Daniel Lesson 33
Another “Little Horn;” The Rise of
Greece – Daniel 8:1-8
We finished Daniel 7 but we still
need to review a couple of things related to the 7th chapter of
Daniel. From Daniel 2:5 through Daniel 7:28 Daniel writes in Aramaic
rather than Hebrew and the reason he is writing in Aramaic is because the
subject matter in Daniel 2-7 has to do with the Gentile empires. So he is
writing in a Gentile language, Aramaic, in order to communicate God’s plan and
purposes for the kingdoms of men, the various stages. That began in
Daniel 2 where we have the image, the great image which gave a view of the
kingdoms as they transitioned from the head of gold, which represents Babylon,
down through silver which represented the Persian Empire, and then bronze which
represented the Greek Empire, iron which represented the Roman Empire and then
the mixture of iron and potter’s clay which represented the Revived Roman
Empire, which is yet future, that is, the kingdom of the antichrist that is
going to dominate during the Tribulation period.
We have to understand that in terms
of its overview of history. It’s interesting that in Daniel 2 we get this
overview and then at the close of this section dealing with the Gentile nations
we have a repetition. But rather than repeating the image as it’s given
in Daniel 2, which uses precious metals to communicate the various
characteristics of these empires, there’s a different image given in Daniel 7
and that is of violent voracious beasts. Daniel 2 pictures the kingdom of
man as man sees his own exploits and his own achievements, whereas Daniel 7
portrays the kingdoms of man as God sees the kingdom of man.
So Daniel 7 closes out the section
dealing with the Gentile nations by giving us a panorama of history viewed from
a moral or spiritual perspective. Then we saw that Daniel was given
various symbols in this dream that came in the first year of Belshazzar.
That’s important because Daniel 8 is going to be in the third year of Belshazzar,
and both events, the dream of chapter 7 and the vision of chapter 8 come many
years prior to the episode in Daniel 6, which was Daniel in the lion’s
den. So we are introduced to various symbols, we are introduced to the
four winds of heaven which pictured angelic forces, spiritual forces that are
at work influencing human history, and that’s not designed to say that human
history is simply the effect of these angelic forces but to recognize the fact
that human history is not distinct from or is not neutral from the events going
on in the angelic conflict, that together these two events, what happens in the
angelic realm and what happens in the physical human realm work together.
It doesn’t mean that human volition is somehow neutralized because there is influence
from outside. No matter what the influence might be, it is still up to
human volition to decide whether they are going to follow God or not.
We see the winds representing the
unseen forces of the angels upon mankind and then the sea, the violent unrestrained
salt sea which throughout Scripture is a picture of evil and it’s a picture of
how man in his natural state, in his fallen state, unrestrained by Bible
doctrine is the breeding ground for violence, it’s the breeding ground for
trouble, it’s the breeding ground for chaos and that’s one reason the Bible
authorizes capital punishment; it authorizes a military, it authorizes a just
warfare, is because there is a need in human history, within human history, for
man to restrain the effects of evil. Only the Bible gives a view of evil
whereby evil has an origin and then is ultimately going to be defeated and
permanently restricted and refrained in the lake of fire.
But as I pointed out many times, we
are not left to just try to guess at what these various symbols mean.
They are interpreted for us in the text, and the angel comes along in the
second half of Daniel 7 and gives us an interpretation for these beasts.
Four beasts came out of the sea and these are the same empires that are
represented by the great statue. The first is like a lion, it had the
wings of an eagle and that’s the Babylonian Empire. And then the second
beast resembled a bear and it was a lopsided bear and it had three ribs in its
mouth, which represented the conquest of that bear, and that bear is the
Medo-Persian Empire. And then the third beast is the leopard and that
represents the third empire, which was the empire of Greece under Alexander the
Great. And then the fourth beast is the Roman Empire, both in its historical
manifestation and in its yet future manifestation.
Now the point of this is that these
two images, the image in Daniel 2 and the image in Daniel 7 compliment each
other. They look at the same flow of human history from two different
perspectives; one from the perspective of man and how he views himself, one
from the perspective of God and how God views man. That lays out the
overview, the outline of human history.
Now what’s going to happen when we
get into Daniel 8 is Daniel is going to shift the focus to Israel. That’s
why there’s a shift back to Hebrew as the main language in the original text,
because the focus is now going to be on what God is going to do to preserve
Israel in the midst of this time of the Gentiles. Luke 23 mentions the times
of the Gentiles, and this is a time when Jerusalem will be trodden under foot
by Gentile powers, and even today Jerusalem is still under the control of
Gentile powers. The Arabs or Gentile powers, the Arabs still control
Jerusalem, the Jews don’t control Jerusalem. Jerusalem has been under the
control of Gentile power since 70 AD when the Roman armies under Titus
completely destroyed it and destroyed the temple.
So it’s during this time, during the
time of the Gentiles, starting with the original defeat of the Jews and the
destruction of Jerusalem, in 586 BC up to the present time, even though Israel
was back in the land for a short period of time, historically speaking, from
about 535 BC up to 70 AD, they were still there under the auspices of some
Gentile power; if some Gentile power had withdrawn their protection the Jews
would have been driven out of the land and it was not a complete return to the
land but only a partial return for the purpose of having the birth of the
Messiah. So what we see here is a panorama of history in Daniel 7 and
then in Daniel 8 we are going to start focusing on how Israel is going to
survive, how they’re going to be protected and what God’s plan for Israel is
going to be during this time of the Gentiles.
Now as we wrap up with Daniel 7
there are two things that we ought to take with us in terms of
application. First of all, this is the flow of human history, and the
flow of human history indicates that God is going to, to a large degree, leave
the kingdom of man unrestrained. And what we see as a lesson from this,
in terms of the first application, is that the main struggle is not a struggle
over moral or ethical issues, it’s a struggle over spiritual issues and there’s
a vast difference. Most people don’t understand the difference between
morality and spirituality; spirituality is moral because morality fits with the
establishment code of the Old Testament; morality is for unbeliever and
believer alike; there are all kinds of religious systems that are moral but
they are not spiritual. They don’t know anything about Jesus Christ as
the Second Person of the Trinity, the hypostatic union, God incarnate who died
on the cross as a substitute for our sins, so that salvation is by faith alone
in Christ alone. Theirs is simply a system of morality trying to impress
God through ritual or through good works, and most of the time the kingdom of
man wants to define the issue in terms of morality or ethics.
For example, we see this in our own
nation, our own national history. We go back to the early part of the 19th
century and I always like to interpret American history from a Christian
viewpoint as opposed to the normal secular garbage you get in school because
your teachers never understood enough doctrine or anything about theology to
understand that theology is always the key to history. So when you look
at the United States of America to understand how the trends of history have
been affected you have to understand how the Church has apostatized at various
times. In the early 19th century there was what everybody
calls the second great awakening, and it was not as powerful, and I don’t think
it was truly a work of the Holy Spirit like the first great awakening
was.
Everybody’s heard about revivals and
revivalism is sort of a theological position that God works through revivals
that come periodically through history, but revivalism per se came out of
America, it’s an invention that came up because something wonderful and great
happened in the 1740s that was called the first great awakening. And then
we tried to reduplicate that and in the second great awakening there was a real
emphasis on morality as opposed to spirituality, there was a lot of false
doctrine, there were a lot of extravagant things that happened. You can
read some of the wild stories that happened down in Cane Ridge, Kentucky and
the camp meetings, they would have three or four thousand people together who
probably hadn’t seen another human being in months and they would all get
together and they got into all kinds of emotionalism and ecstatics and there
would be barking and yelping and running up trees and they weren’t speaking in
tongues but they were getting slain in the Spirit and they were doing all kinds
of crazy things and so everybody thought this was a great work of God.
And in the north and along the Atlantic seaboard it didn’t manifest itself in
those bizarre antics but it did manifest itself in a religious movement, and I
use that in a negative sense, in an emphasis on morality.
What came out of the second great
awakening was the idea that we could reform society because the second great
awakening picked up a heavy postmillennial theology. And that is the idea
that Jesus Christ doesn’t return to the earth until the end of the millennium.
And so the Church is going to have its influence on society and basically
perfect society, gradually through time, until society becomes Christianized
and once society and the world is Christianized, then Jesus Christ returns at
the end of the millennium. In other words, it is the Church that is going
to bring in a perfect or utopic state, and so they viewed that as their
role. Now that went hand in glove with their view of man; their view of
man that predominated during the second great awakening, not everyone but this
was a dominant influence because of Charles Grandison Finney was the idea that
man was perfectible; he’s not really born a sinner, he’s not really imputed
with Adam’s original sin like we believe, but that man is born in the same
neutral free state Adam was created in, so that he’s not influenced by Adam’s
bad decisions, he’s not influenced by Adam’s original sin, he simply has this
totally autonomous free choice and man chooses to sin because of social
influences and other influences, not because he is constitutionally flawed by
Adam’s original sin.
So man is perfectible; society is
perfectible. And if society is perfectible, then who’s going to perfect
it? Well the Church has to perfect it, so what they did is they came in
and they said that we have to reform society and the big sin in society, and in
our American culture it was always identifying major social sins that we have
to solve, that we have to clean up and once we clean them up, then society is
going to be great. And what that has engendered is a messianic view of
government. And this is exactly the kind of thinking that characterizes
the kingdom of man, is that government becomes the means of affecting social
perfection and therefore individual perfection so we can do away with social
ills because they’re legislated and then we’re going to bring in a perfect
kingdom.
Now once we’ve dropped off our
entire Christian heritage, which disappeared by the early 1960s, most Christian
or Church historians would say 1963 was the death knell and the last year where
there was any impact from the old Puritan theology, once we got rid of that it
becomes a secular perfectionism and that’s where we are today. You go
back to the 19th century and the outline of the big social ills
were, first of all, slavery and after you get rid of slavery, then it was
temperance, and prohibition; after you get rid of that it’s child labor and
after you solve that problem it’s women’s rights and voting rights. Look
at the whole history of American politics from the 1820s up to the 1930s and
you just click it off, it’s the story about first we did away with slavery,
then it was dealing with labor laws and we had the rise of the unions, and
after that you deal with women’s rights and women’s voting. What most
people don’t understand is the reason that women were not given the right to
vote under the constitution was because the founding fathers viewed the core
unit in society not as the individual, which is how we look at it today, but
the core unit in society was the family, and so the man voted because he was
the head of the household, and households were voting, not individuals.
But once our nation got away from using the old Roman Republic history as a
model and shifted more by the early 1800s to a Greek model, the emphasis went
to the individual as opposed to a more Republican concept focusing on the
family.
We’re getting way off our subject
but the point I’m making is that in the kingdom of man government picks up this
messianic role because the government is going to be able to solve the problems
and perfect society and so more and more Americans began to look to the
government as the ultimate solution to problems rather than fulfilling their
Biblical mandate of simply restraining evil, both internally through a police
force and externally through a standing army. So they began to look at
social reformation as the big issue and that’s the problem that we still deal
with today and I’m not saying that these social problems aren’t problems or
that they shouldn’t be addressed; it’s the framework within which they are
addressed that makes a difference. If you address them within a framework
of social perfection you’re grounding in on human arrogance and so the ultimate
result is always going to be flawed because the target is flawed.
The issue really isn’t social
reformation; the issue is related to the ultimate authority of God. Who’s
going to solve the problems? Is it going to be man in man’s institutions
or is it going to be God. And if you place God at the center of society
then these other social problems are ultimately going to be resolved and
everything will fall in line. But if you make that the focus then you’re
ultimately going to create problems because now you’re operating independently
from God and you’re no longer dependent upon the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob and so we believe firmly in the separation of Church and State, that
these are two completely different spheres of authority. The State itself
does not give us freedom; we believe that the Church is completely independent
from the authority of the State and that the State just recognizes that and
that’s been the historical doctrine on the separation of Church and State ever
since it was first clearly articulated by Pope Gelasius in about the 5th
century AD.
Now that’s the first thing we come
away with, that the issue is not moral, the issue is really spiritual and has
to do with the authority of God and the kingdom of man can never solve man’s
problems. The kingdom of man is always going to progress and is going to
go through these stages until Jesus Christ returns and it is only then that
there is going to be any kind of perfect society set up on the earth. And
if we don’t operate within that framework then all of our political decisions
and all of our social decisions are going to end up with flawed consequences.
The second application is that the
leader and ruler of the fifth and final kingdom has already come and that was
in the person of Jesus Christ at the First Advent and only when He returns
again will there be a perfect environment with a perfect society and perfect
government. So as believers we should not become distracted by the
Messianic pretensions of secular government or secular society. I think
it was J. Vernon McGee used to say we don’t need to be polishing brass on a
sinking ship, and that’s exactly what most Christians today are trying to
do. Now we have to remember that as Christians we are not out to reform
society but our role as Christians is to function within society and as
citizens. So when we go and get involved politically we’re getting
involved politically not as Christians, but as citizens.
The reason I say that and make that
distinction, I want to make it clear, every now and then you’ll run into
somebody and they’ll say well, I don’t drink, I don’t dance or I don’t go to
movies, I don’t do this or that because I’m a Christian. I want you to
think about that sentence. What they are saying is that because they’re a
Christian they’re not doing something. Now as a Christian you may study
the Scripture and decide that in terms of applying the law of love you’re not
going to do any number of things that are in a gray area, but you made that
decision not because you’re a Christian, it’s not related to becoming a
Christian, it’s not at the core of what it means to be a Christian, it is just
a decision that you’ve made related to application of doctrine and it may be
different for somebody else. But as soon as you make a statement like I
don’t drink because I’m a Christian, what you’re saying is alcohol is an issue
in being a Christian.
That’s the same problem you run into
when you say that I’m going to vote a certain way or make certain political
decisions because I’m a Christian. That doesn’t have to do with being a
Christian; all of a sudden you’re blurring those distinctions between Church
and State. But because you are an individual political unit in this
country, known as a citizen, and as a citizen you have certain responsibilities
under the Constitution, then when you come to the voting booth and you come to
political involvement, you’re going to make decisions because they are informed
by the doctrine in your soul, but you should never make the mistake of saying I
vote a certain way or make certain decisions because I’m a Christian.
It’s the application of doctrine in your individual priesthood but it is not a
pro-Christian position.
Daniel 8 is going to advance our
concept. We’ve looked at Daniel 7 and the flow of history and now we come
to Daniel 8 which is going to give us a profile of the kind of leadership that
is typical of the kingdom of man; at least in its most extreme form. It’s
a profile in leadership in the kingdom of man and it’s going to zero in on the
kind of characteristics that are going to be found in the antichrist. So
as we look at Daniel 8 we are going to get a picture, it’s going to present a
type of the antichrist, a historical type that occurred in the ancient world
and was manifest in a Syrian king by the name of Antiochus Epiphanes. He
was one of the most evil rulers in the entire ancient world, but he was well
loved, at first, he was a charismatic personality, people thought he was
wonderful. He did many great things socially, he had very good justification
for many of the decisions he made in the early years and he’s going to give us
an interesting perspective of what the antichrist will be like, what his
personality will be like and what his character will be like.
He was Antiochus IV, he was a member
of the Seleucid Dynasty and the term Epiphanes was a name he attached to
himself because it had to do with the appearance, a brilliant appearance or the
appearance of God. When we talk about the when the Lord Jesus Christ
appeared on the earth we talk about that as an epiphany, an appearance of
God. So there was a pun that was developed on his name by people who
weren’t really impressed with his character and they would mutter under their
breath, Epimanies,
and epimanies
was the Greek word for idiot. So they had a little play on words for
that. It’s kind of like we perhaps talk about one of our former Presidents as
“slick Willie.” It’s the same kind of dynamic going on there.
So Daniel 8 is a passage of
Scripture that is going to talk about an event that took place in the past but
the events that it talks about aren’t fully exhausted in the past. It
represents the antichrist as a type in historical figure of Antiochus Epiphanes
and yet Antiochus Epiphanes is a type of the future antichrist. One thing
we might say is he presents a psychological profile of the future
antichrist. So when we start to look at some of the attributes of
Antiochus Epiphanes you’ll discover that the antichrist is going to be one of
the most wonderful, kind, winsome personalities in all of history. Too
often when we think of the antichrist we think he’s going to show up on the
scene with “antichrist” tattooed across his forehead and he’s going to be
dressed in all leather, have his ears pierced and his nose pierced, he’s going
to be whatever your image of evil is, that’s what he’s going to look
like. But this guy is not going to look like that; he’s not even going to
appear like some self-righteous terrorist, like Osama Bin Laden, but he is
going to be somebody who is well dressed, well groomed, he’s going to have a
wonderful personality.
He’s going to be the kind of
individual that criticism will not stick to, he will be a Teflon antichrist,
and he’s going to attract hundreds of thousands, millions of people to his
cause because he is going to demonstrate a pseudo compassion and a care for
people that goes unmatched. And you know the masses always want to vote
for people who are going to give them something; they never vote for principle,
they never vote from objective doctrine, they always vote for somebody who is
going to do something to make their own life a little better. And that’s
the kind of person Antiochus Epiphanes was. He was a master politician,
he was skilled in military leadership, and even though he was faced with a
number of political problems because of their situation, he was in Syria and he
was faced with enemies on his flanks, he solved his economic, social and
political problems on the backs of the Jews.
He reigned from 171- BC to 164 BC
and during that time, or at least the second half of that time he led a reign
of terror in Israel. At no point in history has anyone been as
anti-Semitic and anti-Israel as Antiochus IV was, and yet in terms of his
personality… I took German when I was in college, I never reached a level
of fluency in it where I could sit and understand any of Hitler’s speeches, but
those that I have talked to who know German fluently and who listened to his
speeches say there was just a mesmerizing quality about them, and they were so
charismatic and it just sucked people in and they just thought he was so
wonderful, and that’s the kind of thing we’re going to see with the
antichrist. And of course he’s going to be Satan indwelt so he’s going to
have all of that going for him as well. And yet he is also the most evil
person in all of history.
Now we have to remember that Daniel
8 is part of prophetic literature and prophetic literature is written in times
of extreme suffering in order to give comfort, primarily to Israel, that the
suffering is going to last forever, that God is saying to them I’m still in
control of history, even though you’re out of the land. Remember at the
time of Daniel 8 they’d been in captivity for about 50 to 60 years, it’s about
550 BC so they have about another 13 years to go before they start to trickle
back into the land. And so they are wondering if they are ever going to
get back into the land. So when they see what Daniel reveals here in
Daniel 8 it’s going to give them hope because there’s the element in here that
Antiochus, or this goat, that is going to be attacking is going to go down
through the land. He’s going to go through the beautiful land, which is
Israel. In other words, they will be back in the land. So it is
designed to comfort them and to let them know that God is still in control and
even as chaotic as history might appear at times, God is still in control and
history does not operate independently from God.
So Daniel 8, like any prophetic
vision, has three basic parts. It gives the vision in the first 14 verses
and then there is a request for information by Daniel, verses 15-16, and then
there is the revelation or the interpretation given by the angel Gabriel in
verses 17-26. Just like I used the analogy in Daniel 7 that you ought to
look at this, when Daniel is having a vision or a dream, you ought to think
about this almost in the sense that the angel has set him down in front of a
big screen high definition television with a VCR or DVD and he’s running this
thing and as Daniel is watching the future, every now and then he says wait a
minute, so the angel hits the pause button and then explains what it is that
Daniel is watching.
In Daniel 8:1 we’re given the
background to this particular dream and by the time we get down to verse 17 the
angel is going to start telling him what it means. “In the third year of
the reign of Belshazzar, the king, a vision appeared to me, Daniel, subsequent
to the one which appeared to me previously.” So Daniel is going to have a
vision this time as opposed to a dream. In Daniel 7:1 it was a dream, a
dream of something that came while he was asleep at night whereas a vision is
something that comes during the daytime. A vision is something where he
would be seeing his surroundings around him in Babylon and then all of a sudden
it was as if somebody inserted a screen in front of his eyes and rather than
seeing what was physically before him he was seeing off into the distance,
something that God was revealing to him. “In the third year of the reign
of Belshazzar” is 551 BC; Daniel is almost 70 years of age by this time and he
has been in captivity over fifty years. The vision of Daniel 8 comes two
years after the time of the vision in Daniel 7:1 and at this point the language
shifts back to Hebrew which tells us that the focus is going to be more on
God’s plan for Israel. Daniel sees this vision and it’s an external
vision and he is going to see the world or see history unfold before his eyes
as if he were there. It is “subsequent to the one which appeared to me
previously,” and that is that it comes two years after the first vision.
Daniel 8: 2 says, “And I looked in
the vision, and it came about while I was looking,” and the use of participles
in the Hebrew here indicates action; this is ongoing, while he is looking at
the vision, actions taking place before his eyes, he sees himself, he says,
“that I was in the citadel” that is the fortress, “of Susa,” in the Hebrew it’s
Shushan, “the citadel of Susa, which is in the province of Elam; and I looked
in the vision, and I myself was beside the Ulai Canal.” Now Daniel is in
Babylon when the vision occurred, he is not transported to the Ulai Canal, he
is still physically in Babylon but he is seeing himself in Susa.
Now Susa is located about 230 miles
east of Babylon. At this time it is a relatively small city but it had a
history. Previously it had been the capital of Elam; the Elamites were a
Semitic people that had a kingdom that flourished from before the time of
Abraham. And it had been a major power block to the east of Babylon, but
when Nebuchadnezzar rose, or really when his father Nabopolassar rose they
assimilated, they conquered the Elamites and assimilated them into their
kingdom. Assyria had previously conquered them and it had been relegated
to a position of a minor province under Ashurbanipal but it was in Susa, in
this very town, that archeologists discovered the famous code of
Hammurabi. It was also in this city, in Susa, that later, when the
Persians came in and under the Persian Empire that Darius Hystapses would build
a fantastic citadel and castle, and that is part of what Daniel is seeing here,
this would be the palace where Esther would serve as queen. So Susa is
going to become the capital of the second kingdom, the kingdom of the Medes and
the Persians, so Daniel’s vision is taking him into the period of the second
kingdom, the kingdom of the Medes and the Persians.
Now this is a city where the Jews
are going to face some of the greatest attacks of anti-Semitism in their entire
history. It’s going to be in Susa that Esther will defend her people and
it will be in Susa where Artaxerxes is going to give Nehemiah the decree to go
back and rebuild Jerusalem, but Nehemiah is going to face opposition. It
is in Susa that the Jews will have to apply doctrine that they are learning in
Daniel 8 that there is a future for the nation. And so part of the reason
for this revelation is so that in that future generation the Jews will know
from Daniel 8 that they have a future, there’s a future for Jerusalem and a
future for the Jews in Israel.
The Ulai Canal was a canal that was
constructed for agricultural purposes between two rivers just outside of Susa,
the Choaspes River, the Koprates River; it was a canal that was cut through the
desert, it was 900 feet wide. So the Romans knew this also by the name
Eulaios, and archeologists have discovered its existence. So this is
grounded clearly in a historical situation. That gives us the background.
In Daniel 8:3 we see the content of
the vision. Daniel writes, “Then I lifted m my gaze and looked, and
behold, a ram which had two horns was standing in front of the canal. Now
the two horns were long, but one was longer than the other, with the longer one
coming up last.” So it indicates that these horns grow on the ram while
he is watching. This ram is standing there; it’s already in
existence. Now a ram is a male sheep, that’s important because the next
animal is a goat and a sheep is less aggressive and less agile than a goat and
that plays into the interpretation of the dream. So the ram is a male
sheep and it’s represented as already being on the world scene. So he is
taken out of time where he is, he’s placed in Susa, and he’s plopped down in time
in the midst of the second kingdom, the kingdom of the Medes and the
Persians.
Let’s read down through verse 8 to
pick up the context: Daniel 8:4, “I saw the ram butting westward, northward,
and southward, and no other beasts could stand before him, nor was there anyone
to rescue from his power, but he did as he pleased and magnified himself.
[5] While I was observing, behold, a male goat was coming from the west over
the surface of the whole earth without touching the ground; and the goat had a
conspicuous horn between his eyes. [6] And he came up to the ram that had
the two horns, which I had seen standing in front of the canal, and rushed at
him in his mighty wrath. [7] And I saw him come beside the ram, and he
was enraged at him; and he struck the ram and shattered his two horns, and the
ram had no strength to withstand him. So he hurled him to the ground and
trampled on him, and there was none to rescue the ram from his power. [8]
Then the male goat magnified himself exceedingly. But as soon as he was
mighty, the large horn was broken; and in its place there came up four
conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven.”
So what we see here is two animals,
these are different from the kinds of animals that we have in chapter 7, but
these two animals are going to represent two of the kingdoms. So whereas
in Daniel 7 as in Daniel 2 we have this panorama of human history that starts
off with the Babylonians, the Medo-Persians, the Greeks, then the Romans and
then the Revived Roman Empire, here we’re going to focus on these two kingdoms;
the second kingdom which was the Medo-Persian Empire, and the third kingdom,
the kingdom of the Greeks. The ram is going to represent the Medo-Persian
kingdom and the he-goat; the male goat is going to represent the kingdom of
Greece. It’s going to focus initially on its rise under Alexander but
then it is going to shift the focus to the end time of this period on Antiochus
Epiphanes as the fulfillment here.
That gives you an overview so let’s
see how this is going to develop. He uses two images here, that of the
ram and that of the male goat. Now remember Daniel was brought over as a
captive from Jerusalem and he had to go through all the indoctrination of
training from the Babylonians so he is well schooled in the Babylonian Zodiac
and in astrology, in their astrological symbol the ram was a sign of Aries and
the goat was associated with the sign of Capricorn. Now these two animals
are used as symbolism in Daniel’s vision because in the astrological geography
of the time, Persia is associated with Aries and the ram, and the Greeks are
associated with Capricorn and the male goat. So if you were living at
that time and you were presented with these symbols of the ram and the male
goat, that would make sense, just as if you talk about the U. S. in terms of
the eagle or Britain in terms of a lion, that makes sense because these animals
are associated with those nations.
Furthermore, it’s well known that in
the ancient world when the Persians held a military review or when the Persians
went into battle the king would always march before his troops carrying in
front of him, not a crown but a ram’s head. So the symbol of the ram and
the goat, which may seem strange to us because we don’t normally think of them
as aggressive animals like we usually associate with symbols of nations… you
know you always pick some kind of aggressive animal for a football
mascot. There’s a town down in central Texas, the whole area is well
known for deer hunting, but they had this big sign coming into town that says
“home of the fighting deer.” There’s just something there that just
doesn’t fit. We don’t think of rams and male goats as being necessarily
aggressive animals either but in the ancient world those were the symbols associated
with these two particular empires.
Now we’re told in the text that the
ram had two horns, the two horns came up while he’s watching and the two horns
are long, one is longer than the other, and the longer one comes up after the
first one. So the first horn represents the Median kingdom and the Medes
were a kingdom first, and it was only after that that Persia came along; Persia
at the time the Medes were a kingdom under Cambyses, Persia is just a minor
district, an minor region called Anshan, and when Cyrus came to power he
consolidated power over Anshan, which later became Persia and he gained control
over the Medianites and united the two kingdoms. So that’s the picture
here, the first kingdom kind of comes up, the first one that comes up is the
Medes, and the second one is the Persians. So we’re not left to wonder,
remember the writer of Scripture is going to interpret this for us, we don’t
have to just guess at what these symbols mean. When it’s interpreted in
Daniel 8:20 the angel says, “The ram which you saw with the two horns
represents the kings of Media and Persia.” Now it’s important to
understand this because this is prophecy and at the time that Daniel sees this
vision he is still in Babylon and there is no Medo-Persian Empire; it is about
to happen but it is not on the scene yet. So verse 20 is true predictive
prophecy where the angel specifically identifies what this nation is going to
be.
In Daniel 8:4 we see a description
of this ram, after the longer horn takes over and it becomes a Persian Empire,
Daniel says, “I saw the ram butting westward, northward, and southward, and no
other beasts could stand before him, nor was there anyone to rescue from his
power, but he did as he pleased and magnified himself.” Now this first
phrase, “I saw the ram butting westward, northward, and southward” represents
the three directions of military attack of Cyrus as he established the Persian
Empire. When he butted westward, he pushed westward first of all; his
first major line of attack was to the west against the Lydian Empire. We
studied that previously and this was the time when he had a major battle
against Croesus and the Lydians, when under Croesus they lined up their horse
cavalry at the front of their troops and Cyrus got the brilliant idea, instead
of having the horse cavalry and chariot… [tape turns] …camels up there because
horses hate camels and so he attacked the Lydians with his camels at the front
and the camels caused the horses and the chariots of the Lydians to bolt and
they lost control of their horses and so the Persians were able to defeat
them.
So in 547 BC he defeated the Lydian
Empire, then he went north from Persia and that was against the Medes and he
captured the capital of the Medes at Ekbatana if 550 BC, and then he moved south
and conquered the Babylonians in 539 BC. I want you to notice that all of
these events took place prior to the vision of Daniel 8. Daniel 8 takes
place in 551 BC and it’s the first of these, it’s not given in order, the
“westward” was 547 but that was the second attack, the “northward” was the
first attack, in case you thought I was out of order, the Scripture does not
list them in chronological order, but the first attack chronologically was when
he went north and captured the Median capital at Ekbatana and that occurs in
550 BC so this is 551 BC that Daniel sees the vision so it’s true predictive
prophecy, it’s a year off and the Medo-Persian Empire is not yet a historical
reality.
Then we’re told that after he
conquers in these three directions, “no other beasts could stand before him,”
so apparently Daniel saw other beasts. He doesn’t mention them, he
doesn’t identify them, but apparently there are other unnamed, unmentioned
beasts that he sees, other nations that are defeated by Cyrus, and this is true
as the Persian Empire grew to take over most of what we call the Middle East
today, around Iraq, down into Arabia, over to Egypt, as far west almost as the
Indus River in Afghanistan and into central Asia. Then Daniel says, “now
was there anyone to rescue from his power; but he did as he pleased, and he
magnified himself.” So this is a picture of the kings of Persia who were
magnifying themselves and asserting their own authority independent from
God.
Now while this is happening, we
recognize that this is the second manifestation of the kingdom of man in
history and that God gives the kingdom of man power to do as he pleases.
But there will always come a time of collapse as the history marches forward,
and in verse 5 we see the destruction of this second kingdom. Daniel 8:5,
“While I was observing, behold, a male goat” or a he-goat, literally in the
Hebrew it says a buck of the goats, “a male goat was coming from the west over
the surface of the whole earth” and the term “whole earth” indicates the
expanse of this kingdom; he comes “over the surface of the whole earth without
touching the ground; and the goat,” the male goat, “had a conspicuous horn
between his eyes.” And the fact that he’s coming “over the surface of the
earth without touching the ground” indicates his speed, and so this is going to
be a reference to a rise of the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great and is a
picture of the rapidity of his conquest.
That’s the same thing that’s
betrayed by the leopard back in Daniel 7. The leopard is a fast animal,
speedy animal, and that represents the speed of Alexander’s conquest.
Alexander was the son of Philip II of Macedon who had conquered Greece and was
unifying Greece and was prepared to go after the Persians. Now the Greeks
and the Persians had a long-standing rivalry and that’s important for
understanding what is said in verses 6-7. They hated each other, ever
since the Persians had come across under Xerxes and even earlier, and conquered
the kingdoms in Asia Minor…see, the Greeks have always had their eye across the
Aegean to Turkey and even today there’s this continuous tension, the Greeks
hate the Turks and the Turks hate the Greeks and you have all kinds of
problems, historical problems on the island of Cyprus and this has its roots
all the way back in ancient history. The Greeks have always had their
eyes on the peninsula of Asia Minor, which today we call Turkey.
So Alexander, at this time, because
this is after the Persian attempts to conquer Greece, is out for revenge and
after Philip II, his father, is assassinated in 336 BC, Alexander takes over
and in 334 BC he attacks the Persians with a rapidity that is unparalleled in
human history. Alexander who was a young man in his mid-twenties
conquered the world in under 5 years, and that’s what it means “without
touching the ground,” he advanced because of his military genius and he
developed the Greek phalanx and gave them 25 foot spears and so the charging or
advancing forces of chariots would be impaled upon these long spears and then
that would allow the phalanxes in reserve to come up and defeat the
enemy. So they came across the Bosporus in 334 BC and began to take on
the Persians.
Now we are told that this goat has
“a conspicuous horn between his eyes.” Now we have to watch this goat
because he’s animated, he starts off with this large conspicuous horn, it’s
single; now that’s not normal. A goat, like a sheep, normally has two
horns but here it’s like a unicorn, he has one major horn between his eyes.
This is the first king as described in verse 21. The shaggy goat
represents the kingdom of Greece. Now Greece is not even on the
historical horizon much at this point, we’re talking about the 6th
century BC, we haven’t even come to the golden age of Athens yet when Daniel is
looking at this and when Daniel is being told that in the future the kingdom of
Greece is going to be more powerful than that of the Medes and the Persians, so
that is a true revelation. The shaggy goat represents the kingdom of Greece,
and the large horn that is between his eyes is the first king, so that’s
Alexander.
In Daniel 8:6 we read, “And he came
up to the ram that had the two horns, which I had seen standing in front of the
canal, and rushed at him in his mighty wrath.” He is angry, there is this
anger, this hatred, this vindictiveness that the Greeks had to the Persians
because of the way the Persians had invaded Greece and raped and pillaged their
way down through Achaia. So this is a picture here, and they crossed the
Dardanelles and if you remember I taught that Alexander had an army of about
35,000 and he was met with an army of several hundred thousand by Xerxes, and
yet at this first encounter at the Granicus River the Greeks defeated the
Persians. And then again they’re defeated at Issus, he defeats Darius III
at Issus and then the third great defeat was down at Arbella in Persia near the
sight of Nineveh and Alexander went on to sack Persepolis, Susa and Ekbatana,
all the major cities in Persia and the Greeks in five years take control and
expand their empire all the way to the Indus River.
Daniel 8:8, “Then the male goat
magnified himself exceedingly. But as soon as he was mighty,” notice he
doesn’t last long, “as soon as he was mighty the large horn was broken; and in
its place there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of
heaven.” So notice the animation here, you have this large horn that’s
broken off and in its place out comes four horns. Now that’s certainly
something that doesn’t happen in nature. The breaking of the large horn
relates to Alexander’s death in 323 BC, he was drunk and went to a party and
died in an alcoholic stupor that night and he did not know how to handle his
prosperity and so his kingdom was then divided up among four of his generals.
So in its place “four conspicuous
horns” come up and these represent his four generals. The first was
Ptolemy who assumed control of the Egyptian sector of Alexander’s empire, and
he began a new line of Egyptian rulers, the Ptolemies, the last of which was
Cleopatra. Cleopatra was a Greek; she was not an Egyptian. The second
general was Seleucus who assumed control of the Syrian and the Babylonian
section of Alexander’s empire, and began a hereditary line of rulers and that is
going to be the line from which Antiochus Epiphanes comes. The third
general was Cassander and he took control of Macedonia and the Greek section of
Alexander’s empire and then Lysimachus took control over Thrace and Asia Minor
or Turkey as we call it today.
Now here’s the image, you have a
great horn, it’s broken, it’s replaced by these four conspicuous horns, and
then in verse 9, “And out of one of them came forth a father small horn,” it’s
insignificant compared to these others, at least its beginning is, it’s “a
rather small horn which grew exceedingly great,” so it has inauspicious
beginnings, but it gains in power. But the power is directed
geographically; it “grew exceedingly great toward the south, toward the east,
and toward the Beautiful Land.” And the “Beautiful Land” is a term for
Israel, and actually the word means a land that is to be desired, and it is the
land that is to be desired from Israel. And this “little horn” is
Antiochus IV Epiphanes who is going to rise to power after the murder of his
brother, Seleucus Philopator and he is going to use bribery and flattery in
order to gain the throne and seize it from the rightful heir who’s Demetrius,
the son of Seleucus, but Demetrius is being held as a hostage in Rome and so
Antiochus is going to weasel his way to the throne and then he is going to keep
it from Demetrius and he is going to become one of the most evil rulers in all
of history.
Next time we’ll look at the career
of Antiochus as a type of the antichrist. Now this is important because
what we’re going to see as we go through Daniel is Daniel 7 gave us the
panorama; Daniel 8 comes in and starts focusing on two kingdoms and the role of
Israel in those kingdoms, and then as we go through Daniel 9, and go into
Daniel 10 and 11, it’s going to narrow its focus even more and more as to what
takes place in the inter advent period and then in the future, so it’s going to
become more and more detailed in terms of the prophecy that is given.