"The Battle of Little Big Horn" Daniel 8 Sunday Evening Worship Service

The Bible has a lot to say about Antichrist figures, about the nature of the future Antichrist.

The Bible puts forward this concept of an Antichrist.

It presents a singular future individual.

There will be one person in the future who the scriptures define as the Antichrist.

He is the, to quote 2 Thessalonians, the man of lawlessness who stands against Christ and stand against God's purposes in the world.

Now, history has been filled with people who look like they're trying out for that position.

They actively set themselves up as gods.

They demand worship.

But it's not just that.

There's all kinds of people in the world that set themselves up as God, and there's all kinds of people in the world that think they should be worshipped.

I mean, that's the basic nature of human idolatry.

You want to be the sun in your solar system.

You want your world to revolve around yourself.

But what makes, I guess, an antichrist even more particular than that, it's not just that they're opposed to God and they're opposed to Christ, that they set themselves up to receive worship.

It's that they have this unmitigated desire in their life to rob true worship from Jesus Christ.

In a sense, Nebuchadnezzar, before he was converted, was an antichrist.

He was opposed to God and God's people.

He persecuted God's people.

But remember, I mentioned this a few times when we were back in Daniel chapter 4.

Daniel 4 · chapter mention

Nebuchadnezzar wasn't a true Antichrist in the sense of the word, in that he was, you know, he just wanted to be known as more powerful than the God of the Bible.

The Antichrists that are described, what we'll see tonight in Daniel chapter 8 and then the New Testament is the Antichrist.

Daniel 8 · chapter mention

These people, it's not just that they want to be more powerful than Christ, they want to be worshipped as if they were the Savior.

This is not your normal run-of-the-mill idolatry.

This is a wanting to take the place of Jesus Christ.

It's not wanting to have your own church, it's wanting to invade the church of Jesus Christ, remove him, and put yourself in his place.

That's the nature of Antichrist.

Now, of course, anybody, and the New Testament uses the concept of an Antichrist in two ways.

And the broad way, the general, the generic way, is that anyone who rejects Jesus Christ is an Antichrist.

Anyone who's not a Christian in that sense is an Antichrist.

1 John 2, verse 18.

1 John 2:18

Children, it's the last hour, John says.

And then as you've heard the Antichrist is coming, that's the singular Antichrist.

So now many other Antichrists have already come.

And that I think is a reference to the tryout process, it seems, that people are wanting for that position.

But then there's the generic sense, a few verses later.

This is 1 John 2, 22, only four verses later.

Who is the liar but he that denies Jesus is the Christ?

This is the Antichrist.

He who denies the Father and the Son.

No one who denies the Son has the Father.

Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also.

So John has a very close system here.

If you deny Jesus Christ, you deny the Father.

So he's zeroing out here the possibility that for people to be in the world that say, I believe in the God of Abraham, I believe in the God of the Old Testament, I believe in Yahweh, but I do not believe in Jesus Christ.

John zeroes that out and says, no, if you reject Jesus, you reject the Father also.

And that is the Antichrist.

So in the generic sense, John says, all those who say they believe in the God of the Old Testament, but reject Jesus Christ are in fact Antichrist.

1 John 4, verse 3.

1 John 4:3

Every spirit that does not confess Jesus as the Christ is not from God.

And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and I tell you, is in the world already.

In other words, where you find non-believers, you find the spirit of Antichrist.

But finding the spirit of Antichrist is different than finding the Antichrist.

Not every non-believer is the Antichrist.

And this is what John says earlier, 2 John 1, verse 7.

2 John 1:7

Many deceivers have gone out into the world.

Those who do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh.

Such a one is a deceiver and is the Antichrist.

Of course, 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 3, let no one deceive you in any way.

2 Thessalonians 2:3

The day will not come, the day of the Lord will not come.

He will not establish his kingdom on earth.

He will not usher in the thousand-year kingdom.

He will not split Mount Zion when he returns, like we talked about this morning.

That will not happen until the man of lawlessness is revealed, who is the son of destruction or perd, depending on your translation.

In other words, there is a singular Antichrist who is coming, and until he arrives, Jesus himself will not return to earth.

Now remember, it's not that Antichrist just wants to be worshipped, it's that they want to be worshipped in the place of Jesus.

So to use a more modern example before we jump into Daniel 8, I will spend a little bit of time here talking about what made Hitler an Antichrist.

This is a little crash course in how Hitler rose to power, leveraging the church.

Because you have to have that in your mind to appreciate, I think, what is going on in Daniel chapter 8.

Daniel 8 · chapter mention

It'll just help you because we're more familiar with Hitler than we are with the kings that we're going to look at tonight in Daniel 8.

Hitler's probably the most relevant contemporary example of an Antichrist.

He took the title Fuhrer, which means there's no real English word.

It's kind of like leader.

You could say father, but it's more like leader or guide, but it's somebody with almost a paternal kind of authority in leadership.

And he took that title to say that only God can make a Fuhrer.

Only God can make somebody who's that kind of leader.

To be that kind of leader requires supernatural ability given to you by God.

So he's taking the idea that God appoints political leaders one step further.

When Hitler started calling himself that, he was not the prime minister or the chancellor he had, no huge political position.

And so he invented a title for himself and said that only God could give him that authority.

He began to sell himself to Germany as the one who could restore their sense of cultural pride.

Germany was in a bit of a cultural wasteland after the Treaty of Versailles.

They had been humiliated.

They felt like there was no more German pride.

There was no more German currency or business or industry.

The inflation had devastated their whole country.

They had no sense of German culture really.

It had been taken from them, stolen in their minds, and Hitler vowed to get it back.

And to do that, he called himself the Fure and said, God has brought him on the scene for just such a time as this.

And then he went beyond that and started calling himself Germany's savior.

Now that's a title that catches on in the political world.

Hey, here's our savior, vote for him.

But he anticipated problems with the church because churches aren't generally going to go along with somebody who's not named Jesus calling themselves the savior.

And so he developed a system.

He brought together the church leaders in Germany and he sold them that on the idea that if he was a powerful, influential political leader, that he should also have leadership of the church.

That if it's God's design for Germany to be a noble nation and it's God's design for Germany to be Christian, then it follows that the church should report to the head of state.

The church should report to somebody whom God has made as a supernatural leader.

If he is the best leader in Germany, if he is the Fuhrer, if he's the savior, then the church should fall under his leadership.

And many pastors went along with this.

In fact, he renamed the church.

It was the Lutheran Church.

It was the state church of Germany as a Lutheran church.

He renamed it the Reich Church.

He had pastors put Nazi symbols on their clerical robes.

They wore the, you know, the black robes, many of them did, and they would pin an eagle on it, which was the Nazi symbol.

He had churches take down the German flag even and replace it with the Nazi flag.

And this was his way of saying, hey, the German country is a wasteland, so don't fly your country's flag in the church.

Fly the flag of the political party that wants to bring the church to greatness.

And many churches did that.

Germany is the place where the Christmas tree comes from.

You know, there were a couple winters in Germany where most Christmas trees took down the star on the top and replaced it with a swastika.

This is how it caught on.

It was the idea.

This is the symbol of what God is doing through the church to bring the church to greatness.

The Germans loved this.

They considered it a victorious version of Christianity.

A more manly version, a more conquering version.

Remember, they were humiliated from World War I.

Then Hitler began to teach that in this new victorious church, you didn't need to pray for your enemies because you were going to defeat your enemies.

Why would you pray for them if you were going to defeat them?

He said, You don't need to turn the other cheek.

Somebody strikes you, you don't turn the other cheek.

That's for weak people.

That's for Christians that are in countries that don't have a savior leading their church.

And people went along with that.

But then everything changed when Hitler adopted what he called the Aryan paragraph, and he called it the Aryan paragraph to make it sound so small.

Just a tiny paragraph.

Just a paragraph.

What's the big deal with the paragraph?

And what the paragraph said was that for anybody to serve in civil service or government, they had to be of pure German blood.

Which was left undefined.

I mean, this is a world without DNA tests.

Pure German blood, which means I could size you up and tell if you have pure German blood.

Now, this passed.

This passed the parliament.

It became a law that for you to serve in the German job, if you have a government job, you had to be a pure German blood.

Now think about how this plays out in the church.

If the church reports to the government, that means for you to be part of the church, you have to have pure blood.

Well, Hitler sold this to the church.

Listen to his ingenuity here.

He sold this to the church by saying, listen, there's a Jewish problem, he called it the Jewish problem in Germany.

Do you want Jews leading the church?

Do you want Jews who crucified Jesus, who murdered the Savior?

Do you want them leading your church?

Of course not.

And so you need to embrace this rule because this rule is a way of making sure that no Jew will ever take over your church.

He spun this in the language of religious freedom.

By you adopting this, you safeguard your pulpits, you safeguard your theology, you safeguard that your church will only belong to you.

And many churches went along with this.

In fact, a lot of churches in the Reich Church, they stopped ending their services with a doxology and started ending their service with a shouting, Hail Hitler! Now, how's that all gonna play out?

When this happened, Bonhoeffer had just returned from New York where he went to seminary.

When the Aryan paragraph was adopted, he was just brand new back in Germany.

He came from a wealthy, powerful family.

He convinced uh the largest Christian radio station in Germany to put him on the air, and he preached a sermon against this.

My favorite line from the sermon, let me read it to you.

He says, When a leader allows himself to succumb to the wishes of those who will seek to turn him into an idol, the image of the leader will gradually become the image of the misleader.

Leaders are offices which set themselves up as gods, mock the true God, and the individual who stands alone before him, and therefore they must perish.

And as he was preaching his sermon, the government cut off the radio signal so he couldn't finish it.

And that was the beginning of the end.

Notice what made Hitler particularly evil in this was the way he leveraged the identity of the church and those who worship God for his own end to make him the Savior.

That is the spirit of Antichrist.

That's no ordinary leader.

And that's what we see tonight in Daniel chapter 8.

Daniel 8 · chapter mention

I want to work through Daniel 8 tonight, and I want you to see these men, because us, I started with this illustration about Hitler because for us, these are just horns.

These are ram and goat and horns and what's the deal?

We don't even remember their names.

Maybe if you're homeschooled, do you remember the names?

But I want you to understand that in these worlds, these were the Hitlers.

And God knew about them before they came.

He named them before they were born.

In the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar.

This is before the Persians had come to authority, and that is very important to understand because otherwise the first part of this wouldn't be prophecy.

This is when Babylon was still Chaldean, the Medio-Persian Empire had not conquered it yet.

This is before Daniel 6.

A vision appeared to me.

It's a different vision than appeared to me at the first, meaning it's a different one in chapter 7.

So chapter 7 had one vision of the ram, and this is a different vision.

Chapter 7 had one horn.

This is not the same horn in chapter 7.

Different vision, he says in verse 1.

And I saw in the vision, when I saw, I was in Susa, the capital, which is in the province of Elam.

Now, note this real quick.

At this point, Susa was not a capital of anything.

When he's giving, when he's receiving this vision in the third year of King Belshazzar, Susa was, it was a city, it existed, but it was not a capital.

That would come much later, but in Daniel's vision, he already saw this future capital city.

How is that the Uli Canal?

If you have an older translation, it translates it the Uli River, which is interesting.

It's always been translated river.

And there's been some Bible scholars that have said this is an interesting word for river.

It's not used anywhere else in the New Testament.

It's got to mean something different than river.

There's a word for river.

This is not it.

Oh, by the way, this switches to Hebrew here because he's done here talking.

The first part, the middle part of this book was in Aramaic because it was about God's plan for Gentiles.

He's switching here to God's plan for the Jews.

So he's switching back to Hebrew, and that's hugely important to understand this.

He uses a different word here for river, not the Hebrew word for river.

Over time, archaeologists more recently, in the last 20 years, have uncovered the ruins of Susa and have found that there was a canal there.

They flooded this big canal.

It was probably, you know, 300, 400 feet wide, 100 yards or so wide.

And they flooded it.

It didn't run that long.

It ran like a half mile or so around the out, you know, around one length of the city.

The thing I think of is like if you've been to in Phoenix, Tempe, like Mil Av, they did the same thing there.

They flooded that water on the outside.

When I was a kid, that was just a you know, a royal.

It was a sandy nothing.

There was rocks and desolate.

And now they've flooded it with water, and people can take boats on it, and restaurants are there, and it's a hip place to walk your dog with a sweater vest in Phoenix.

It's people do that there.

That's what they did in Sousa.

They flooded this little area to make it, you know, kind of a more hoity-toity kind of city.

It had no irrigation function.

It was just there for looks, to flaunt the city's power.

Well, Daniel has a vision of this long before it happens.

And now that that's been uncovered, the new translations, ESV here, even translates it canal.

Daniel's there, he raised his eyes, verse 3, and I saw, behold, a ram standing on the bank of the canal.

And so this canal, which is here to show the power and the beauty of the capital city, Susa, which will be the capital of the Meta Persian Empire, on the far side of it, is a big ram.

It had two horns, as rams do, and both horns were high.

But one was higher than the other.

And the higher one came up last.

So this is a weird vision.

Daniel's looking across this canal.

It's a pretty wide canal.

And there I think on the other side is a ram.

And lo and behold, I see two horns.

I think that's two horns.

And one is growing much faster than the other.

That's weird.

I saw the, and we're going to find out.

The way I'm going to do this is I'm going to talk about what these visions are mean now.

And so we don't get to the end of the chapter.

That's okay, because the end of the chapter tells you what the first half of the chapter means.

We'll try to get through it all, but you know how the night goes.

And what this means here is the Medo-Persian Empire was a composite empire of two different kings, two different ruling authorities that started tagging up in war, and the Persian Empire began to exert their influence over it and grew up faster and stronger and was more dominant.

They combined, they had a more shrewd leader, and they became combined, and that's what Daniel's seeing before it happens.

Now you think if Daniel got this vision before the Persians conquered Babylon, why didn't he say anything?

And may I remind you, because it's a vision of the Persians conquering Babylon.

It's not exactly something you bring to the emperor.

And Daniel, and by the way, Daniel, you can't say Daniel would have warned him, right?

He said the handwriting on the wall, Mini, Mini, Teklofarson, you're going down.

Plus, he had this vision.

And so this empire, what he's getting a vision here is the Medo-Persian Empire with half of it that's going to be stronger than the other, and that's exactly what it was.

And it combined, it's even called the Medo-Persian Empire, and then it became consolidated under the leader of one person, Cyrus.

Cyrus is named by God before he was born.

That's Isaiah 45, verses 1 through 7.

Isaiah 45:1–7

150 years before this, Cyrus is already named by God.

So God's prophetic power here is unquestioned.

And Daniel's not getting, Isaiah got the name.

Daniel's not getting the name.

Daniel's getting a ram with a horn that's growing bigger than the other.

It's a lopsided ram.

I saw the ram charging westward and northward and southward.

So it's coming from, you know, Persia here.

West is going to be into Africa.

North is going to be up into Europe.

Southward is going to be down to that Arabian Peninsula.

It can't charge east because there's nothing east of this Persian area here.

There's the sea there.

That's all there is there.

So we can't conquer east.

And that's exactly what Daniel sees is this ram taking over the world.

This is the Medo-Persian Empire.

Medo-Persian Empire.

No beast could stand before him.

There was no one who could rescue from his power.

He did as he pleased and he became great.

He conquered Babylon, and we looked at that a few weeks ago in chapter, the end of chapter five.

As I was considering this raging two-horned ram, lopsided and all that, behold, a male goat came from the west across the face of the whole earth without touching the ground.

I think that means it's traveling fast.

Well, you can kind of have that idiom that you got there so fast your feet barely touched the ground.

Now Daniel's watching this lopsided ram frolic around the opposite side of a hoity-toidy canal and now sees a goat approaching at warp speed from over the canal.

And they're gonna collide.

Well, the goat, it says, let me jump back up to verse 7.

I saw him close to the or sorry, verse 6.

He came to the ram with two horns.

Or we skip, let me go back to verse 5.

As I was holding, behold, a male goat came from across the west without touching the ground.

The goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes.

So goats don't usually have one horn.

This one has a conspicuous one coming out right between his eyes.

He came to the ram with the two horns, which I had seen standing on the bank of the canal, and he ran at him with his powerful wrath.

So the one-horned goat colliding with the two-horns lopsided ram.

I saw him close to the ram, and he was enraged against him and struck the ram and broke his two horns.

Now, what this is here, the goat, we've learned this in chapter two and then in chapter seven.

The goat here represents the Greek Empire.

Now, a goat is moving so fast across the water, and it's moving as fast, so fast that you could almost describe it as like a leopard with four wings.

Which is what Daniel described as his last week.

You remember we said when you described the Greek Empire as a leopard with four wings, it just means it is going fast.

And that was Alexander the Great.

He conquered the world so quickly.

This is the Greek Empire and it's coming.

The horn that's conspicuous represents Alexander the Great.

He is coming with venom.

He's coming and he's enraged with the Medo-Persian Empire.

He's enraged with Cyrus because Cyrus is standing in his way of world domination.

They collide, and of course, the goat wins.

The middle of verse 7, and the ram had no power to stand before him.

The Medo-Persian Empire, Cyrus and all that, could not stand before the goat.

Instead, the goat cast him down to the ground and trampled him, and there was no one who could rescue the ram from his power.

This is the power of Alexander the Great.

We looked at the power of the Medo-Persian Empire in Daniel chapter 6.

Daniel 6 · chapter mention

This is now time to focus on the power of Alexander the Great and the Greek Empire.

That goat, verse 8 says, became exceedingly great.

He conquered the world.

Alexander the Great had 35,000 soldiers in his army.

Remember when we looked at the fall of Babylon, there was fell with against an army with 5,000 soldiers.

How could you even mobilize an army of 35,000 soldiers?

They're going to cross the Mediterranean Sea a couple times.

They're going to go off into Asia.

They're going to sweep down into Egypt, even that's the power of Alexander the Great.

His power didn't last long.

He worked his way.

As far east as you wanted to go, and then he circled back to Jerusalem, conquered Jerusalem, then he goes further off into Babylon, conquers Babylon again.

He beat it the first time and he crushed him to Persia.

Now he comes back to even reign there, it seems.

He was 33 years old.

And he died there in Babylon.

The Lord killed him in Babylon.

If you want to talk about a not so subtle message, remember, Babylon represents all that's ungodly in the world.

Here is a guy that had set himself up as God.

He proclaimed even that he was going to be Zeus.

He was worshipped as a Greek God.

He set himself up as a god.

He put himself against God's people, crushing God's people in Jerusalem, and the Lord killed him in Babylon, of all of the places.

It's a global empire.

God can kill them anywhere.

He kills him in Babylon.

He died of his own drunkenness.

It's likely he choked on his own vomit in a scene of debauchery as described by some historians.

His horn was broken off.

The Greek Empire still existed.

They just lost their horn.

But, verse 8, when the horn was broken in the middle of it, instead of the horn came up four conspicuous horns towards the four winds of heaven.

The Greek Empire did not die with Alexander the Great.

Instead, it was split into fourths.

We talked a little bit about this last week because Daniel had the same prophecy somewhat differently last week with the four different horns, but here it's four different horns are going to grow up.

These are the four generals.

Lysimachus took over Asia Minor, and he set his eyes on Rome after that.

Ptolemy took over Egypt and Arabia.

And a guy named Celestius took over Syria.

Celestius was one of the Greek generals, took over Syria, and he is important to remember because he was at first he had the smallest of the force, he had the smallest of the force.

But then he asked Ptolemy, who was over Egypt, if he could also take over Babylon as well, which he did.

And so he grew his empire a little bit.

This provoked a little bit of war.

And then Ptolemy gave him some of his soldiers.

And Celius then turned and marched towards India and conquered much of India.

And he grew his army.

In fact, he was a cunning guy.

He had his daughter marry an Indian king, and as a gift, he got something like 300 war elephants.

I don't know what a war elephant is, but I wouldn't want to fight one.

I wouldn't want to fight a normal elephant, but this was a war elephant.

Now look what happens in verse 8.

His great horn was broken, four conspicuous horns grew up towards the wind of heaven.

That's the four generals that grew up.

This is all prophetic before it happens.

This didn't just happen instantly.

Twenty-two years it took for these four generals to come to power.

But out of one of those four horns came a little horn, which grew exceedingly great towards the south and towards the east and towards the glorious land.

This little horn becomes great and great.

And this is representing Celius here at first.

Silicius had the smallest of these force, but he grew more and more powerful, got the war elephants with him, returns from India, and he goes to war against two of the other four generals.

He takes on Lysimachus in Asia Minor and conquers that.

Now we remember Alexander the Great because he's got the great nickname, you know.

How can you forget Alexander the Great?

But the Greeks viewed Celius as even more important than him.

He was the one that took Alexander as the title of Zeus, and he's the one that was known as Zeus Incarnate, Zeus in human form.

He started his own dynasty.

And this is important because of this verse, right here in verse 9, a little horn grew out of that.

Towards the south, towards the east, and towards the glorious land.

This little horn is Antiochus Epiphanes.

And this is, or Tiochus Epiphanius, however you want to say it, but Epiphanes is how I'm going to say it.

And Etiochus was the most ruthless leader really to ever attack Israel.

And the rest of Daniel 8 and Daniel 11 is going to be devoted to describing him.

And so since we've got two chapters to deal with this in the next few months, it's important for you to at least know who he is.

And this is kind of like a history lesson, but there's two chapters of the Bible devoted to this, and so we're going to talk about it.

Antiochus Epiphanes, the name, by the way, Antiochus Epiphanes, means God manifest in human form.

However, the guy was nuts.

And the the Greeks had a nickname for him.

They called him Antiochus Epipominus, which means really Antiochus the Crazy.

So he said, My name is Antiochus, God in human flesh.

And they said, okay, and they just flipped two letters to make it a pun and said, You're Antiochus the Crazy.

And he was.

He was born in Iran, modern-day Iran.

He became king in 175 BC of the Silicious dynasty, which remember is that fourth of the Greek Empire.

But it was the biggest of the force now because it had conquered much of Syria and the Mediterranean basin.

He became passionate about the Greek culture.

He believed in the Greek gods and tried to indoctrinate everybody under his authority, even stretching into India, into the Greek gods and the Greek customs and the Greek ways.

And most of the cultures he conquered went along with it.

There was one notable exception, though.

The Jews in Jerusalem.

This is like 175 BC.

So 200 years before the time of Christ.

The Jews in Jerusalem did not go along with being Hellenized, they called it.

Some of the Jews did, they became Hellenistic Jews, but most did not.

And this led to the war that became Antiochus' undoing.

He became the most powerful leader of this 400-year period, really.

The most powerful leader after Alexander the Great, all the way up until Caesar, was this guy.

And he went to war against Israel because they would not worship Zeus.

This is described in verse 10.

This little horn, it grew, well, in the end of verse 9, it grew towards the east, meaning it's going back towards India.

He also gets war elephants, only he gets 800 of them.

It then goes towards the glorious land, which is speaking of Israel.

So he goes to the east, gets his war elephants, then he goes back and he's going to attack Jerusalem with them.

This horn grew great, even to the host of heaven.

In other words, this guy was so strong and powerful, he went after, it seems like angels.

He went after God's own people.

And some of the host of God's people and some of the stars threw it down to the ground and trampled on them.

In other words, he started attacking God's people and trampling on God's own people in Jerusalem.

This morning we talked about how isolated Jerusalem was.

It was not on one of the major highways from Africa and Asia.

You had to go out of your way to fight it.

And that's why it got away with so much for so long.

The Jews were allowed to live there.

Cyrus was allowing them to rebuild it earlier.

But Antiochus wanted everybody to embrace the Greek culture, and they refused.

So he went to war on them and he trampled on the Jews.

Verse 11, this one became great, even as great as the prince of the host.

Which I think here is an expression, a messianic expression.

It means God, and of course, in Daniel's mind it's going to be the prince of angels, the God of angels, the prince of peace.

I think there's a messianic connotation here.

In other words, Antiochus Epiphanes was putting himself forward as if he were the Messiah.

Remember, the Jews here, they're going to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem every year, looking for the Savior, looking for the time where God would bring the prophet and the priest and the king to Jerusalem.

They were on the hunt for it.

And this guy comes and says, I'm it.

I am he.

Look for your Savior no longer.

Instead, worship me.

That became his speech.

He was going against this is in the 400 years of silence.

There's no prophets here.

Daniel had prophesied about this event ahead of time.

And you wonder why would God give such a meticulous prophecy about Greek leaders?

Because if you're going through a 400-year period where God is not speaking to you through prophets, the priestly system is a mess, you have no king from the line of Judah.

Wouldn't it not give you so much comfort to know that one of God's last prophets said exactly what was going to happen before it happened?

Well, middle of verse 11, the regular burnt offering was taken away from him.

He stopped the sacrifices in Jerusalem.

The place of his sanctuary was overthrown.

A host was given over to it together with the regular burnt offerings of transgressions.

It will throw truth to the ground, and it will act and prosper.

It's a fancy way of saying he shut down the sacrifices in Jerusalem and made himself the object of worship.

Then I heard a holy one speaking, an angel speaking, verse 13.

And another holy one, another angel, said to the one who spoke, For how long is this vision concerning the regular burnt offerings and the transgressions that makes desolate the giving over of the sanctuary and the host to be trampled underfoot?

And he said to me, For two thousand three hundred evenings and mornings, and that's two thousand three hundred days, the sanctuary will be restored to its rightful time.

That's a little over six years.

Six years, four months is how long this period's gonna last.

It's an incredible prophecy.

We're talking a hundred and fifty years at least before this happens, is when Daniel is saying it's going to happen.

There will be some king that you may have never heard of, but they were gonna hear of him, who's gonna stop the sacrifices in Jerusalem, say that he is the Savior, and he will get away with this for six years and four months.

Do you see why this would be encouraging to be a Jew in Jerusalem during this time?

This is the Maccabean War.

Antiochus had gone back to Egypt by this point.

His sister was Cleopatra II.

He had his sister Mary into Ptolemy's line to consolidate those two powers there.

And then he bribed somebody, one of his Hellenized Jewish friends, to go back to Jerusalem and declare himself to be the high priest.

This is a guy named Menlois.

He was paid by Antiochus to go back to Jerusalem and declare himself the high priest.

Menloius went back to Jerusalem, murdered the real high priest in the temple, and declared himself to be the high priest.

This did not go well.

The Jews started a revolt.

Rumor got to Antiochus that the Jews were revolting.

He sent his army in and they slaughtered the Jewish army.

He then went back east to Syria and got his whole army to invade Jerusalem.

Historians at the time describe his army as landing in Syria with 46,000 soldiers.

Remember earlier how 35,000 was insane from Alexander the Great?

Antiochus is going to invade Jerusalem with 46,000 soldiers.

He had a Macedonian battalion of 20,000 men, 500 mercenaries with Roman swords, and 8,500 horsemen from Egypt, and 306 armored elephants is what he brought.

Now, I give you that list because notice what he's doing with his army.

The elephants represent the east, the Roman weapons represent Rome, the Macedonian soldiers, that's that middle part, and the Egyptian footmen.

He's demonstrating with his army that he is the ruler of the whole Greek world.

And he invades Jerusalem and slaughters people there, and he ends up losing the battle.

In fact, they took Jerusalem, lost it, gained it, lost it again.

The entire conflict before he finally surrendered Jerusalem was six years and four months long.

Exactly the number of dates, exactly the days described here.

A fascinating side note.

The tribulation is going to be seven years long in the middle of it, three and a half years is the abomination of desolation.

Something interesting happened in the middle of this war, at the three and a half year mark, the middle point of more or less the middle point of the war, he goes to the temple, he strips the temple out of everything, defiles all the oil in the temple, and erects a statue of Zeus in the temple and commands the Jews to worship Zeus and starts slaughtering them if they don't.

At the end of the war, when the Jews finally took control of the temple again and established the real high priest, they had only enough oil to burn the candle in the temple for one day.

It takes eight days for the Jews to make purified oil, which they weren't allowed to do under Antiochus.

And the story goes, according to Apocrypha, 2 Maccabees, the God multiplied the oil for eight days.

This is where the celebration of Hanukkah comes from.

So again, this seems like it's not a big deal to us.

It's like, oh, this is Jewish history, Greek history.

No, it's described in the full chapter here, and then again in Daniel 11, and it leads to the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.

After this Antiochus died, 2 Maccabees chapter 9, again the Apocrypha describes his death.

This way, the all-seeing Lord, the God of Israel, struck him with an incurable and invisible blow.

As soon as he stopped speaking, he was seized with a pain in his bowels.

In other words, God hit him in such a way that if he stopped talking, he was gripped with pain.

There was no relief, there was internal tortures.

He was struck with the six times to punish him for the six years he went to war against Israel.

Yet he no way stopped his insolence.

He was even more filled with arrogance, breathing fire and his rage against the Jews, giving orders to drive even faster.

And so it came about that he fell out of his chariot, he was rushing along.

The fall was so hard as to torture every limb of his body.

Thus, he only, who a little while before had thought it his superhuman arrogance that he could command the ways of the sea, he'd imagined he could weigh the high mountains in the balance.

He was brought down to earth and carried in a litter, making the power of God manifest to all.

Gabor, which means strong, strong man, and El means God, the strong man of God, in other words, combines to make the name Gabriel, the first angel in the Bible with a name.

Gabriel, make this man understand the vision.

So I came to where I stood.

When he came, I was frightened, I fell on my face, but he said to me, Oh, understand, O son of man, this vision is for the time of the end.

Meaning it's not for you now, Daniel.

Get up.

You'll be long dead when this happens.

When the angel spoke to me, I fell into a deep sleep with my face to the ground, and he woke me up, touched me, and made me get up.

He said, Behold, I'll make known to you what shall be in the latter end of the indignation, for refer as the appointed time of the end.

As for the ram you saw with two horns, these are the kings of the median Persian Empire.

The goat is the king of Greece, the great horn between his eyes is the first king, Alexander the Great.

As for the horn that was broken in its place, with four others arose, the four kingdoms that arose from his nation, that's the four different kings were four different generals that split the Greek Empire.

But they won't have the power of Alexander the Great.

At the latter time of their kingdom, towards the end of the Greek Empire, right before it falls to Rome, when the transgressors have reached their limit, the king of a bold face, one who understands riddles, shall arise.

This is Antiochus.

His power will be great, but not by his own power.

Meaning he is getting this power demonically.

He will cause fearful destruction, he will succeed in all that he does, he'll destroy mighty men and the people who are the saints.

By his cunning he will make deceit and prosper under his hand, and in his own mind he'll become great.

Without warning he shall destroy many, and he shall even rise up against the prince of princes, and he will be broken, but by no human hand.

Notice how it says that.

Again, this is we're talking almost 200 years before he dies.

Remember how he dies?

God drives him crazy and he falls out of a chariot.

Here, Daniel says, centuries earlier, he will die, and it won't be by a human's hand.

The vision of the evenings and mornings has been told to me.

It's true.

But seal it up, Daniel, for it refers to many days from now.

I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days.

I arose and went about the king's business.

But I was appalled by the vision, and I did not understand it.

Encouraging to know that God knows the false leaders that will rise up and go to war against him.

That God knows the names of every person who is born, the names of those who will present themselves as Antichrists, and the names of those who are his.

Let me end tonight by reading you a poem by a guy named Charles Ross Reed.

He writes this Jesus and Alexander both died at age 33.

One lived for self, one died for you and me.

The Greek died on a throne, the Jew died on a cross.

One's life triumphed, it seems, the other was a loss.

One led armies forth, the other walked alone, one shed a whole world's blood, the other gave his own.

One won the world in life and lost it all in death, the other lost his life to win the whole world's faith.

Jesus and Alexander both died at age thirty-three.

One died in Babylon, the other at Calvary.

One gained the world for self, and one himself he gave.

One conquered every throne, the other every grave.

One built a throne on blood, the other built on love.

One was born of earth, the other from above.

One won all this earth to lose all earth in heaven.

The other gave up all that all to him be given.

The Greek forever died.

The Jew forever lives.

He loses all who gets and gains all things who gives.

Antiochus died crazy and mad opposing Christ.

Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler's regime.

Bonhoeffer's last words, this is the end for me, but this is the beginning of real life.

Lord, we're thankful that those who die in faith have eternal life.

That those who oppose evil oppose the spirit of Antichrist.

We know that you've warned the Jews in Daniel's day that the Antichrist was coming.

You've warned the church today.

The Antichrist is coming to the world in the future.

He will follow Antiochus' lead.

He will set himself up in the temple.

He will desolate it.

He will make it an abomination just like Antiochus did with the Zeus statue.

He'll do that at the three and a half year mark of the tribulation.

This won't catch anybody by surprise, Lord.

You've declared it, you decreed it, you give the countdown to it.

Lord, we're thankful that that is not our fate.

We're grateful that you have called us to something different than this.

You've called us to faith in your son to a resurrection life.

We're thankful for our Lord Jesus Christ.

We put our confidence and our trust in Him.

He makes our future secure.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You have been listening to Emmanuel with Pastor Jesse Johnson.

You can find more resources like this at IBCVA.com.

Here is a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, iBCVA.com.

If you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, DC area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emanuel.

We're located in Northern Virginia, and for more information about when and where we worship, check out our church website.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week.

You speak to Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.