the coasts [isles],” that’s a word in the Hebrew for Cypress, Crete, for the islands in the Aegean and so on, and what it means, Mediterranean coast and “turn his face unto the islands” means that Antiochus III just couldn’t get over the lust to be another Alexander the Great, and Antiochus wanted to conquer Greece. He obviously held what is now Turkey, he controlled what is now Syria, what is now Lebanon, what is now Iraq, what is now Iran and he decided he wanted to move west and take over Macedonia and Greece. So his attention was turned unto the isles.

“…and shall take many: but a prince for his own behalf shall cause the reproach offered by him to cease; without his own reproach he shall cause it to turn upon him.” That’s a very awkward say of saying that Antiochus III met a little growing country called Rome and he made a big mistake. He tried to get smart with a Roman delegation; the Romans at the time were beginning to expand eastward in the Mediterranean, and so this zone in western Turkey and the Aegean and Greece was a zone of political competition between the Romans moving in from the west and Antiochus III moving in from the east. There was bound to be political friction and it finally occurred. And the Romans sent a delegation telling Antiochus he’d better cool it. And Antiochus III got smart and said well, you don’t have to worry about it, I’m not bothering Italy, you stay out of Greece. And this is the reproach of verse 18, it was the reproach given by Antiochus III to the Roman delegation.

Now it also says in verse 18 that “his own reproach, he shall cause it to turn upon him.” The “own reproach that he shall cause to turn” is the destruction of Antiochus III in one of the greatest military reversals of history. If you have been here during the Daniel series you remember there was another great reversal. Here’s the Black Sea, Turkey, the eastern end of the Mediterranean and Greece. There was an invasion of Greece under Xerxes back in the days of the Medo-Persian Empire. That invasion of Xerxes was stopped cold by the Greeks. The invasion was slowed at a famous pass where 300 Spartans held, at Thermopylae and they were able to slow the advance of Xerxes until the Greek fleet, under the Athenians, could gain prominence in the sea and finally get ready for battle. And so Asian domination of Europe was stopped once before. And verse 18 is a prophecy that future to the time of Daniel there will be another great invasion from Asia, not under Xerxes but under Antiochus III, and once again the domination of Europe by Asian powers will be stopped cold. God’s will at this point in history, the prophesied period here, is that Europe be autonomous from Asia. The sons of Japheth will rule the world but they will not be ruled by Asians. And therefore when Antiochus III moved into Greece, moving along the same invasion route of Xerxes, following the same topography of Xerxes, was liable to the same military tactics of Xerxes. And so in the year 191 BC, as Antiochus’ armies invaded Greece they were stopped at Thermopylae. Once again Greek defenders, on Greek terrain, stopped an invasion; they used good military tactics on proper terrain. Xerxes was stopped cold and now Antiochus III is stopped.

But not only was he stopped at Thermopylae and when he began to move back across the Bosporus and back into Asia Minor, he was pursued by the Romans. Now the reason the Romans got antagonistic, not only because of his reproach, but what stood in back of the reproach. As you know, Rome had a long series of wars with a place called Carthage. And one of the great generals of Carthage was Hannibal, the man who took the elephants over the Alps and brought them down into northing Italy and nothing stopped Hannibal, he was a genius at this thing, until finally his advance was stopped, through attrition and so on, slowed it at least, and then the Roman senate had another man by the name of Africanus, Scipio Africanus and he went down to Africa and destroyed Carthage. Well, along while this was going on, Antiochus III made a deal with Hannibal. So besides the Romans upset about Hannibal, they found this man was getting a little smart and so in 189 BC they pursued him into Asia Minor at a place called Magnesia, and there Scipio, who had defeated Hannibal at Carthage, defeated Antiochus in an extremely humiliating defeat. And the treaty that the Romans imposed upon Antiochus bred the economic conditions for the rise of antichrist.

Now this is a very interesting point of history and failure on the part of western statesmen to see this led to World War II, and here’s how. After World War I the allies forced Germany into a treaty, the treaty of Versailles. That was very, very ridiculous. German reparations were all out of proportions to the thing and it resulted, it smashed Germany, hurt Germany very badly, besides creating a wounded national pride that had a lot to do with setting the political situation that Adolph Hitler took advantage of. World War II basically is an extension of World War I, and the treaty of Versailles certainly aided things along. It was an unwisely conceived treaty; it was too harsh on the enemy. It’s all right to defeat an enemy and have a decisive defeat but when you set up situations that breed a decade of resentment, somebody is going to pay a price for the envy, the hatred, etc. that’s created.

Well, the Romans imposed this treaty. In this case the Romans had the power to do it and weren’t afraid of what Antiochus III was going to do. And as we explained earlier in the Daniel series, this treaty included six points. The first point was that Antiochus III had to surrender all territories west of the Taurus River, in other words, his boundary, he could not extend himself any longer, he was stopped in Asia Minor. That was far west as Antiochus could go which cut him off from great seaport, cut him off from great manpower and cut him off from great economic sources.

The second point of the treaty was that he had to surrender all of his elephants. That may sound like a good deal, depending on how you look at it, but that was his major weapon system, the elephants. So he had to surrender all these; the Romans had all they wanted to do with elephants when Hannibal started coming down from the north at Rome in Italy and the Romans had seen about all the elephants they wanted to see. So when Antiochus had elephants they decided they’d take care of those while they were cleaning up the Mediterranean.

The third point of the treaty was he had to surrender all ships of his fleet. The Romans are very smart here, you see, because Asians can’t invade Europe, at least in that day, they couldn’t invade Europe with a large enough army to live off the land so any invading army from the east had to be supplied by sea. So if you forced the invading army to give up its ships, they could no longer have adequate logistics to support an invasion. So the third point of the treaty was no ships, no navy, no logistics by sea.

The fourth point of the treaty was that he could not conduct forays into Greece with a recruiting of soldiers. The Greeks, individually, made fine warriors and Antiochus III liked to protect his northwestern boundary with Greek warriors, Greek mercenaries, and he was forbidden to recruit soldiers from Greece under the fourth point of the treaty.

The worst point of the treaty, the fifth point, was that he had to pay an indemnity of 15,000 talents in twelve annual installments. This would amount in today’s currency to billions of dollars. It was just like the treaty of Versailles that expected prostrate Germany at the end of World War I to pay to France, America and England this vast series of payments. The history of reparations payments is very poor and it’s stupid to write these things in a treaty because a defeated nation just doesn’t have the funds and all you do is create an animosity and breed a situation for future war. Well, the Romans imposed this indemnity and for twelve years Antiochus and his son would have to raise money; that is one of the sources for the frictions that eventually came to pass. So you can asterisks that, that is one of the unwise portions of this treaty that bred the ground for antichrist. Antiochus IV, this man’s son, is going to be the model of the antichrist who is going to come future to our time.

The sixth point of the treaty, and one also that played a great role in the rise of antichrist, is that always one of the sons of the Asia king had to remain in Rome as a political hostage. And the first man to be tapped on the shoulder and said you’re coming to Rome, you’re going to be educated under Roman teachers, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life in Roman society as a hostage was Antiochus IV, the Antiochus who will then be called Antiochus Epiphanes. So Antiochus Epiphanes now is transported to Rome and is educated in Roman culture.

So much for verse 18; verse 18 is the breeding ground for what is now to come to pass. Today we will study from verses 18-32. This is a period of history that extends from the rise of the Syrian power over Palestine to the Maccabean Wars and the freedom of the Jewish state. Next week we will have a film presentation of Masada and you’ll see the historic space/time fulfillment of passages in verses 33-34.

Daniel 11:19, “Then he shall turn his face toward the fort of his own land: but he shall stumble and fall, and not be found.” He shall turn his face toward the stronghold, literally. In other words, he needs money and so he goes on raids of the central banks of his time, which in that world were called temples. There was no difference between a temple and a central bank in the ancient world. And there is going to be no difference in the future between any one-world church and the world banking system. Banking and apostate religion at certain points of history always gravitate together. That is the thesis of Scripture. Today we don’t see it because today we still have a Christian influence left, very little but it’s still left to keep this apart. But at times when the Christian influence disappears, banking and economics and apostate religion go hand in hand, and in the ancient world the central banks were the temples. So he goes and he tries to raid these areas to secure funds, “and he shall stumble and fall, and not be found,” in the course of one of his raids he was killed, and thus endeth Antiochus III.

Daniel 11:20, “Then shall stand up in his estate a raiser of taxes in the glory of the kingdom,” one of his sons was called Seleucus IV and Seleucus IV was a monumental tax collector. You can get some idea of why Seleucus IV was a tax collector, his dad left him with twelve coming annual installments so Seleucus had to hustle to make the payments, and hustle he did. He sent tax collectors to all sorts of places, and down toward the end of his life, he ruled from 187 BC to 175 BC, along about 175 BC finally his treasury department said hey, we’ve raided this temple, this temple, this temple, there’s one other temple left and it’s in a place called Jerusalem. Let’s go down there and so Seleucus said well, I’m busy, send my assistant and his assistant’s name was Heliodorus, so Heliodorus goes to Jerusalem to collect taxes. But little did Heliodorus realize from whom he was collecting taxes, namely the Jews who believed in Jehovah God, and so in the book of 2 Maccabees 3 we read the following situation that happened when Heliodorus showed up in the city of Jerusalem to collect taxes. Jerusalem, by the way, was a center of vast wealth because they were following the principles of Biblical economics, they didn’t have paper treasury notes; they had actual gold and silver coins.

So as Heliodorus approaches the entire city comes out for prayer because they realized that that money is there, that gold, is God’s blessing, and so they ask God, whom they had given this gold, God protect it. So this goes on and describes the tremendous prayer meetings they’re having all over the city of Jerusalem and finally this is what happened.

“While they were calling upon the Almighty Lord that He would keep what He had entrusted safe and secure for those who had entrusted, Heliodorus went on with what had been decided. But when he arrived at the temple treasury with his bodyguard, then and there the sovereign Lord of spirits and of all authority caused so great a manifestation that all who had been so bold as to accompany him were astonished by the power of God and became faint with terror. For there appeared to them a magnificently caparisoned horse with a rider of frightening mean, and it rushed furiously at Heliodorus and struck him with its front hoof. Its rider was said to have armor and weapons of gold. Two young men also appeared to him, remarkably strong, gloriously beautiful, splendidly dressed, who stood on each side of him and hit him continuously, inflicting many blows on him. And when he suddenly fell to the ground a deep darkness came over him as men took him and put him on a stretcher and carried him away. This man who had just entered the aforesaid treasury with a great retinue and all his body guards, but was now unable to help himself, and they recognized the sovereign power of God. While he lay prostrate, speechless of the divine intervention, and deprived of any hope of recovery, they praised the Lord who acted marvelously for his own place; and the temple which a little was full of fear and disturbance, was filled with joy and gladness now that Almighty God had appeared.”

Now we can’t vouch for the absolute authenticity of this, this is taken from the Apocrypha, from 2 Maccabees and it’s not inspired text. But it’s a very strongly rooted Jewish tradition that something drastic happened. Nobody except the writer or 2 Maccabees actually tells what happened; all the Syrian accounts say is that he went down there, he had enough men to raid that treasury, and he came back injured without any money. So it looks very much like something happened. God is very, very sensitive about that particular hill in the city of Jerusalem.

While we were there Arnold was telling us a little bit about the post-Christian history of the temple. There was a great Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate, who tried to refute Christian prophecy because the prophecy would be that the temple would not be rebuilt on top of the hill of Jerusalem until just before Christ returned, so Julian the Apostate thought it would be a neat idea to refute Christianity by simply trying to build a temple, and if he could build a temple on that hill in the city of Jerusalem, then Christianity would be refuted because prophecy would be refuted. Later on when they tried to tamper with the hill the Roman engineers started digging down to put the footings and all of a sudden sparks come out of the ground, tremendous lightening flashes, and that’s the end of the project, everybody got scared off. So there have been these strange occurrences, and these are not reported just by believers; they are also reported by non-Christians, that people who try to tamper with that piece of real estate that God has selected for His temple, something strange always happens to them.

All right, so whatever happened Heliodorus came back with no taxes. And the other interesting thing in verse 20 is that “within a few days he shall be destroyed,” and within a few days of this incident, Seleucus IV drops dead, in the year 175 BC. So we have the destruction of the first of Antiochus III sons.

Now the way is completely clear for the most vicious ruler of all history, Daniel 11:21, “And in his estate shall stand up a vile person, to whom they shall not give the honor of the kingdom: but he shall come in peaceably, and obtain the kingdom by flatteries. [22] And with the arms of a flood shall they be overflown from before him, and shall be broken; yea, also the prince of the covenant.” Who is this man? He is Antiochus, the brother Seleucus, Antiochus IV.

Let’s look at a little history of Antiochus, and as I did in Daniel 8 I want to try to have you understand this man. It’s crucial that you understand the motivations of Antiochus IV; you say what does Antiochus IV have to do with me? Antiochus IV is your personal illustration of how Satan works in the political realm. If you expect to have any kind of discernment as a Christian citizen you must be able to spot, on the basis of Scripture, satanic political movements. This man, his biography, will give you that kind of discernment. Now Christians are very, very naïve in this area. Christians today, I believe, would vote for Antiochus IV if he ran for election. Do you know why? He fulfills all the classic Christian taboos. He’s not an immoral man, he does good works, doesn’t smoke, drank very little, perfect model of the upright citizen.

Now Christians must understand something; there’s a passage in Scripture that we went through in Samuel that contrasts Saul and David, and when Christians face this kind of a situation politically, where you have a David who may be divine viewpoint in his politics and immoral, or Saul who may be human viewpoint in his politics and moral, Christians will always vote for Saul. That’s the history of America because Christians are so uptight over a few things; they think that a vote for Saul is a vote for God. Saul and Antiochus IV were men that were just alike; they would fit the typical legalist mold, fit all the nice sweet little legalistic ethics of the Christians and take them straight to hell on a greased fly, because Christians are so stupid when it comes to the area of applying doctrine in the area of politics. I had a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary say he wouldn’t vote for so and so because he used the word “damn.” Now isn’t that too damned bad; it’s ridiculous. What does the word “damn” have to do with his political philosophy? This is what goes on, so this passage is dedicated to all nitwit Christians that will not vote for a person that uses damn once in a while.

So we have this man who is a vile person, Antiochus IV. And he worms his way in by a very clever route. Antiochus first of all starts his career where? What has he been all his life? A political hostage in the city of Rome, and so what has his education been; he’s been educated in Horace Mann’s common in school, he’s been educated in straight Hellenism. And this man is a fanatic on Greek Roman culture, an absolute fanatic. And when his father dies he starts going east to take over the kingdom, he’s going to bump off his brother if he can get there first, it turns out he didn’t have to because someone killed him first before he got there, but as he goes east he stops off at a city called Athens, and he just loved Athens because after all, he studied Plato, he studied Aristotle, Athens is the great cultural center of the world, the world rotates around Athens. So Antiochus IV dips into his wallet and pulls out this gold and says hey, look, you make me an honorary citizen of the city of Athens and I’ll build you a temple to Zeus Olympus. And so he does, in fact, the temple that Antiochus IV built to Zeus Olympus, the remnants still stand in the city of Athens today. And as he goes further east he makes all these friends with the Hellenists.

Finally he takes over his kingdom, even it says in verse 22 to the destruction of “the prince of the covenant.” When he ascends his position he destroys the legitimate high priest, he removes him and he replaces him with a stooge, because he wants money, he’s got to finish those reparations payments and his brother died. So Antiochus IV finishes off the reparations payments and one way he does so is to get rid of the legitimate high priest who is called in this verse “the prince of the covenant,” the “covenant” is the Mosaic Covenant, the “prince” is the high priest. So we have him interfering with the divine institutions.

Here is one of your first signs of satanic political philosophy. God has ordained human society to be separate, to have certain separate spheres that man always wants to mix. Antiochus IV, in place of the Church in that day you had the temple so we’ll just put temple, the sphere of grace; the sphere of grace cannot be confused with the sphere of works, with the sphere or marriage, with the sphere of family, with the sphere of law and justice and civil government, and with the sphere of international foreign relations. Those are separate spheres and God has ordained a set of principles that apply to each sphere. We bring ourselves to great suffering whenever we take one of those spheres and impose it on the other sphere.

So what Antiochus said was, as is always the case, we will take the fourth divine institution and with this one we will control all spheres with it. In other words, centralize government. And he invaded the domain of the temple; here’s his intrusion, government intrudes into the Church, government intrudes and dictates to the Church what the Church should and should not believe. And here when it says “the prince of the covenant” you have a violation of the sphere of grace, the sphere of the church, or in that day the sphere of the temple, by the government. The government decides who and what is going to happen. That is one characteristic of satanic politics and it can be done under the most worthy motive. I read you Horace Mann; Horace Mann wasn’t a drunkard, he wasn’t a thief, he wasn’t somebody that Christians would go ugh at. Horace Mann was a fine type of community leader but Horace Mann was an apostate. Horace Mann took the fourth divine institution and intruded it into the third divine institution. And the result ever since has been a destruction of education. Now that is the price we always pay for satanic politics. Satan wants to breed chaos in God’s orderly creation and he will do it by mixing up the divine institution’s, transferring one thing from one and moving it over here, that’s always part and parcel of his plan to do that. The modern concept of women’s liberation is trying to do the same thing, mix up the order of the sexes, destroy, introduce chaos, smash the order. So he does this for “the prince of the covenant.”

Daniel 11:23, “And after the league made with him he shall work deceitfully,” so he has various underhanded deals, “for he shall come up, and shall become strong with a small people. [24] He shall enter peaceably even upon the fattest places of the province;” that means the richest places, he rips them off like nobody has been ripped off before, “and he shall do that which his fathers have not done, nor his fathers’ fathers; he shall scatter among them the prey, and spoil, and riches; yea, and he shall forecast his devices against the strong holds, even for a time.” These are the various deals that were involved. Now the treachery of this thing is indicated in verses 25-28, his dealings with the king of the south. As Antiochus expanded it was obvious that he would begin to come down the coast and begin to pressure Egypt. In fact, he captured one of the Ptolemies and he has him in his tent out in the Sinai. And he fed this man, and in this passage you’re going to see the height of Oriental treachery. You can read the passage quickly and never see it but I want to point it out to you.

Daniel 11:25, “And he shall stir up his power and his courage against the king of the south” that’s the Ptolemaic line, “with a great army; and the king of the south shall be stirred up to battle with a very great and mighty army; but he shall not stand; for they shall forecast,” they shall prophecy, “devices against him. [26] Yea, they that feed of the portion of his meat shall destroy him, and his army shall overflow: and many shall fall down slain.” The most treacherous act an Oriental can ever do in this [can’t understand word] is to have someone you dine with at the table be a traitor and do you in; “one with whom I have eaten has done me in,” does that passage sound familiar. It comes from Psalm 41:10 and it’s a prophecy of Judas Iscariot. Remember the Last Supper? Who got the sop? Judas, and Jesus says one who has eaten at My table has done me in, the height of treachery. And here Antiochus IV feeds Ptolemy at the table and then does him in; it’s an insult.

Daniel 11:27, “And both these kings’ hearts shall be to do mischief,” they tried to make deals with each other, “and they shall speak lies at one table,” they had kind of a Geneva conference and they worked out accords, “but it shall not prosper: for yet the end shall be at the time appointed.” In other words, God shall frustrate this treaty. [28] “Then shall he return into his land with great riches; and his heart shall be against the holy covenant; and he shall do exploits, and return to his own land.” So verse 28 signals that when all this wheeling and dealing goes on down here in Egypt, Antiochus comes back the first time, he begins to become anti-Semitic, this is the beginning, something happens to the man’s soul at this point, we don’t know what happens, he’s still a philanthropist, he’s a humorist, one of the things he loved to do is like in a fairy store, the prince gets in the clothes of a beggar and he walks the streets of his kingdom to see what people think. Antiochus IV did that and his bodyguards, he had his own little secret service outfit and these guys were pulling their hair, every night they’d have him locked up in the room all secure, and he’d get in some weird clothes and go out in the streets and walk around, he thought that was funny. The security chief said you’re crazy but he went and did it anyway. So he’s a philanthropist, he’s a humorous, he was a good soldier, he was a wise administrator and he was a zealous Hellenist, he wanted to bring Greek culture to his kingdom. He wanted to fulfill the dream of Alexander, Hellenize this whole area, turn everything into the Greek way of doing things.

So it says in Daniel 11:29, “At the time appointed he shall return,” and this was the second time he went down to Egypt, “and come toward the south; but it shall not be as the former, or as the latter.” He comes to the south for the destruction of Egypt, across the Mediterranean Sea the Romans are just finishing up one of their last wars with Macedonia and they begin to dispatch the Roman navy down in the Middle East. The Romans, like the United States and Russia were interested in having a balance of power in the Middle East, so the Romans viewed with alarm Syria’s strength. So they tried to weaken it, and how you weaken it is by building up the opponent, Egypt. Well her Syria is down here attacking Egypt so the Roman navy moves in.

Daniel 11:30, “For the ships of Kittim” that’s the ships from beyond Cyprus and Crete, that’s the Roman navy, “shall come against him: therefore he shall be grieved, and return, and have indignation against the holy covenant: so shall he do; he shall even return, and have intelligence with them that forsake the holy covenant.” now very quickly the Bible goes over a very famous incident that happened that I explained in chapter 8, but Lucas Laenas was the man who was with this fleet, and he came with a decree of the Roman Senate, one of the most famous battlefield incidents happened as Lucas Laenas walked up to Antiochus; see Antiochus had been a hostage in the city of Rome, he had grown up with Laenas, and so here Antiochus is with his armies out in back of him, he’s ready to greet the Romans who come ashore because he doesn’t know why they’re there yet, and Lucas Laenas appears to him and he says oh, old school boy chum, and he reaches out his hand to shake Lucas Laenas’ hand and Laenas looks at him and he pulls out of his toga the decree of the Roman Senate and plops it right in his hand. And Antiochus pulls his hand back and he opens up the decree and the Roman Senate says get the hell out of Egypt. And that wasn’t quite a polite way of opening a nice boyhood get together. And so he says well, Laenas, I’ve got to think about this, talk to my advisors and so on, let’s have a good party here while we’re thinking about this. And so Lucas pulls out the sword that’s in his belt and he walks around Antiochus and he draws a circle in the ground and he says, Antiochus, you give me an answer to that decree before you step across that line. And then to emphasize the point he told the Roman legionnaires, just stand right up here. So obviously Antiochus IV has met Roman power and he backs off and says okay, I’ll get out of Egypt. And when he does so, then Laenas well, here, shake. That was the famous meeting between the Roman courier and Antiochus IV.

As a result of that meeting something cracked in Antiochus’ IV soul, he became a different man; historians say, as we have seen oftentimes in history, great leaders under strain just something gives way in their personality. He was turned into a vicious revengeful man after this, and the Bible says here in this passage, he shall be grieved; it’s a very strong word. He walks back with his army, marches back from Egypt the second time, and when he marches back from Egypt the second time he has got to go through Palestine with his army. And as he begins to march through Palestine he looks around and he sees these Jews, and something has cracked in his soul and he says these Jews are the source of all my trouble, not Rome, it’s the Jews. So he rises into a vicious tirade of anti-Semitism.

And one of the things that most bugs him about the Jews was what we will call their absolutes. See, Hellenists always want to bring everything under the control of man. Autonomous man must decide what is good and what is wrong; autonomous man must design all institutions. But the Jews said Torah, the Law, Torah, that is our standard, not Antiochus, not the Roman Senate but Torah. And this he couldn’t stand because all other countries would yield to Hellenization but these stubborn rebellious believing Jews refused to yield their absolutes. They insisted upon sticking to Scripture, and therefore this incurred his wrath.

And so it says in Daniel 11:31, “And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate.” What did he do? He walked into the city, marched along the north wall under the guise of a military parade and suddenly the soldiers breached the north wall of the city of Jerusalem; they came in and they went to the temple, and on December 25, you can understand now the Jewish thinking about December 25, what an unfortunate day for the Church to pick as the birth of Christ; Christ was not born in December. December 15, 167 BC, Antiochus and the soldiers march into the Jewish temple and they set up on the altar of sacrifice an altar to Olympian Zeus, just like he had done in the city of Athens, the Greek god of heaven. He is called in the Semitic tongue, Baal Shamayim, the lord of heaven, and so the Jews, in their usual way they had of making fun had two words that they used to describe it, translated the abomination of desolation, Baal Shamayim, the Jewish zealots would say [can’t understand Hebrew words] and it meant the abomination of desolation. The altar to Olympian Zeus was the spark that started the Jewish war of revolt. All through the land they had altars, in every town, that had to have pagan offerings, including of all things for a Jew, they had to offer a pig. This wasn’t too smart a policy.

Another thing that Antiochus wanted to do to crush this stubborn resistance against the government that was always grounded on Scriptural absolutes, he said all sacred Scriptures must be destroyed; get rid of that Torah, every place you see a copy of the Torah destroy it, burn it, tear it up. And so his soldiers went from Jewish home to Jewish home, from synagogue to synagogue and temple to temple to destroy the Torah. Then he forbade the Jewish wives to cook their food by strict Jewish law, and he deliberately kept the pure food, the kosher food, from being served. He refused circumcision; no Jewish mother could have her son circumcised. And this went on and on and on until verse 32 it says:

Daniel 11:32, “And such as do wickedly against the covenant shall he corrupt by flatteries: but the people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits.” And such as do wickedly against the covenant shall he corrupt” means that many Jews were bought off, “but those that know their God,” those are the believers, “those that know their God shall be strong.” And the war begins with a family of Mattathias. This man has five sons. Mattathias lives in a city called Modin. And in the book of 1 Maccabees, chapter 2, verse 19, is how the war began. I read this before; I read it again because this is one of the great, great moments in man’s history, when a blow was delivered for freedom. The soldiers come in, they’re going to set up a little sacrificial cult at this little city of Modin. “Mattathias answered and said in a loud voice, Though all the nations that are under the king’s dominion obey him, and fall away every one from the religion of their fathers, and give consent to his commandments: [29] I and my sons and my brethren will live by the covenant of our fathers; far be it from us to desert the law and the ordinances. We will not hearken to the king’s words, to go from our religion, either on the right hand, or the left. Now when he had left speaking these words, there came one of the Jews in the sight of all to sacrifice on the altar which was at Modin, according to the king’s commandment.” So he had just given this speech and then out from the ranks of the Jews comes this one person, the person you read about in verse 32 who’s been bribed, who goes along with the government’s intrusion.

”Which thing when Mattathias saw, he was inflamed with zeal, and his reins trembled, neither could he forbear to show his anger according to judgment: wherefore he ran, and slew him upon the altar. At the same time he killed the king’s officer who was forcing them to sacrifice and he tore down the altar. Thus he burned with zeal for the law as Phineas did unto Zambri the son of Salom.” And so on.

And there began the war; the war began 167 BC, close to our Christmas. The war went on for a year, not much happened. Mattathias went to the place…where did all the people hide in Israel traditionally? The wilderness of Judah. So he fled to the wilderness of Judah with his five sons and on his death bed he said this, and this is a very great speech that a father gave his five sons:

“Now the days drew near for Mattathias to die and he said to his sons, arrogance and reproach have now become strong, it is a time of ruin and furious anger. Now my sons, show zeal for the Word and give your lives for the covenant of our fathers. Remember the deeds of the fathers which they did in their generation. Was not Abraham found faithful when he was tested?” Then he goes on and he goes through and he gives his sons a history lesson, he speaks of Joseph, he speaks of Phineas, he speaks of Joshua, he speaks of Caleb and then he says essentially go and do likewise. So he is replaced by his son called Judas. Judas leads the revolt from 166 BC to 160 BC. Judas is called Judas Maccabeus, Judas the Hammer, and that’s where the Maccabean Revolution got its name from. It means that he was such a successful military leader, successful in many ways, and in the day when you wonder about how men can be trained to fight, just think of what this one boy did. Judas took a population that had never fielded an army, for 400 years the Jews had never fought, for 400 years the Jews knew nothing of military life, military training, and military discipline. And Judas, in the course of these six years built himself one of the finest armies the world has ever seen, an amazing accomplishment of this boy, Judas the Hammer.

Finally he was defeated in 162 BC, Jerusalem walls were completely destroyed but in the process of give and take on the deal, in 162 BC he secured a religious freedom for the Jews. In 162 BC those laws were repealed. I want you to see what’s happened; you had believers who tried to establish the vision and they fell and you have the society go into bondage. Now you watch the blood price that is being paid to regain freedom. And so in 162 BC some of the freedom is given back; in 164 BC, just before this, the temple was cleansed, exactly on December 25^th again, this time not 167 BC but 164 BC. That is forever celebrated in the Jewish calendar as Hanukkah.

Now after Judas died, he was eventually killed in battle, in 160 BC his brother Jonathan took over leadership; see, it was all in the family, an amazing family. Jonathan led the revolt from 160 BC to 143 BC; he was killed in battle. These sons were all violently killed but they gave their lives to restore freedom to the Jewish nation. Jonathan’s great accomplishment happened when he secured the legitimate high priest. So under him the high priest was reestablished, the second step in their regaining of freedom. Finally the third son, Simon, 143 BC to 134 BC, Simon ruled. And he restored tax exemption and from that point on the Jewish nation entered into a kind of renaissance with the Hasmoneans. Now all of this happened in real history and I have a few slides I want to show you where Modin is to give you an idea some of the problems these men faced as they fought for their freedom. [shows slides]

Conclusion: we will stop with some lessons, vital lessons. This passage in Daniel 11 with its fulfilled history in the Maccabean period should tell every one of you how easy freedom is to loose and what a heartache and struggle it is to get it back again. It took the Jews ten years to lose their freedom to the Syrians; ten short, easy years when freedom was lost by sliding down a grease slide. Even believers helped them out because it was believers who were their guerilla assaults on Egyptian logistics, helped the Egyptians collapse at the battle of Panias in 200 BC and therefore allow the king of the north to come in and take over; only a decade it took. But do you know how long it took them to fight and claw their way back? Sixty years of blood before the Jews secured their freedom again.

Freedom is easily lost by it has to be borne and has to be secured by violence. And this is a position that is true in both physical and spiritual areas. If you look at history, freedom has always come through hardship and usually by blood. And how does freedom come spiritually? Does it not too also come by blood? Except in this case not ours but Christ’s. Freedom always has a price; from the Exodus to the cross blood is always the price of freedom. So application to the Christian citizen, don’t be one of those, as in verse 14, who try to establish the vision and you bring in the destruction of freedom and then other believers, like the Maccabeans, like Judas, like Jonathan, like Simon, like Mattathias have to give their blood and their family and their loved ones to buy back what you in your foolishness have lost.