Daniel Lesson 27
Prophetic Symbols; The Sea and the
Wind – Daniel 7:1-2
We are going to continue our study
in Daniel 7; last week we spent our time in a bit of review but also helping us
understand the overall structure of Daniel and what is about to
transpire. The first 6 chapters of Daniel relate to Daniel’s personal
history and Daniel 7-12 relate to Daniel’s visions. There are five
visions covered in the last 6 chapters and those visions all take place within
the framework of the life covered from Daniel 1-6. We have an outline of
the book that we’ve worked on in terms of its language structure. There
is the history, the personal history of Daniel in chapter 1; then from 2:1-7:28
there’s the history of the Gentile powers, and in chapter 8 it is a return to
the history of Israel. This is evidenced by the fact that chapter 1 is
written in Hebrew; the second chapter in Aramaic which was the lingua franca of
both the Babylonian and the Persian Empires and then the history of Israel where
the focus is more on God’s plan and purposes for the nation Israel, from
chapter 8-12.
Now this is important because we
have to lock this down in history. This happens at a time when the people
of Israel, who are God’s covenant people, He promised them the land, He
promised them eternal blessing and they’ve been ripped from the land because of
their disobedience. They have been defeated by a foreign power and they
have seen the temple destroyed, they have seen Jerusalem reduced to rubble,
they have seen many of their friends and family and loved ones hideously killed
in a time of horrible war and taken from the land, transported to Babylon where
they survived as captives; 70 years have gone by now, by the time of our study,
they’re on the verge of leaving. But the book of Daniel is given during
that time to give the nation hope, to inform the Jews that God is the God of
Gentiles as well as the God of Israel, that God has a plan that He is
developing starting at this time, there’s a shift.
We saw that last time, a shift in
God’s plan from a primary focus on Israel to where He is going to be working
through Gentile empires and it is on the basis of empires that God is going to
govern history and provide historical periods of stability so that as there is
peace brought in by these empires the gospel can go forth. There are
examples of the tremendous peace that existed under the Roman emperors,
especially the Antoine Caesars at the end of the 1st century and
beginning of the 2nd century and it was during that time of
unprecedented peace called the Pax Romana that the gospel went out all over the
Mediterranean area; it left Rome and headed east into the Parthian Empire, and
down into India, it went north from the Roman Empire into what was then Gaul,
which is now France, and into Germany as well as into England. So the
gospel spread throughout the known world at that particular time under the
Roman emperor. There have been other times of peace established by other
empires, for example, the British Empire in the 19th century and
also under the aegis of America during the 20th century. So
God’s plan for the Gentile is to dominate history and primarily the western
nations, Western Europe will dominate history and under that umbrella the
gospel will go forth.
We looked at the structure of
Daniel, it’s divided into two sections: Daniel’s personal life history in the
first 6 chapters and prophetic revelation in chapters 7-12. The first 6
chapters cover the four Hebrews, four empires, the fiery furnace, the fall of
Nebuchadnezzar, and the fingers writing on the wall and then the false
accusation resulting in Daniel’s being put into the lion’s den. And then
we come to the last five visions. We get a vision of the four beasts in
chapter 7; there’ll be the vision of the ram and the he-goat in chapter 8 which
is crucial to understanding tribulational events. Then in chapter 9
there’s the vision of the seventy sevens and then the vision of the last days
in chapters 10-12. So keep that in mind to give an overview. I had
a seminary professor who used to talk about the fact that we had to have
something to organize all these details so when you go into your closet, the
closet in your mind, you have to have main coat hangers on which you start
hanging up and organizing all the specific details. So these are the big
coat hangers that we have in our mind for organizing all the details that we’re
going to study in the text.
Now one of the problems that you get
into as you study a book like Daniel is all of the symbolism that you
encounter. Prophetic literature, especially, is loaded with symbolic
literature and by prophetic literature I mean more than any other books at this
point, Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah and Revelation. They are loaded with
symbolism and people get pretty intrigued at times and curious and come up with
all kinds of speculative ideas about what this thing might symbolize and that
thing might symbolize, and so we have to understand some basic principles about
the interpretation of these symbols.
First of all, symbols are to be
interpreted consistently. That means that when you are in Daniel and you
see, as we will this evening, the four winds stirring up the great sea, when we
come to other passages in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, in Revelation that talk about
the great sea it will be interpreted in the same way. These symbols are
established, it’s not just the idea of people subjectively coming along and
saying well, I think this can mean this and that can mean that and you’ll run
into some people that think you can just make the Bible mean anything.
No, there are rules of interpretation.
And God intends to communicate
clearly. This is our second point, God intended to communicate
clearly. God intended to communicate something, something specific and if
we do not properly interpret it then we are wrong. God did not intend to
communicate four or five different contradictory things when He revealed
these things. He did this in order to provide specific information; He
did not say these things in such a way that we can take it to mean just about
anything then it means nothing. It’s just like when you talk to someone
or write someone a letter; you expect them to understand exactly and precisely
what you’re trying to communicate to them. You don’t expect them to take
it 800 different ways. If you write something down and write a letter to
somebody you don’t expect… if you send a message or one of these Christmas
letters that some people write at Christmas to tell their friends and family
about all the things that went on during the last year in their life, you don’t
expect everybody that reads that to get something different our of it.
You intend to communicate something specific and God intended to communicate
something specific and there is only one accurate interpretation of what God
says.
I think that’s a crucial principle
that is lost. God intended to communicate something, and I would rather
be guilty of saying God said this and it means X and be wrong than to say well,
you know, it could mean A or it could mean B, or it could mean Z, you all just
take your pick. God intended to communicate something and we ought to
have the courage to study the text and that’s what has to happen, especially
with prophetic literature, is there has to be a tremendous amount of study in
order to properly understand it and interpret it.
That leads to the third point, which
is that prophetic literature assumes knowledge of other Scripture.
Prophetic literature assumes that you know other Scripture. The more that
I am getting into this study of Daniel and study of prophecy and these last six
chapters the more I’m realizing that prophecy is that branch of theology that
you don’t get into unless you have already mastered numerous other areas of
theology. We’re going to get into some angelology tonight, demonology,
get into a lot of theology proper and Christology and if you don’t have these
areas clearly established in your own thinking before you get into prophecy
then you can really get into some very strange interpretations.
Soteriology is crucial to establish in your own thinking before you ever get
into the study of prophecy. So prophecy is not really designed to be
handled by brand new baby believers. But so often that’s how it’s treated
in the Church today.
What’s the first thing people tend
to get into? Or what is one of the first things that attract people to
Bible study? Well, I want to know about the future, they have a curiosity
about Armageddon and about end times events and especially today when we are
constantly watching on the news events surrounding the temple mount, and events
surrounding Israel and the land, and whether or not they are going to concede
part of the land to a Palestinian homeland, and all of these different
events. People what to know what the Bible says about this. And
what we learn from studying prophetic literature… the reason a lot of people
have trouble, you start reading Ezekiel sometime before you go to sleep at
night you might have some interesting dreams. You start reading
Zechariah, Zephaniah, and people get confused when they get into Revelation,
and incidentally, a lot of things that always bothers me a little bit are
people who put an “s” on the end of Revelation and call it Revelations.
You’ll hear people do that every now and then and not only does it betray your
inability to read the Scripture, but it is false. It is “The Revelation
of Jesus Christ,” that’s the technical title for the last book in the Bible,
singular, “The Revelation of Jesus Christ.” It is not Revelations!
So if that applies to you then at least you’ll go home with one piece of
application.
But it’s interesting and somewhat
ironic that that’s exactly what happens in our culture today is we start people
off on prophecy. They read something like Late Great Planet Earth or they read one
of the books in the Tim LaHaye series, or something like that and that gets
them going, yet when you get into reading prophecy and trying to interpret it,
it demands an understanding of other areas of Scripture and if you don’t have
that under your belt then you can get yourself in trouble or you’ll just get
confused and give up.
So Daniel is going to address five
visions starting in verse 7 and each of these visions builds on the one
preceding just as Daniel 7 builds on the history laid out in Daniel 2 with the
great statue of a man that Nebuchadnezzar saw. Now when we come to these
final chapters in Daniel they are out of chronological sequence and we ought to
ask the question, why is it that these last chapters are out of sequence
chronologically in relationship to the first half of the book. One of the
reasons is that they are addressing a shift in theme. For example, we
come to Daniel 7:1 we read: “In the first year of Belshazzar, king of Babylon, Daniel
saw a dream and visions in his mind as he lay on his bed; then he wrote the
dream down and related the following summary of it. [2] Daniel said, I
was looking in my vision by night, and behold the four winds of heaven were
stirring up the great sea.” “The first year of Belshazzar,” 7:1, was
approximately 553 BC, so that means that Daniel 7 is out of chronological
sequence because at the end of Daniel 5 we saw the collapse of the
Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Chaldean Empire, and the death of Belshazzar.
So this happens quite a bit earlier, it happens between Daniel 4 and Daniel
5.
We look at the chart I have on the
overhead and we see that Daniel 2 was written about 603 BC or at least the
events there took place in 603 BC where you have the dream that Nebuchadnezzar
had of the statue with the head of gold. Daniel 3, which is the episode
of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego and the fiery furnace, that took place
sometime between 603 and 562 BC. Daniel 4 is also sometime between 603
and 562, nearer to 562, probably about 545 or 565 BC, just before the end of
Nebuchadnezzar’s life. Daniel 5 takes place in 539 BC with the fall of
the Neo-Babylonian Empire and then Daniel 6 takes place about 538 BC or
later. So these events go in between Daniel 4 and Daniel 5, probably
right around 551-553 BC.
Now the reason that these latter
chapters of Daniel are out of chronological sequence is because they deal with
a different subject matter. From chapter 7 on we are going to deal with
information that is really directed towards the believer and the believer in
Israel. By application we can extend that to the mature Church Age
believer today, but we are dealing with God opening up a little trap door so
that we can look inside His thinking to see what His plan and purpose is for
history. Now I pointed out last time that one of the problems that we
have in judging history is we don’t have God’s particular insight into what’s
going on in the Church Age, we know there are historical trends in the Church
Age, but no prophecy is being fulfilled in the Church Age and there is no
specific prophecy in the Old Testament related to the Church Age. Nothing
has to be fulfilled in order for the rapture to take place. But we can
see from our study of Daniel 7 and Daniel 2 that God definitely has a plan and
what we are going to see is that whenever we study history, read a book on
history or sit in a classroom at a university or college on history we’re going
to learn that there are certain things that cause history.
You might have a professor who
believes in a geo-economic causation of history where he spends a lot of time
talking about the way, like for example England was an island and it has
certain mountains over to Wales and mountains up in the north in Scotland, that
influenced the character of the British people and how their history
developed. Or you may have somebody who has a Marxist background, they’re
going to focus on certain economic issues and they’re going to focus on the
differences between the classes, the working class, and you know, there’s all
kinds of different things in history and there’s a certain element of truth to
all of these. You might have somebody teach history from a military
perspective and have a course on warfare that looks at how history progresses
because of the rise and fall of nations and the strength or weakness of their
armed forces. All of that is legitimate but it’s not the whole story and
what we learn in Daniel is the ultimate control factor in history, the ultimate
causation factor in history is the sovereignty of God. Jesus Christ
controls history and it is God through Jesus Christ who is controlling the
events in history and moving history towards its final culmination.
So what we see, first of all, is
that in the early part of Daniel the emphasis is on God’s sovereignty.
The issue is on God’s sovereignty, that He is the God who rules all the
nations, not just Israel. He rules the Gentiles as well as the
Jews. But in the latter part of Daniel, from Daniel 7 on, the emphasis is
on God’s righteousness and justice. The kingdom of man in Daniel 2 is
depicted in relationship to the sovereignty of God whereas the kingdom of man
in Daniel 7 is depicted in terms of its relationship to God’s justice and the
fact that God will ultimately judge the kingdom of man. The question that
is answered in the second half of Daniel is the question: is evil going to be
eradicated? Is God going to finally and totally judge evil and right
every wrong.
The first part of Daniel is written
to the Gentile nations and for them to understand and the second half of Daniel
is written to Jewish believers so that they can understand what God is doing in
history. God is presented as a God who is 100% sovereign in the first 6
chapters and the second half addressed the question, is God truly just when
there is so much suffering and so much evil in this world.
A second thing that we should notice
is a shift that takes place from chapter 6 to 7 is that what happens in the
first half of the book, and pay attention to it, who receives the dreams and
visions and who interprets them? In the first half of the book Gentiles
received the dreams and visions and Daniel interprets them. In the second
half Daniel receives the dreams and visions and an angel interprets that to
Daniel. So there is a difference. The visions in the first part are
given to Gentiles and in the second half given to Daniel.
And finally, as I just indicated, a
third shift that takes place is that the one who does the interpreting is now
an angel. And this is typical in prophetic literature. In the last
half of Daniel an angel is going to appear several times to interpret the
visions to Daniel so he can’t make a mistake. See, God is a God of
precision, He is not only going to communicate something and He intends to
communicate something precise with these dreams and visions but then he’s going
to make sure that He can’t be misunderstood, that the prophet is not left there
with just this vision where he can jus assign any meaning he wants to to these
animals or these creatures, but there will be an angel who will specifically
tell him what each of these elements refer to. The same kind of thing
happens in Zechariah and in Revelation. There is always an interpreting
angel on hand to inform them of what the visions mean.
So that lets us into a little
insight into angelology and what we’re going to see is that angels are crucial
in the outworking of the plans of God in human history. It is angels who
move things along, angels that influence the direction of nations. Now we
don’t see that, we just see the results of that. But when we operate on
some kind of theory of history that functions just on empirical data, it leaves
out both the operation of the angels and the operation of God, so we see that
all of human history is clearly related to the angelic conflict. Now
that’s something that’s just going to go right over the heads of a lot of new
believers, as soon as you start talking about angels and demons and Satan
today, a lot of people who are brand new believers just sort of raise their
eyebrow, that seems a little off the charts for them. But the Bible makes
it clear that there is a personal creature that we know of as Satan and that
there are personal demons and that they exist and that they are involved in
human history, even though they are under the sovereign control of God and
cannot operate on their own willy-nilly, just visiting whatever kind of evil
they want to on people any time they choose. They are clearly under the
control of God and that’s seen in Job 1 and Job 2.
Now what we see at the beginning of
Daniel 7 is that just as we find in other passages, Daniel is told by the
interpreting angels to write down exactly what he sees in his vision in order
to provide it for every believer in subsequent human history. This is
seen in Daniel 12:4 where the angel tells Daniel, “But as for you, Daniel,
conceal these words and seal up the book until the end of time; many will go
back and forth, and knowledge will increase.” So he is to write these
books down, that’s what that means, he is to write these books down, and what
he also infers there is that it’s meaning will be somewhat hidden and obscure
for a long time. Now we, in the 20th century have a lot more
perspective, historical perspective than Daniel did, than those who lived in
the early Church did, and so we can have a little bit better understanding of
what is going on here.
We live at a time where we’ve seen
the incredible destruction of modern technology; we live in a time when we
watch what’s going on in Afghanistan and some of the tools that the soldiers on
the ground are using in order to track down the enemy and the destructive
capability of our weaponry is just truly amazing. And that’s the kind of
thing that we can easily see fits into the high death rate revealed in these
prophetic passages. Furthermore, since 1948 Israel is back in the land
and we know that there must be a remnant in the land, there must be a nation
Israel in the land in order for the antichrist, the prince who is to come, to
sign a peace treaty. That kicks off the seven year Tribulation and we’ll
study that when we get to Daniel 9. Not only that, but in the last 15
years there has been more and more of an emphasis placed on the rebuilding of
the temple.
When Tommy was here a couple of
years ago, almost three, he talked about the book that he and Randy Price had
written, Ready
to Rebuild, and yesterday I just got Randy’s new book, I think it’s been
out about a year and a half, called The Coming Last Day’s Temple, it’s about 700
pages of the most detailed study of the temple that you could ever
imagine. There’ll probably never be another book written like that
because there are few people quite as detailed minded as my friend Randy
Price. I’ve known Randy since high school so I can get away with
that. We went through seminary together; we’ve known each other many,
many years and he is just an incredible student and there’s some fascinating
information in there, especially with regard to what has been going on in
Israel in more and more groups. There are many different groups aside
from the Temple Mount Faithful, there’s many other groups that are involved in
trying to rebuild the temple and he has a quote in there from a survey that was
done in 1996 where in response to this survey 58% of the Jews interviewed were
in favor of rebuilding the temple. Now that’s in contrast to statements
made about ten years before that where there were only about 10% or 12% that
were interested in rebuilding the temple. So there is a tremendous
interest there. Then last fall when Ariel Sharon went on to the temple
mount to prayer, that’s what Arafat used as a justification for this current intifada
which means uprising, and so all of this focuses on what’s going on in the land
and with Israel and with God’s future plans for Israel.
So as we look at these events in
light of Daniel 12:4, knowledge has increased, we think that we’re near the end
of time and we’re able to see how things are being set up for the fulfillment
of these prophecies. There are other commands to write down prophecies in
Revelation 1:19 and Revelation 21:5. These were to be written down for
the edification of Church Age believers in the coming centuries.
Now we look at Daniel 7:2 and Daniel
writes…I want to go over the first 4 or 5 verses briefly to give us the
overview of what’s happening in the introduction, “ Daniel said, I was looking
in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up
the great sea. [3] And four great beasts were coming up from the sea,
different from one another. [4] The first was like a lion and had the
wings of an eagle. I kept looking until its wings were plucked, and it
was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man; a human
mind also was given to it. [5] And behold, another beast, a second one,
resembling a bear. And it was raised up on one side, and three ribs were
in its mouth between its teeth; and thus they said to it, ‘Arise, devour much
meat!’”
We’ll stop there but that’s enough
to give you a clue as to some of the symbols that are included in this
section. So we have to take some time to carefully analyze these and see
what they mean in Scripture. We will begin with the second verse where
Daniel says, “I was looking in my vision by night,” so he is asleep and this
vision comes upon him, and the difference between a vision and a dream is that
in the vision there is going to be communication, two-way communication between
the one who is seeing the vision and the angels and God who is giving the
vision. So there is two-way communication, the one seeing the vision can
ask questions. And the first thing he sees is “the four winds of heaven
stirring up the great sea,” and in the Aramaic he used participles to relate
that and that indicates the drama of the situation and the present reality of
it to him at that time.
We need to ask the question as we go
through this: what are the four winds of heaven? What’s the stirring
up? And what’s the great sea? And I think the best way to attack
this is to start at the end and define what the great sea is. First of
all the verb; the verb is an Aramaic participle from giyach, which means to burst forth, to
break forth, to surge and to push; it doesn’t mean simply to strive or to stir
up, it has a very strong connotation. It is used in certain passages, for
example in Job 40:23 it’s used to describe the surging and writhing motion of a
baby as it emerges from the womb. Other passages do that as well, such as
Job 38:8 and Psalm 22:9. It’s also used to describe the fighting motion
of an army as the soldiers come forth from hiding in ambush and break forth
upon the enemy soldiers and this is seen in Judges 20:33, where we read: “The
all the men of Israel arose from their place and arrayed themselves at
Baal-tamar; and the men of Israel in ambush broke out of their place, even out
of Maareh-geba.” So as the ambush breaks and overflows the men they are attacking,
that is the word giyach.
So the basic usage is that of bursting forth, of giving forth, and it implies
something that is violent, something where there is a tremendous amount of
pressure.
So whatever these four winds are,
suddenly they are blasting in from the four corners. One minute the sea
is like glass, some of you navy guys have been out on an ocean where it’s been
very calm, almost like glass with just a very subtle undulating motion and then
a storm comes up and you can see tremendous waves develop. It takes a
while, you get 100 mph winds coming along over the surface of a calm body of
water and that generates a tremendous amount of friction that over time is
transferred further and further down, and if you’ve got a shallow body of water
especially, there’s not a lot of place for that energy to dissipate so in can
create incredible waves. In fact, it’s worse to be in shallow water than
deep water when you’ve got high winds. So these violent winds break forth
on this calm body of water and this is what Daniel is picturing here, that his
time in history…we’re going to look at what the waters are, we’re going to look
at what the winds are, but this is what’s happening in history. Up to
this time you’ve got calm placid waters and then suddenly, at this time in
history, between 600 and 500 BC these violent winds are going to break forth in
human history.
But we’re not left to just guess at
what this might refer to. Daniel 7:17 is where the interpretation begins
in this chapter, and what we’ll do is the first half of the chapter, from 1-16
gives us the vision, 17 and following gives us the interpretation, so we’re
going to go back and forth between the first half and the last half to talk
about the vision and then its interpretation. So we see that the great
sea has to do with the earth or the kingdoms of the earth. Daniel 7:17
says, “These great beasts, which are four in number, are four kings,” so the
four beasts are four kings and that’s going to relate to the four kings that we
discussed in Daniel 2, the Neo-Babylonian or Chaldean Empire, the Medo-Persian
Empire, the Greek Empire and the Roman Empire. So these are the four
kings and they “will arise from the earth.” So the waters describe the
earth, or human society. And this is a consistent theme in Scripture
where the waters always picture humanity as a group of people that are tossed
to and fro, that are easily influenced, and shaped and moved in a particular
direction. In fact, the Salt Sea in the sea is always a picture of something
evil, something that has potential for evil, something that’s out of control
and chaotic, and something that can produce tremendous destruction.
So one of the principles that we
have to discover when we get into something like this is look at how these terms
are used in the Bible. There are five principles of the Scripture’s use
of the sea in its relationship to humanity. The first point: the great
sea is the source of the inhabitable world at creation. Go back and look
at Genesis 1:2-10 and the dry land comes up out of the sea, in Genesis 1:2 the
earth has been covered in water and that’s been frozen, there’s no light,
there’s no light so there’s no heat, so it’s in an ice pack. And then the
Spirit of God begins to move on the waters and the reason that it’s that way is
because of the judgment on Satan and the angels that took place between Genesis
1:1 and 1:2. So starting in Genesis 1:2 you have a recreation or
restoration of the planet that takes place in six literal 24 hour days, and the
dry land comes up out of the sea, Genesis 1:2-10, and also 2 Peter 3:5.
So the sea is seen as the source of the inhabitable world and the
inhabitable world and the order of the inhabitable world is taken out of the
great sea. The great sea is chaos; God has to bring order into a
situation where He can create human life.
Second point: the waters also are
used as a picture of physical birth at our creation, or in other words, to put
a little play on an old saying that was used in teaching evolution, ontogeny
recapitulates Biblical cosmogony. Those of you who it’s been a long time
since you were in high school biology, there used to be a saying that ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, and what that means is that if you look through the
various stages of the embryo, there was a time when they thought that you could
look at it at 2-3 weeks and there were these little folds there so those were
gills and then a few weeks later they would look at other elements and say
well, that’s when it’s emerging into a reptilian stage and the theory was that
if you watched the embryonic development in the womb then it recapitulated or
repeated the stages of evolution. That’s just pure hogwash and it’s been
proven to be completely false by now, but that’s what their statement meant,
was ontogeny, which is the life in the womb, recapitulates phylogeny, but here
we’re saying ontogeny recapitulates Biblical cosmogony. Life comes out of
the water in the womb, just as life came out of the water in the original
restoration week of Genesis 1. The first analogy between ontogeny, that
is what goes on in the womb, and Biblical cosmogony is found in Job 38:8 which
identifies the waters in a pregnant woman with the waters from which the earth
came. This same analogy is also used in Psalm 139:15 where a woman’s womb
is actually called the earth. So there is this definite Biblical analogy
drawn between the original creation, creation week, and birth, our birth.
Point number three: the sea,
therefore, is the source of the inhabitable world at creation and then again
after the flood. This is seen in several passages in Job. The sea
is the source of the inhabitable world at creation and then again after the
flood. For example, Job 26:8 says, “He wraps up the waters in His clouds,
and the cloud does not burst under them; [9] He obscures the face of the full
moon, and spreads His cloud over it. [10] He has inscribed a circle on
the surface of the waters at the boundary of light and darkness,” that goes
back to the original restoration when God limits water so that water cannot
exercise its destructive force on the planet. And if we go back to verses
8-9 it talks about the waters and the clouds, that’s the water vapor canopy that
was separated over the earth. When it rains for 40 days and 40 nights
that’s not enough to flood the earth. What had to happen was water had to
come from another source and God had stored this water above the atmosphere the
second day of creation and that is where most of the water came from.
Genesis 6 said that the waters, the fountains of the deep burst forth and the
windows of heaven were opened, it rained for 40 days and 40 nights but then the
water continued to rise for another, approximately 180 days, so you have six
months at the beginning of the flood, it took another five months before things
finally calmed down enough to where they could beach the ark, and it was
actually a year, 360 days from the day they went into the ark to the day they came
out of the ark, and it was at that time that God once again restricted water,
put a boundary on the water.
Job 38:8 uses this same analogy, “Or
who enclosed the sea with doors, when, bursting forth, it went out from the
womb. [9] When I made a cloud its garment, and thick darkness its
swaddling band, [10] And I placed boundaries on it, and I set a bold and
doors.” See, God placed boundaries on the water so it can’t exercise that
chaotic influence, that destructive influence. God has established
that. All of this is simply just to picture the point that historically
and biblically water has this imagery of being unrestrained chaos and potential
evil and destruction. And this is one reason why at the end of time, in
Revelation 21:1 we’ll see in the new heavens and the new earth there is no
longer any sea. John wrote there, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth;
for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer
any sea.” So the sea is completely missing from the perfect environment
of the new heavens and the new earth.
The fourth thing about the sea; in
the Bible the sea eventually becomes the symbol of unstable human society in
the kingdom of man. The sea becomes a symbol of unstable human society in
the kingdom of man. The first three symbols dealt with literal physical
water and this fourth principle shows how it is used to symbolize chaos.
Remember, water as a liquid takes the shape of its container, so water can take
any shape. You can put it in a bowl and it’ll have a rounded shape of a
bowl. You can put it in some kind of a Jello mold and it’ll take the
shape of that mold and you can freeze it and have ice cubes in all kinds of
different shapes, you can put that liquid in any kind of mold and it takes that
shape. So it’s malleable, it’ll fit whatever environment that’s around
it. So water in that sense is unstable and it’s a picture of people, they
don’t have their own shape, they’re just twisted and take the shape of whatever
is going on around them. When they’re with certain peer groups they just
follow whatever the crowd wants to do. So it’s a picture of instability
and the winds can blow upon the water and cause it to take many different
shapes and be very destructive. So that picture is used in Ephesians 4 of
people who are just tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, it’s that
picture of the destruction of the water.
The fifth way in which water is
used, the great sea, is a picture of…[tape turns]…as pathetic because
unregenerate people are vulnerable to and are the victims of satanic
influences. They are the victims of Satan’s influences, Ephesians
4:14. People without Bible doctrine are suckers for every possible
satanic deception, they don’t have the Word of God, they don’t have any absolutes,
they are completely malleable by whatever influences there are around them,
whatever their education background is, whatever the media wants them to do,
they are influenced by all of these different things and Satan is part of that
influence that comes against them. So the great sea here is a picture of
fallen human society. It is a picture of the kingdom of man in all of its
destructive potential. That’s the first element.
Now the second thing we see here in
Daniel 7:2, Daniel is “looking on his vision by night, and behold, the four
winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea.” So the four winds of
heaven are breaking forth on the great sea of humanity. Now what are
these “four winds of heaven” which are causing this tremendous tempest, because
that’s what’s pictured here, is suddenly these winds come up and it takes some
time but it stirs up the sea and they are not fighting against each other, they
are all working against the sea. It’s not a picture of the wind striving
against each other, which is an idea you can get from the King James, but they
are fighting against the sea, they are stirring up the sea to produce something
specific.
Now obviously the word “four” there
is a number of completion and it indicates that the wind is coming from the four
points of the compass, it’s coming from every direction and it’s falling upon
human society in order to create a tempest. Now the word for “wind” there
needs to be dealt with. “four winds of heaven,” the Hebrew word for wind
is ruach;
ruach is the word for spirit, it’s the same thing you have in the
Greek. The Greek word for spirit is pneuma, it’s also the word for wind, it’s the
word for breath, and it can be the word even for mental attitude. Ruach is the
same way in the Hebrew. The Jews did not think abstractly as we do but
they think of…for example, they thought of the human spirit in terms of its
breath, when the baby takes its first breath that’s when it becomes truly alive
and truly human and so they pictured these immaterial things in terms of a
concrete wind. So “the four winds of heaven” are not just dealing with
four physical winds, the movement of air, but they are of an angelic army and
we need to look at this in the Scripture to see how we get the idea that the
winds of heaven are an angelic army.
First of all, turn to Ezekiel
37. Ezekiel is another prophetic book that uses this same imagery, and
Ezekiel 37 is the famous dry bones passage. You know the old song that
came out in the 50s, “dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones,” well that’s what
this was based on. Ezekiel 37:1 says, “The hand of the LORD was upon me, and He
brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of the
valley; and it was full of bones.” Now these bones are scattered
everywhere and they’re dry. This is a picture of the nation Israel in the
Diaspora that’s been completely scattered throughout all of the nations.
Verse 2, “And He caused me to pass among them round about, and behold,
there were very many on the surface of the valley; and lo, they were very
dry.” Now I have heard an exposition of this, I haven’t had the time to
go into all of the details of Ezekiel 37 in my own study, but it would seem to
make some level of sense and that is that after the holocaust where the Jews
were baked in the ovens of Auschwitz and Birkenau and many other Nazi camps,
they were baked, they were dry, you have the dry bones and it was that
holocaust that gave birth to Israel, to the modern state of Israel. And
so it’s very possible that you begin to see the fulfillment of this prophecy in
these events because this is a picture, in Ezekiel 37:1, of God’s restoration
of the nation and eventual regeneration of the nation.
Ezekiel 37:3, “And He said to me,
‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ And I answered, ‘O Lord God, Thou
knowest.’” Verse 4, “Again He said to me, ‘Prophecy over these bones, and
say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.’ [5] Thus says the
Lord God to these bones, ‘Behold, I will cause breath to enter you that you may
come to life. [6] And I will put sinews on you, make flesh grow back on
you, cover you with skin, and put breath in your that you may come alive; and
you will know that I am the Lord.’” The picture here is of gathering
these bones together, linking them together, putting sinew together, muscle on
the bones, flesh on the bones, gradually putting flesh on the bones so that you
have the creation of the physical body which would be tantamount to the
restoration of non-regenerate Israel in the land during the Tribulation and
then God will breathe on them at the end of the Tribulation and that is a
picture of their regeneration; the regeneration of the nation of Israel at the
end of the Tribulation.
Ezekiel 37:7, “So I prophesied as I
was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling;
and the bones came together, bone to its bone. [8] And I looked, and
behold, sinews were on them, and flesh grew, and skin covered them; but there
was no breath in them.” So they’re not alive, it’s just a physical body
with no real life, like a spiritually dead person. [9] “Then He said to
me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus
says the Lord God, ‘Come form the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these
slain, that they come to life.’” So there is going to be the four winds
that are going to breathe on Israel to bring it to life. They are
gathered from the nations and then breathed on, brought to life.
Now let’s see where that idea is
picked up in the New Testament. But first, look at Ezekiel 37:21-22, “And
say to them, Thus says the Lord God, ‘Behold, I will take the sons of Israel
from among the nations where they have gone,” now in Ezekiel 37:21-22 it is God
who restores them, He says “I will take the sons of Israel from among the
nations where they have gone, and I will gather them, [from every side and
bring them into their own land; [22] and I will make them one nation in the
land, on the mountains of Israel; and one king will be king for all of them;
and they will no longer be two nations, and they will no longer be divided into
two kingdoms.]” and yet in verse 9 it’s the four winds that are going to do
it. So God is in control and He utilizes the four winds to bring this
about.
And then we come to Matthew 24:30-31
in the Olivet Discourse, and there Jesus says that “the sign of the Son of Man
will appear in the sky, and then all of the tribes of the earth will mourn, and
they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and
great glory.” This is the Second Coming. Verse 31, “And He will
send forth His angels with a great trumpet and they will gather together His
elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other.” So here
we see that what gathers the people isn’t the four winds, in this chapter, it
is the angels coming from the four winds. So comparing Scripture with
Scripture now identifies the angels with the four winds.
Significantly another passage that
relates the winds to the angels, in Zechariah 6:1-6, there Zechariah says, “Now
I lifted up my eyes again and looked, and behold, four chariots were coming
forth from between the two mountains; and the mountains were bronze
mountains. [2] With the first chariot were red horses; with the second
chariot black horses, [3] with the third chariot white horses, and with the
fourth chariot strong dappled horses. [4] Then I spoke and said to the
angel who was speaking with me, ‘What are these, my lord?’” Notice, he’s
having a vision, there’s an angel there interpreting the vision for him, just
as we have in Daniel 7. Verse 6, “And the angel answered and said to me,
‘These are the four spirits of heaven, going forth after standing before the
Lord of all the earth, [6] with one of which the black horses are going forth
to the north country; and the white ones go forth after them, while the dappled
ones go forth to the south country.” So this is a picture of how the four
spirits of heaven or the four winds of heaven are also angelic forces.
And it is this angelic army that God uses to move along the course of human
history. And not surprising to any of you, we also find this same imagery
in Revelation 7.
Revelation 7:1, “After this I saw
four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four
winds of the earth, so that no wind should blow on the earth or on the sea or
on any tree. [2] And I saw another angel ascending from the rising of the sun,
having the seal of the living God; and he cried out with a loud voice to the
four angels to whom it was granted to harm the earth and the sea, [3] saying,
‘Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees, until we have sealed the
bond-servants of our God on their foreheads.’ [4] And I heard the number
of those who were sealed, one hundred and forty-four thousand sealed from every
tribe of the sons of Israel.” So once again Revelation identifies four
angels with the four corners of heaven, so we have a mighty angelic army here
that is maneuvering human history and events in human history to bring about
God’s plan and purposes.
So now when we get back and we look
at our passage in Daniel 7:2, Daniel says, “I was looking in my vision by
night,” and what he sees are these angels, these angelic armies, coming like
winds, stirring up the sea, causing a tremendous tempest or storm in the midst
of the sea of nations. So this tells us there’s something radical,
something that had not yet happened in human history was now happening and
these angelic armies are stirring things up in history. These angelic
forces are coming, it’s not just, probably not just the elect angels but very
possibly they are using the evil spirits, for a reference see 1 Corinthians
2:19-23, where they are using the evil spirits to bring about the manipulation
of human history. So ultimate causation in history comes from God, not
from events within history; that gives us great comfort to know that God
through Jesus Christ controls history.
So as Daniel is looking, he’s lying
there and he’s looking and this goes on for a period of time, maybe an hour passes
and he watches this wind increase and the tumult of the sea increases and the
storm increases, and the waves increase and he sees its destructive power, and
then suddenly out from the midst of this sea comes a progression of four great
beasts, each one different from the other, in verse 3. And next time
we’ll begin to look at the first beast and what that means starting in verse
4.