Daniel Lesson 49

Antichrist – 11:36-39

 

We have gotten down to verse 36, we gave studied the history from Daniel’s time forward until just after Jesus Christ.  All this was prophesied centuries before as Jesus Christ showed Daniel in His preincarnate form.  The book of Daniel focuses on two kingdoms; the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man.  These are two movements and they’re going against each other.  If one movement succeeds then the other movement can’t succeed.  If the kingdom of man succeeds then the kingdom of God can never succeed.  If the kingdom of God succeeds then the kingdom of man cannot succeed.  One movement must succeed and the other movement must fail but they both can’t succeed together.  These are opposites and each person throughout the face of the earth is involved in moving one direction or the other.  Every man, woman and child is embedded in the flow that’s moving either toward the kingdom of God or toward the kingdom of man.  These two movements control every area from politics on down to the individual.  Whatever area, whatever part of society is involved, whatever country is involved, whatever continent is involved, you have the struggle operating there between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. 

 

These struggles encompass every point of human existence.  As to their goals they radically differ.  The kingdom of man always wants man’s freedom apart from God by chance and by human works.  It’s always this way; man must have his freedom apart from God’s provision.  And man must have his happiness apart from God’s position, God’s dependence and so on.  So we have this autonomy expressed in the very goal.  All men by virtue of their sin-depraved natures seek the kingdom of man.  The baby, from the time he takes his first breath in the cradle is a person schooled and disciplined by his environment and by his own nature to seek the kingdom of man.

 

The kingdom of God comes by grace as the Holy Spirit operates on the souls of men and its ultimate objective is not man centered at all; it’s not anthropocentric but Theocentric, it’s God-centered.  And it seeks God’s glory and not man’s welfare; man’s welfare is a byproduct of God’s glory in this respect. Every political movement, every political party, every politician, every scheme, every citizen, is basically moving in one of these two directions.  You cannot move in both directions at the same time any more than you can drive your car in two different directions at the same time.  So we have basic fundamental total collision of goals. 

 

And then we have a total collision as to how these kingdoms are born into history.  The kingdom of man is always born anew as one nation forms from and old nation, they are always born in the same way, by a loss of freedom, either voluntarily as men seek what is a so-called social contract or involuntarily as men are conquered and subdued under a more powerful nature.  The kingdom of man is always born amidst a loss of freedom. 

 

Then we have on the other hand the kingdom of God always comes first by releasing guilt through forgiveness in Christ’s finished work, thereby providing the basis for true freedom in the world.  And the best picture historically happened in the 14th century before Christ in the nation Egypt, that is the Exodus.  So the kingdom of God is always born with the work of a blood sacrifice atoning for man’s guilt and then because man’s guilt is forgiven, man can come back into contact with God and His Word, receive the true wisdom principles and then become a more efficient creature and therefore a more free creature. 

Then we have the collision between the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God in the area of ethics, what is right and what is wrong.  And the kingdom of man always decides what is right and what is wrong on the basis of a majority vote, always what the majority wants is right; always what man decides will be right.  So all ethics in the kingdom of man come not from God but from man. They are man-centered ethics in their origin; man decides right and wrong. Thus in the 1930s if 51% of the German people agree that you should exterminate six million Jews, auto­matically Jewish extermination was considered right.  It was for the good of society.  So wherever you have the kingdom of man you always will have men making the rules, man legislates morality. 

 

But in the kingdom of God it’s the other way around; God alone is capable of revealing the rights and the wrongs and God legislates.  So in one man legislates and in the other God legislates.  They both cannot legislate together.  Now in practice, in governments that are influenced by the Christian system then man-made legislation reflects the God-given legislation.  And therefore we do not have real legislators, all you have is men skilled in law who reflect Christian morals into the legal structure.  That would be a bona fide case.  But in the kingdom of man, as you have in most governments in the face of the earth, you just simply have legislators deciding what is right and what is wrong. 

 

Finally you have a collision in how these kingdoms expand.  Both seek to dominate man.  Both refuse to be contained.  The kingdom of man insists it is going to dominate man and the kingdom of God insists that it will dominate man and they both can’t do it together.  The kingdom of man expands by increasing state power; always the government must increase and always the power must be centered in man and his institution.  And always there is the promise that man, by his own social engineering, can change and make a new world and that is salvation.  Under this concept the government is the savior; under the kingdom of God concept God is the Savior and all the state does in insure justice.  So under the kingdom of God you have a limited government assuring justice and you have God saving.  Under the kingdom of man you have government claiming that it alone is savior and so legislation does not become just, it becomes saving, it becomes redeeming and there’s the difference between the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God. 

 

Under the kingdom of man legislating is saving and redemptive; under the kingdom of God legislation is just and expresses the principles of God’s revealed Word.  The leadership under both, and here is where we study in Daniel 11, and this is why we review these two differences.  Ultimately both of these kingdoms have a certain quality of persons that these kingdoms rotate around.  Both kingdoms look for a certain kind of leader.  The kingdom of man looks for the perfect man and under the concepts of the kingdom of man the perfect man is the man who expresses his own soul the ultimate in pride.  Pride in man is man, autonomous man, pride that man himself can do his own thing independently of all outside help.  It is also featured by a leader who stresses that man alone must do the work to secure his salvation and therefore it is always a leader promoting salvation by human works.  That is the kind of people the kingdom of man attracts. 

 

Finally, the people always, in the concept of the kingdom of man, take divinity upon themselves so therefore you have kings sometimes called gods in history.  And this is why even the western democracies elevate the people and as Mao Tse-Tung says in an earlier address in his career, he said “the people are the god of China,” so therefore whether it’s a democracy (supposedly) or whether you have a monarchy, there’s always a tendency to deify man, deify either the king of deify the People, always spelled with a capital “P”, the “People,” the force of all power.  The voice of the people is the voice of God, that concept.

 

And then under the kingdom of God you always have as the ultimate leader a man who has humility before God’s absolutes, a man who in history would be pictured as David, a man who knows that he himself has something above him in the chain of command.  And that above him there is the absolute authority and sovereign, that he himself is only a finite creature, limited in his own sovereignty.  And you have a man in the kingdom of God who is grace oriented and he understands that only progress socially or individually can come as God is gracious to us and he is grace oriented and he expects grace and God to work in history.  And finally you have emphasis upon the man’s own humanity and his limitations; he keeps from calling himself God, he keeps from attributing to himself divine attributes. 

 

That gives you a basic summary of the Biblical philosophy of politics and government, between the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God.  Now Daniel 11 is going to carry this further because Daniel 11 has been written to warn believers throughout the centuries of these two tendencies, and every believer in every country in every age is either helping or hindering the advance of the kingdom of God by whether or not he sides with one philosophy or the other.

 

Daniel 11:36, here we have the so-called beast, the antichrist to come.  Up to verse 36 in this chapter we have studied real history; up to verse 36 we have studied from Daniel’s era, which was the Babylonian period, the Medo-Persian period, the Grecian period, on down to the Roman period, and the destruction of Jerusalem and Masada in those years.  That’s been the span of the history so far of Daniel, the four great kingdoms. 

 

Now the book of Daniel says that every government since 70 AD in the world combines elements from these four kingdoms.  Even the United States government combines elements of the four kingdoms.  The reason America has less of these elements than other countries is because in the founding of our nation we had great and powerful Christians, not a majority mind you, but you had very highly doctrinally trained Christians and these men made sure that these divine viewpoint principles were injected into the constitutional convention and so on.  But in today’s schools who bothers with the constitution; we don’t bother with the constitution any more than we do the Bible.  But as we abandon the constitution we will see elements of these four kingdoms begin to eat their way in like a cancer, into American thinking and American policies and as they do the Christians are going to be put in more and more of a crunch and more and more of a bind and there will be more and more tension between God and Caesar and more and more pressure on the Christian parents. 

 

And one of the elements that comes from these four kingdoms, from Babylon we have the concept of centralized currency.  It was Babylon that introduced the concept of systematic inflation in the world and fractional reserved banking; it was Babylon that basically is the model of all modern economic systems.  And it is Babylon and its ideas that determine the value of the world currency and behind all the discussions about controvert ability of American currency into gold is the struggle between the kingdom of man and the kingdom of God in the area of economics. 

 

The Medo-Persians, what were they known for in history and what elements do we inherit in the kingdom of man from them. The Medo-Persians were known for their hyper internationalism, the fact that all races could be brought together in unity, and so we still have that concept, bringing all races together in one organized system, disrespecting their own individual contributions. 

 

From Greece what do we have as an inheritance?  Rationalism; the Greek philosophers and the idea that man by his intellect alone can erect his own kingdom.  What do we have from Rome?  From Rome we have the concept that many by administration and engineering can apply all these previous principles to every and any social problem.  The great organizers of the world were the Romans.  So all these streams come in. 

 

Now the Bible, at the end of verse 35, “yet for a time appointed,” skips from these four kingdoms on down through what we call a gap, down to the end time just before the return of Jesus Christ. This is the way prophecy is written; you can observe this in Daniel 2, Daniel 7, Daniel 8, there is a gap; it’s like you’re on a mountain and you look over the top of the mountain and you can only see the mountain way off in the distance higher than the mountain close up but you can’t see the valley in between and the valley in between is the Church Age and the centuries that have come and gone between Christ’s coming and His future coming. 

 

But prophecy skips over the Church Age because during the Church Age due to the restraining work of the Holy Spirit the kingdom of man is held down; Christian citizens always act, Jesus says, as the salt of the earth, they preserve it, they retard the growth of the kingdom of man but as soon as the rapture occurs, as soon as the Christian Church is removed from history at that future point in time, then, just like a pot that’s been boiling under pressure and you suddenly take the lid off and the water just instantly boils, so when the Christian Church is removed from history then all the powerful forces that have been operating in society, temporarily held down by Christian citizens here and Christian citizens there, will suddenly rise up and explode and you’ll have the bringing in of the ultimate form of the kingdom of man, for God has designed history so that before He ends history men will have to see where sin leads totally.  We’ve seen somewhat, talk to the survivors of the massacres under Stalin, they’ll tell you where the kingdom of man leads.  Talk to Solzhenitsyn, he’ll tell you where the kingdom of man leads. Talk to Corrie Ten Boom, she’ll tell you where the kingdom of man leads.   But even all these awesome, horrible illustrations of the kingdom of man they’re only a fore view of the ultimate power of this man.

 

In verse 36 when you read: “And the king shall do according to his will,” “the king” is the future world dictator, the one the Bible prophecies will try to do what Christ alone can do, but the man who will attain the allegiance of most men on the face of the earth, “the king,” the, as he is sometimes called, the antichrist; we’ll correct that in a moment.  “The king,” we know there’s a break between verse 35 and verse 36 for three reasons.  First we have the precedent of Daniel 2, 7 and 8.  Second, from verse 36 on we no longer have this text check with history, nothing happened to Antiochus like this, so from verse 36 everybody agrees, whether they accept prophecy or not, that something strange happens right here and that we just can’t control this any way by what is known as history.  All these events are yet to come.  And the third and most important reason is Jesus Christ Himself interprets this material as future. 

 

What does the king do?  Let’s look at the king and see what he does: Daniel 11:36, “And the king shall do according to his will; and he shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak marvelous things against the God of gods, and shall prosper till the indignation be accomplished: for that that is determined shall be done.”  There are several things this king does, all express the ultimate leader of the kingdom of man.  They ultimately express negative volition and pride.  They all express humanism, pure humanism, pure autonomous humanism.  The king will do, not according to the controls of his environment, not according to moral principles, he has no principles outside of himself and this is the first characteristic of the king and one that is iterated, no authority above himself, either pretended or real.  This will be a man who will appear on the face of the earth, not miraculously, for all we know he may be growing up in some country today, we don’t know.  If the rapture would occur today he’d be some genius that would suddenly attain the political notice of men and one of the characteristics of his life is that he is his own authority, he charts his own way through the chaos of the world and he does according to his principles. 

 

“…and he shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god,” this means there will be a discontinuity with the past, this man may come out of France, out of the United States, England, Italy, we don’t know, but from whatever country he comes there’ll be a discontinuity with his own nationality.  He will be a man who will deny his own nationality for this is what it means in the ancient world, “himself above every god,” each nation had its own god, and this becomes a national culture.  And so he puts himself up above his national culture.  He becomes, then, one of the world’s first international [can’t understand word], one of the men who is a man not of any nation but of all nations, he claims world citizenship for himself.  He will magnify himself above every national culture and God. 

 

He “…shall speak marvelous things against the God of gods,” and that is the God of the Scripture.  “Marvelous things” is the word in the Bible for miracles, that’s what this word means in the original language, miracle.  We don’t quite know what is going to happen because the Bible itself doesn’t tell us.  All it says is this man apparently is going to make claims that are more miraculous than God’s miracles of the Old Testament.  He is going to claim for himself the ability to affect miracles in space/time history that God Himself hasn’t affected.  Now if you ask yourself what miracles are not in Scripture that modern man tends to appeal to the only ones that we could suggest that are really new from the Old Testament and a development and not really in the Old Testament would be miracles involving communication with outer space, miracles involving beings on other planets.  This is just a speculation and I label it carefully as just a speculation!  But it appears from various passages this man has power, either he projects this power or its real, but he tends to claim extraterrestrial power for himself.  He is a man of planet earth but the implication is he’s also a man of the universe.  So therefore he speaks of marvelous things against the God of Gods, who hasn’t done, so to speak, a public miracle since Christ’s resurrection from the dead, and therefore he is going to claim projects for himself.

 

It says he “…shall prosper till the indignation be accomplished,” and this is the sentence of discipline upon Israel and upon the world.  This man will have a limited time of prosperity; for three and one half years, the Bible says, he will attain a dictatorship over the face of this earth, for three and a half years he will have a time when men will kiss his feet because he brings them peace, he brings them social equality, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. he promises it at least.  And for three and a half years no one can stop him, until Christ personally comes and destroys him.  Only then will this man be stopped; he will prosper by divine permission, not because of himself, he will prosper because God in His sovereign plan must demonstrate once and for all in history where rebellion leads.  Men must understand that rebellion and sin affect every area of life and we must have a graphic illustration that humanity never forgets this again.  And this is what all history is working up to, this climax just before Christ returns.  It’s sort of a study in appreciation for Christ.  This is what happens with Him.

 

“…for that which is determined shall be done.”  “That which is determined” is the necessary lessons that men must learn.  And men, because we are all sinners, can learn only through suffering and therefore the world will suffer like it has never suffered, ever.

 

In Daniel 11:37, further describing this beast, as he’s called in other passages, “Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, nor the desire of women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all.”  The first phrase, “the God of his fathers” is taken by some commentators to mean that he is a Jew and he does not regard the traditional God of Israel, “the God of his fathers.”  But this is all based on a mistranslation because in the original text it doesn’t say “God of his fathers,” it is a word for gods that denotes pagan gods, he refuses to acknowledge “the gods,” plural, “of his fathers.”  Now how is he?  We know what nation or what nationality the antichrist is and he’s not Jewish.  And here’s why we know what his nationality is. 

 

First of all, before we go further, let’s define something.  “Antichrist” is a term of imprecision, it means “against Christ” and can be used for two people, one who is called the beast, and one who is called the false prophet.  These are two men who will appear among some countries in the future; they may be with us now but until the Church is raptured and the lid taken off men will not recognize who these people are.  But there will be two men, one the beast, who will be the world’s ruler, and the other will be a prophet who solicits worship of the beast.  One is a politician and the other is a priest.  One is a man in the area of state and the other is a man in the area of religion and together they rule the world, showing, incidentally that faith does make a difference. 

 

So “the god of his fathers” talking about the beast and when I use the “antichrist” I mean the beast, not the false prophet. This antichrist or the beast is going to rise out of the sea.  Turn to Revelation 13; having studied Daniel carefully we are prepared to interpret Revelation.  There are two attitudes of the book of Revelation; one is the naïve attitude you can just go in here and read it and understand, which you can’t, and the other is that its everybody’s interpretation.  I don’t know how people who think ever can say that, that the Bible says whatever you interpret it to say.  So many people make that remark and they just don’t’ think what they’re saying because if you just stop and replace the word “Bible” by any verbal communication, either spoken or written, you know that’s not true.  If that were really true nobody would write a book because it would be interpreted any way you want to interpret it.  Books aren’t written to be interpreted any way someone wants to interpret them; they’re written to communicate a message.  That’s why authors write books, to communicate. That’s why people write the newspaper to communicate.  There’s a hope that people aren’t going to interpret any way, they’re going to interpret it only one way, the way I mean it, I’m the author, I want to tell you something.  When you talk to somebody else do you seriously believe they’re going to take your words any way they want to interpret them?  If you really believed that you’d never open your mouth.  So that’s a hypocritical objection to the Christian faith and you don’t really believe that yourself because if you did you’d never talk.  So it’s not true that you can just interpret literature any way you to interpret it.  I grant you, people do this all the time, but that’s not the purpose of literature.  The purpose of literature is to communicate content and you communicate content by understanding how words are used.

 

So when we come to Revelation 13 we’re going to see symbols, we just don’t plow in here and read anybody’s name into the symbols, we study those words and how they’re used.  We don’t have time in this particular passage but we know at least one of these symbols.  Revelation 13:1, “And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.”  Now what does the sea stand for in the book of Daniel?  We spent at least an hour studying the word “sea.”  It is a symbol that Daniel introduces into Biblical literature and the sea stands for that which has no form; formlessness, water, it takes the shape of its container and the sea is turbulent and it’s always changing, thrashing around, waves going whichever way the wind blows.  The wind blows, and so the word wind is often used with the sea, it’s a natural picture.  If you’ve never seen the sea you’re missing part of the beauty of the world.  One of the most beautiful things to watch is a hurricane at sea, watch waves 40 or 50 feet high being thrown around in gale force winds, and when you see this  you realize the formlessness of waves, they’re thrown violently, tons of water, just heaved with the wind. 

 

Now the Bible takes this natural thing that men know and moves it over to the spiritual realm, and the word “sea” refers to humanity without a rudder, humanity blown, people without Bible doctrine and divine revelation who are blown by whatever wind comes along.  And that’s what the sea means and it consistently is used that way, not any way, consistently used that way in both Daniel and Revelation and Ezekiel and Zechariah, the apocalyptic books. 

 

Now the beast rises up out of the sea.  What’s that saying?  The sea is not Israel because Israel as a nation has the canonical Scripture, so if the beast rises up out of the sea what is it telling us?  He’s going to be a Gentile.  He is going to be a Gentile man from some non-Israelite nation.  That’s at least what we know from Revelation 13:1.  What else do we know?  We know from Daniel 9, back to Daniel 9:26, we know not only that he is going to be a Gentile, we are going to know of what tribe.  It says in Daniel 9:26, “After threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself;” for he will have nothing; now what does it say, look at that next sentence carefully, read it slowly and look carefully at the words, “and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city,” now who destroyed the city of Jerusalem in 70 AD?  The Romans. 

 

What does this say? “the people” the Romans, “the people of the prince,” so the tribe of Gentiles who were associated with the Roman administration will be that group of humanity from which comes the beast—the Romans.  Who, today corresponds to the Romans.  Obviously the Italians, although the Italians have a lot mixture; the Italians and many of the Celts who were in the northern part of Rome, and many of us have Celtic blood, and you might have some German in there too, but basically you have the people in France and England, in that area, for the core of the descendants of the people of the Roman Empire and it’s from this group somewhere, and of course the people have scattered across western civilizations so this doesn’t pin down what country, it pins down their genealogy however.  So that’s the nature of the beast as far as his racial background. 

Then we can summarize, the beast will most likely be a western European man, somebody in western culture will be the beast.  Now, it says in Daniel 11:37, he will not “regard the gods of his fathers,” so he will come out from western civilization, he will disregard the religious commitments of the west, which has largely been Christianity it turns out.  But the whole western mode, he will not necessarily, though he is a westerner, he will not necessarily act like a western thinking man. 

 

Daniel 11:37, “…nor the desire of women,” this is a hidden phrase, some have interpreted this to mean he’s an ascetic, he has no desire for women, but that is not the interpretation because that’s not the way the expression is used.  The “desire of women” is not the desire for women, it is the desire that women have.  It is that which is desired by women he will disregard.  Now fortunately we’re not alone in the woods, we have help for this phrase because it occurs two other places in God’s Word, “the desire of women,” the word “desire” in this context.  It is used in 1 Samuel 9:20 for the desire of Israel and there it means the Messiah: the desire of Israel.  In Haggai 2:7 it occurs again as the desire of the nation shall come, and again it’s the Messiah.  So therefore we suspect that this is a Messianic code word, “the desire of women” he will ignore.  “The desire of women” again is a word for Messiah because women, particularly look forward to Messiah.  How?  Jewish women because they always wanted to be the mother of the Messiah but we have to think more of the nature of woman and what would a woman want and what does she really like about Jesus Christ?  What is peculiar about a woman’s allegiance to Jesus Christ versus a man’s allegiance to Jesus Christ.  Well, we know from the nature of women from the Scripture that they basically are the decorators of culture; man is always pictured as the one who conquers but it’s always the woman who completes.  Everywhere she’s pictured in Scripture she’s pictured as either the decorator or the one who [can’t understand word], but she always complements what man does; what the male does is always perpetually incomplete unless the woman is there to finish it. So she’s called the ’ezer or the helper of the male.  And every man without a woman, unless he has the gift of celibacy, incomplete.

 

So therefore if that’s the situation what can we apply about the Messiah?  What is it that women would enjoy most about Christ’s administration?  Judging from Proverbs 30 and other passage we would have to argue that this emphasizes Christ’s beauty, the beautiful things culturally that come about because of Christ’s reign, the stability that Jesus Christ gives, for the woman is always the one that suffers most when society is unstable; stability, beauty, those kind of things, settled conditions.  So the contrast and what do we read by its opposite here in verse 37, he will regard “not the desire of women,” will mean that this man and his administration will be characterized by cultural ugliness; at this climactic moment of history there will be an ugliness across the face of the earth and there will be tremendous instability; the home life will be disrupted and it will be almost impossible for women to function any longer as women. 

 

The society will be so disrupted and so chaotic, and this man will care less about it.  Said another way, with all due apologies to the feminist movement, he could give a damn for the feminists, he doesn’t care, because this man is so powerful he rides over them.  This is something that some of you women should learn about your place as far as Scripture is concerned.  When  you break the authority of God’s Word, even if you think it’s for a good temporary goal, do you see the chain that you’re releasing?  This is it.  When evil triumphs women will always suffer more and every woman ought to be diligent that she upholds the authority of the Word, and she ought to be vigilant that social movements going on around here with whom she’s involved are not undermining Scripture because in the final analysis it will be the women who suffer most.  And here at the epitome of evil in history its explicitly stated by the Holy Spirit, this man will disregard the desire of women, the wishes of women be damned, that’s his policy, his entire policy from top to bottom.  “Neither shall he … regard any god; for he shall magnify himself above all.”  No authority outside of himself. 

 

Daniel 11:38, “But in his estate shall he honor the God of forces,” now the word for “forces” is the word for refugee places.  For example in the Psalms this is used, “O God, Thou art my fortress,” and what it means in the Hebrew is “O God, you are the place of safety.”  Last Sunday you saw the slides of Masada; that is a fortress in this sense of the word, a fortress not because its impregnable, it’s a place of safety.  The emphasis isn’t here particularly on the ability to attack the enemy, it’s on the ability to defend.  It is, in a nutshell, security.  And what will be the them of the final beast in history?  Security.  He will honor the god of fortresses, the god of places of safety or security itself and that will be his whole program, I offer you security.  We’ll see this further as it goes on. 

 

“In his estate” or in his policy, in his place, “and a god whom his fathers knew not shall he honor with gold, and silver, and with precious stones, and pleasant things.”  Now who is this, “a god whom his fathers knew not?” Obviously if this is in the future and the fathers haven’t known it, the center of worship of this administration will be radically different than anything we’ve ever seen before; there’ll be just a discontinuity, all men will be just amazed at what’s happening; there will be something entirely new without historic precedence; “the god whom his fathers knew not” will become, we could say, since the word “God” is used here, mainly for concept of what we would call forces and processes, it will be something to do with granting security to the human race.  It will be by means of a force or process that is not now known, not now recognized in history, which some authors again suspect there is interplanetary overtones to this kind of thing.

 

So he will honor this god “with gold, and silver, and precious stones, and pleasant things.”  What would that correspond to today?  How did ancient men honor their God in a way that we can understand it?  Taxes, taxes went to the temple; the confiscation of wealth to pay for this god and his administration. Or, something to do with how this force and process gives security to man and he will tax and tax and tax and tax and tax all people in all [can’t understand word] of the world will pour into this strange process of force that he will exalt with the remaining wealth of the world.  He will demand confiscation of all gold and silver, and this will be what he pays or builds up this thing.  Paraphrasing a famous slogan in our own time, “somebody knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing,” well you can do the same thing with the beast: “you are more secure over less and less until you are perfectly secure over nothing.”  This is going to be the slogan of this man’s administration. 

 

God promises us security in every area.  If this represents, say a continent, he is going to grant security inside this fortress, inside this fortress, and inside will be chaos as God’s judgments reign down on the earth and there’s geophysical chaos and everything is chaotic, this man will gather people into his fortresses across the continent and give them security here but you’ll lose your land, your freedom, you’ll be a totally insecure person except secure only in one thing finally: as man seeks his security from age to age to age and finally in this one man security is sought, what is going to be most secure in the final, final, final analysis.  Turn to Revelation 6:14, here is where man winds up with perfect security with nothing; secure now no longer in private property, secure now no longer in homes, the “desired women” as it were, there has to be something to give security, and here’s the irony.  The security that the beast finally gives is security from positive volition.  He gives a hardened heart, you are secure in your rebellion against God, you can be secure but that will be forever.  And so when Christ comes back in Revelation 6:14, “And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. [15] And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman [slave], and every free man,” all levels of society, not just the upper levels, “hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains, [16] And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him that sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.”  No repentance, no change, no bowing of the knee any longer to Christ, we defy You to the end.  That’s the last picture of man’s security; he has no private property, he has no love, he has no stability but he’s got security, security of a grounded ice-frozen negative volition.  There’s his security, and that’s what the beast gives finally.

 

For some more details turn back, “…he shall honor the god of forces; a god whom his fathers knew not.”  Daniel 11:39, “Thus shall he do in the most strong holds with a strange god,” now this is a poor translation and it would be better to translate it this way: “he will do to the defenders of the shelters with a strange god.”  The word “strong holds” in verse 39 is the same word for refugee or shelter areas that we saw before, but it’s talking about the defenders of those strongholds, so it pictures the last gasp of the human race before Christ returns, gathered together in bomb shelters, shielding themselves from the catastrophes of the end, and finally shielding themselves from Christ Himself, and these shelters will be controlled by the military forces of this last world ruler, the defenders. And he’s going to do something with his military structure together with this strange god, and we said the strange god we don’t know because by definition something is going to be new in history, so is it some strange weapon, some strange force, some strange power that he has, he will in the last analysis build his military machine around this strange force, this strange god.  And with this he will train the defenders of the shelter.

 

And “he shall do” or “he shall do for them,” in the Hebrew it’s lamed, “he will do for the defenders of the strong holds something with a strange god,” that’s all we know, “whom he shall acknowledge and increase with glory,” so as the end approaches and Christ’s return becomes more and more imminent to the end, more and more there’s an exultation of this stranger power this beast has, and he will command men to go with him, because I have what can give you security,  “and he shall cause them to rule over many, and shall divide the land for gain,”  “as wages,” not for gain but as wages.  In other words, he’s going to pay those who are a professional cadre of military experts, and he will pay them by confiscation of private property that is remaining, the state owning all property, of course, in the final days.  “And he shall cause them to rule,” he will actually have a military dictatorship over the entire world.

 

Let’s pause here and summarize.  We studied verses 36-39; we have seen something of this strange man, and you can sit there and take it just as prophecy, ho-hum, isn’t that interesting, I’ll add it to my prophecy chart, or you can ask yourself the more mature question, why do you suppose the Holy Spirit bothered to record this ahead of time for me?  Don’t you suppose the Holy Spirit, who knows we’re not going to live in that day if we’re Christians because the rapture is going to come first, why does the Holy Spirit tell us about all this when it doesn’t directly pertain to us.  There must be some applications today, and there is, because the process of the beast and this willful self-worship, this culmination of sin, is what you personally would be apart from common grace.  You can ask yourself how much of this man is in your heart; how much of the beast lies within me?  Were it but for God’s restraining grace I’d be the same way?  If God gave me the intelligence He gave this man I’d do the same thing if I were left on my own to do it; the total depravity of us all, that’s one great application of this passage.  It’s not just prophecy, it’s to show us what a horrible cancer is eating its way into all our souls.  And it’s just held down by God’s grace and that’s all. Fantastic power lust, demand for free will, lay aside all the trappings of your God-consciousness, wherever you see it, whether it’s in the woman’s demand for stability in an atmosphere of love, an atmosphere of comfort and quality, we just disregard it all and go for [can’t understand word] violence and we seek 100% security, even finally to discover that we can’t get it except we can at least be secure that we’ll never get in God’s kingdom.  That we have 100% security over.  So how much of the beast is in you.

 

Then we have another application, the appeal of the beast’s scheme to mankind.  How much does the beast’s program appeal to you today.  Let’s take some common examples, programs we see today that mirror and adumbrate this future program of the beast.  The idea that the state has the right to grant religious freedom, that may sound very innocuous to you but do you know that that’s a heresy.  Do you know that the Puritans and the Reformers never, never granted the right of a government to grant religious freedom because it wasn’t the prerogative of the government to grant freedom.  All the government can do is recognize freedom, it doesn’t grant it.  If I grant you something it implies I’ve got the right to give it to you and the Christians from the Reformation on said NO! no human government on the face of this earth has the right to give me freedom of religion because the government doesn’t possess the right in the first place to pass sentence in this area.  But the beast will, and the beast will bring all the kingdom of man to [can’t understand word/s] the state will determine who and what you work for, and when you work and where you’re working. 

 

And then the state, we’ve also seen in the beast’s day will own all the land, and the state still acts like this, even today, eminent domain, the state can take any piece of land out from under your feet it wants to, the state taxes your land, not just the produce of your land but it taxes the land itself, implying that the state has the right to tax land itself.  Under the Old Testament the state was never permitted to tax land, it was only permitted to tax the produce of the land but never the land.  So it’s not much of a gap or jump from today’s policies to the beast’s policies.  Today the state taxes your family inheritance; try and pass your wealth on to your children and see how hard it is without getting taxed four times for it.  So the state controls and gets its hands into your family wealth.  In the Old Testament that never happened; your family wealth was your own capital. 

 

The state, like the beast, tries to hold all the groups together, even if they must do it with forced [can’t understand word], but it will do it; it will ram, cram and jam men together, whether they like it or not.  And so the beast will ram, cram everyone together under, by the way, the same idea, only in this do we have social security for a good society, same old story.  I want to close with a statement from one the great students of the beast, one of the men who in the 19th century did a lot for prophetic students, to understand how this man could come to attain power, particularly out of the west. The man’s books are no longer available except in reprint form; he’s not a well-known person but he’s one of the great scholars that has influenced most 20th century students in the book of Daniel.  His name is Samuel J. Andrews and his book: Christianity and anti-Christian in the Final Conflict, and here’s what he said.  Remember he writes in the 19th century.

 

“The choice of the antichrist is not to be the choice of the rulers only, or of the popular leaders, the multitude being unwilling, and silent and passive; it is the act of the peoples, the direct or indirect expression of popular will.  It is the voluntary declaration of Christendom, we will now have this man rule over us, not this man but Barabbas, that’s who we want.”  We may note here that a democracy, looking upon its leader as its representative, willingly gives him a power even greater than the largest measure of his political prerogatives, the sovereign multitudes, the people, which sees in their leader not so much the ruler who commands them as the one who is the exponent and executer of their will; that people yields to their ruler such a full and unreserved obedience as no despot could ever attain.  Democracy, headed up in one who can sway its forces, has such elements of aggression and strength as no form of government hitherto existing has ever had. When laws and institutions are no longer reverenced as having religious sanction, when continual change after change after change after change,” this is written in the 19th century, “when various institutions are continually changed, they have no root in the traditions or love of the people.  When rulers by popular election prove themselves incapable, when no surety or stability of legislation exists, and all are uncertain and anxious as to the future, then there arises a general cry for a man.  In the gentle disintegration it is only about a man that men can rally; it’s not about abstract principles or written constitutions, all cry for one with a clear brain, an inflexible will, and a strong arm who can serve as the center of unity and bring order out of confusion.”

 

Don’t let the beast’s policies prevail in our time.