Trust in God When Kingdoms Collide

Good morning, church family.

I'm so thankful to see each of you here this morning and uh to participate in worship together.

It really is a privilege.

And um uh if you're newer here, my name is Tim.

I'm one of the elders here, one of the pastors, and it's my privilege to get to bring the word as we continue in our our sermon series through Daniel, uh and we come now to Daniel chapter 11.

Daniel 11 · chapter mention

So if you have a Bible with you on your app or in your lap, you can uh open it up to Daniel chapter 11.

Daniel 11 · chapter mention

Most days, the 24-hour news cycle that we are so attuned to uh looking up on a daily basis, it churns with developing crises.

Like that's the name of the game.

If the news is good, it doesn't sell.

And so they sprinkle in a little bit of good news, you know, stories about puppies, and then about the earthquake that set off the nuclear facility that was next to an orphanage, arms races between superpowers, air raid sirens in Ukraine, footage from the Iranian parliament as they chant death to America, death to Israel, and they have banners saying the same.

These are the kind of headlines that communicate to you and me to be afraid, to be very afraid.

That's the right response.

To be afraid, to live in fear, and to tune in tomorrow for more if you're a glutton for punishment.

Humanity really is like an enormous chessboard with pieces moving all at once, no one waiting for their turn.

I wonder if anyone can keep track.

Is anyone actually keeping track with this massive chessboard called human history?

Is anyone in charge of it?

Or is it simply a random collection of differing uh entities of differing powers and abilities vying for survival according to the drumbeat of natural selection or survival of the fittest?

This is the very question that Daniel seeks to answer as he affirms in Daniel chapter 11 that there is a grand master ruling over the board of history.

Daniel 11 · chapter mention

And he convinces us that with some 40 to 45 prophecies that he is going to share with us in these 45 verses that would come true over the following 350 years after the prophecy.

This morning, our message from Daniel 11 is titled Trusting God When Kingdoms Collide.

Trusting God When Kingdoms Collide.

This chapter in Daniel 11 is about global issues, whole kingdoms in conflict with each other, and then he zooms in on individual people, on an individual people of God.

And so I think there's plenty for us here.

I apologize in advance how dense it is, uh, how much history it is.

If you didn't like eighth grade history, you might as well just uh get a pillow, pull it out, catch up on email, because that's gonna be a lot of that.

No.

No, I'm thankful you're here, and I just encourage you to buckle up and uh as we read our text.

So I'm not gonna read every verse.

If I did, I would have my three main verses, and I'd have 15 sub points per verse or per point.

So I'm gonna try to spare you that situation.

Daniel 11 is like a divine spoiler alert for an ancient movie.

Are you the kind of person that likes to watch the spoiler before you watch the movie?

You don't like the suspense.

Brandy and I, thankfully, she's not like neither of us like uh suspense thrillers.

Like this sense that someone's gonna jump out at any time and you're just like, you know, bracing yourself the whole movie.

We just don't like that.

Like the whole like the stomach in a knot thing is just not really pleasant.

We prefer action, like Jason Bourne or something.

Thankfully, we have a similar taste in movies.

Here, Daniel in Daniel 11 is gonna give us a divine spoiler alert.

God is gonna invite Daniel, so to speak, to look over his shoulder at the next 350 years of human history.

And it's remarkable how precise this prophecy is.

It's so precise that critics of Scripture, even though all the evidence points to Daniel being written during the third year of King Osiris, etc., whenever it's dated, there are critics who are like, that history's too accurate.

It must have been written 350 years later after these events happened because they're so accurate.

Or it was just a prophecy given by an angel to a prophet of God named Daniel.

We are called this morning to recognize that with every movement of the key pieces of history, every oppressive king rising, every kingdom toppling, every alliance shifting, that there is a power above all earthly powers at work.

Every pawn, every king and queen, every knight, all of them are moving of their own volition, and yet within God's sovereign purposes.

This is a mystery.

Some people call it the doctrine of compatibilism.

There's a spectrum of free will, determinism, compatibilism in the middle.

I think compatibilism makes the most sense of scripture's emphasis that God is sovereign, that things come to pass according to his purposes, that nothing he purposes will fall to the ground and fail.

On the other hand, people are responsible for their actions, they're accountable to God, they make real choices, like real moral agents, and you put both of those together.

Theologically it's called compatibilism.

We are actual players in the game, and God is actually in control.

And we can affirm both at the same time.

Daniel 11 is a great example of that.

The 40 to 45 uh historical events that occur are between 530 BC to 164, a range of a little over 350 years.

And so we're gonna break this into three parts and try to make it applicable to us today.

So, verses 1 through 20, the angel tells Daniel about the ponds, the pawns on the chessboard of history, to prove that God's rule is over the nations.

God rules these ponds.

Let's read the first couple verses.

Um, verses two through four.

The angel speaking to Daniel says, And now I will show you the truth.

Behold, three more kings shall arise in Persia.

Remember, Cyrus was the current king at the moment.

And a fourth king shall be far richer than all of them.

And when he shall become strong through his riches, he shall sh he shall stir up against the kingdom of Greece.

Then a mighty king shall arise, who shall rule with great dominion and do as he wills.

And as soon as he is arisen, his kingdom shall be broken and divided towards the four winds of heaven, but not to his posterity, nor according to the authority with which he ruled, for his kingdom shall be plucked up and go to others besides these.

If you understand all that, just raise your hand, okay?

I've got to put my hand down.

No, this is actually a fascinating look at the history that would begin very soon after Daniel receives this prophecy.

There are three more kings that are going to arise, a fourth from Cyrus, who would be known for his wealth, his extravagant wealth.

He would have the name of Xerxes.

Xerxes would look at the rising Grecian Empire and say, hmm, I see a little threat here.

He would mount war against the Greeks.

And if you've ever seen the movie 300, the Spartans, you've seen Xerxes, or at least you've seen the modern uh rendering of him.

So we're talking about real events in real history, not just these fictitious events or something the angels making up.

These are things that came to pass.

A man named Xerxes would rise to power, filthy rich, would get greedy and protective, and he would fight against the Greeks, but the Greeks would cause the fall of the Persian Empire.

A few kings later.

And there would be a great king who would begin to dominate, who would be a Greek king, a Greek king, and his name was Alexander the Great.

He was a young man, and he ruled for twelve, thirteen years, and then he died suddenly.

And just like Daniel chapter 11 says, it says that as soon as he is arisen, he will be cut off.

Daniel 11 · chapter mention

And his kingdom, even though it went from Greece to India, this massive kingdom in the ancient world, would be split to the four winds, it says.

Well, guess how many generals Alexander the Great had?

It four generals.

And each one of them got a fourth part of the kingdom.

It didn't go, his kingdom didn't go to Alexander the Great's posterity, as Daniel says in verse 4, that is his son or his children, it went to his four generals.

Daniel explicitly prophesies of this, and it came to pass, just as he said, in 323 BC at the death of Alexander the Great and the splitting of the empire of Greece.

Very importantly, we need to understand that these four Greek subkingdoms now are now going to become major players in that ancient world.

For example, you have the general Ptolemy would rule over the southern portion of Egypt, and Seleucus over Syria and Babylon, Cassander over Macedonia, and Antigonus over Asia Minor.

So we have these four kingdoms, the north, the south, and in verses five and following, we're going to read about the wars between the north and the south.

Sort of a civil war because both of them are Greek rulers ruling over non-Greek territories.

Interestingly, and I wish we had more time to get into it, but it specifically mentions that there is an arranged marriage that takes place between the Seleucid Empire and the Egyptian Ptolemaic Empire.

Because they were fighting and they were warring, and they're like, you know, if we have conflict and trouble and difficulty, the surefire way to bring about peace in the earth is to arrange a marriage.

It didn't work then either, right?

So they arranged this marriage.

Ptolemy II sent his daughter to the north to marry Antiochus II.

Turns out, unfortunately, Antiochus II already had a wife.

And she was something.

So she was pretty jilted.

And they were married for a while and things were a little better.

But then Ptolemy II, the father who sent his daughter off, he passed away.

And as soon as he passed away, there was no point for the arranged marriage.

So he reinstated Antiochus or the Seleucid Empire.

What was his name?

Antiochus II.

Reinstated his first wife, and she was so appreciative that she poisoned him and then killed the other mistress and her baby, lest they should take over, and her son began to reign.

Note to self.

Don't let her cook.

If you're gonna cheat on your wife, don't let her cook.

I'm just saying.

It's gonna change everything.

Their struggle would end in this ill-fated uh betrayal and death at the hands of this jilted wife in the Seleucid Empire.

Daniel talks about that.

Wow, that's pretty specific.

These two dynasties would continue to clash, and Ptolemy IV, who was the brother of the now the slain woman who was given in marriage, now mounts an all-out war against the north, and it's going back and forth.

Eventually Antiochus III would turn west, and after invading the homeland Greece, he would be defeated by the Romans in the Battle of Magnesia.

And as I read that, I just wondered if perhaps the Romans won the Battle of Magnesia by injecting the milk of Magnesia into the drinking water around the battlefield.

I don't know.

History will have to bear that out.

And the kids will have to ask your parents about that one.

So Antichus III would die in 187 BC.

He would be succeeded by Seleucus IV, like Daniel says, who would wage or raise these and levy these heavy taxes over the people of God.

Daniel says that, and it comes to pass.

And also, as you can read about it in 2 Maccabees chapter 3.

So if we were to summarize these first 20 verses, it's this that these pawns in God's rule over the nations, that in every conflict, in every alliance, in every reversal of power, these prophecies didn't only match later historical events.

They were given not just so we could like have some kind of intellectual curiosity and be like, that's really fascinating.

He told what would happen and it came to pass, and it's fun to match it up.

But the reason the angel told us to Daniel was to strengthen his heart and the heart of God's people thereafter in every age.

To realize that God doesn't just know what will happen in human history, things are happening in human history according to God's plans.

And there's a couple verses that we'll read a little later that emphasize this point that it's not just merely foretelling these events, but God is setting the boundaries of these events.

So, what does this mean for us today?

I can't help but think about those 350 years after Daniel's prophecy of chaos and of upheaval and of the persecution of God's people.

And I can't help but think about in our own day, the exchange of powers and institutions and corporations and a world in which Kim Jong-un is sort of like sleeps with his finger on the nuclear option and evil financiers like uh George Soros are constantly pushing billions and billions of dollars towards wicked legislation or movements.

What are we called to do?

How is the people of God called to respond to this kind of threat?

And I think the answer from our text is we're called to trust God unwaveringly.

He is over all the pawns on the chessboard.

And if God rules over the micro scale, just think about this.

If God rules over the nations, in order to do that, you'd have to rule under the subsets within the nations.

If you can't control a family in your God, then you can't control the nation.

If you can't can if you're not in control or superintending and having a hand in the final outcome of the butler, then how are you gonna control the king?

This means that God not only controls nations rising and falling today, but he's sovereign over situations and relational problems in our lives and things people have done to you have only happened if God's let them happen.

That's sobering.

Sometimes that's a hard pill to swallow.

Like C.

H.

Spurgeon said, the only thing worse than saying that God purposed something awful, purpose to allow something awful to happen, the only thing worse than that is to say that he purposed for it not to happen and it happened anyways.

Or for God to say, to have no word to say in it at all.

He's just like a deist deity that just kind of stands back and is like, sorry guys, you're on your own.

Truly, the hard pill to swallow is the medicine for our souls.

Like the confession says, that whatever happens, there's a 1689 line of confession of faith.

He says, What so that whatsoever happens to any of God's elect is by divine appointment for God's glory and for their good.

That's the hard pill to swallow.

The alternative is much worse.

That God is not in control, that he has no purpose for our evil, that he's not redeeming the things that happen to us.

God is providentially ruling over national and local elections, and he's also superintending our financial successes and failures that we make as free moral agents in a fallen world.

These are just some of the applications of what it means that God is superintending this chessboard.

But here's a question: what happens when evil gets really close?

Because sometimes it's one thing for evil to be on the other side of the world.

It's one thing for a world power to be threatening and menacing to invade a country next to them, and we're like, you know, 22 hours plane ride away from there, and we're not exactly worried.

But what about whenever it's happening to you?

What about when your world is colliding with other worlds?

What about whenever your world is in turmoil?

And that's what a second part of our text, verses 21 through 35, is all about.

We're gonna call this the remnant, courage under attack.

The remnant, courage under attack.

Let's read verses 21 through 24.

He says, In his place, and this is talking about Antichus the Great of verse 20, in his place shall arise a contemptible person to whom royal majesty has not been given.

He shall come in and without warning obtain the kingdom by flatteries.

Armies shall be swept away before him and broken, even the Prince of the Covenant.

And from the time that an alliance is made with him he shall act deceitfully, and he shall become strong with the small people.

Without warning, he shall come into the richest parts of the province, and he shall do what neither his father's nor his father's fathers have done, scattering among them plunder, spoil, and goods.

He shall devise plans against strongholds, but only for a time.

There's a little expression of God's sovereignty.

He's gonna do all this stuff, but God's gonna limit what he can do.

Verses 21 through 35, they center on the rise in tyranny of Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

He was a Greek Seleucid ruler from that same kingdom.

He was a descendant of the woman who poisoned her husband, etc., and he had the same personality.

He was notorious for his cruelty towards the Jewish people.

But what's interesting in this text that we just read was that he's not just powerful, but that he's deceitful.

It mentioned several times that he does what he does through flattery.

In fact, he came to power over the Seleucid Empire, not because he was in line to be the next ruler, but because the one who was in line to be the next ruler was uh in a prison in Rome.

And so Antichus Epiphanes took advantage over this little uh opportunity and in the turmoil, and then he he knew the right people to flatter, and by deception he entered into this position.

And then whenever he deals with God's people, he acts deceitfully again, and he flatters those so that they compromise a little few verses later that we don't have time to read.

He flatters even the people of God initially.

This seleucid ruler is described in verse 21 as a contemptible person.

Sounds like a great guy.

Who obtains the kingdom by flatteries.

So he obtains this political uh position through shrewd manipulation.

But soon after his ascension to power, he had such a passion, passionate hatred against the Jews and the Jewish religion, that as soon as he comes to power in Seleucia, he comes to Judea and he kills Onias III, the Jewish high priest.

He deposes a priest, he he kills the high priest, and then he, through flattery, amasses to himself a group of disloyalist Jews who were gonna sort of infiltrate the rest of the Jews and try to get him to go along with Antiochus' pagan ways.

I mean, this guy is a conniving, uh, wicked man.

He enters into Judea and Sam and uh Syria and he scatters among them plunder, spoil, and goods, verse 24 says.

Then he goes into Egypt and he fights against Egypt, which is the southern.

So this is remember, he's the solution, and he's fighting against Egypt, the southern kingdom again.

Why don't they just get along, right?

Invades Egypt, it doesn't work, so he comes back up, and when he comes back up, he's just filled with this rage, and he goes into Jerusalem.

He makes them the sort of the lightning rod of his uh anger and his hatred, and he just abolishes temple sacrifices.

He kills 40,000 Jews in Jerusalem alone, and then he enslaves and takes into captivity another 40,000 Jews from Jerusalem alone.

He sets up a statue of Jupiter Olympias in the temple in Jerusalem, and then he slaughters uh an unclean pig on the altar.

This guy was just a wicked man.

You can imagine being a Jew in that day and just thinking, how can there be a God who supposedly loves Israel?

How could this God possibly exist?

And if he exists, how could he possibly not intervene?

Did you see what just happened in the temple?

40,000 slaughtered Jews, and now an idol in the temple, and now a pig sacrifice on the altar.

You can imagine at any point in human history, if you just take a cross-section of that moment, it would look like there is no God.

If he's there, he doesn't care.

If he's there, he's not powerful enough to stop it.

That's why I love this book written by Oz Guinness on Wrestling with Doubts, and he says, we have to suspend judgment.

If any moment in our lives something happens and we feel like we have to make some kind of judgment about it, we're often gonna wrong arrive at the wrong judgment.

There is no God.

God doesn't care, God hates me.

He's like, stop feeling like you have to come up with some explanation for what happened.

And in the place of that need for explanation, in the place of that need for control, is trust.

Is faith in a God who says, I'm not just a God in moments and slices throughout history, I'm the God over the whole thing.

So, in the midst of all this turmoil, God was preserving a remnant of Jews through whom the Messiah would come.

And it even says in the text that we read, verses 32 through 34, in the scripture reading, it says that through flattery he's going to deceive some of the remnant, and then others are going to stumble, but God allows them to stumble so that he can purify them.

And in purifying them, preserve a people, and in preserving a people, send Messiah.

God had a purpose in it all, not just in the wicked stuff, but in allowing his people to experience it.

And the same is true for us today.

Did you know that you too were called to be a remnant in your generation?

Though none go with me.

Like Joshua said, as for me in my house, we will serve the Lord.

That's remnant talking right there.

That's saying I don't care what's going on around me, I'm going to be faithful.

Those around me, I'm going to influence them to be faithful.

We as God's remnant in the world, we are called to courage in the midst of chaos as well.

Knowing that God preserves his people even in the darkest of times.

It's interesting, I think at any given moment, us humans, we just like, you know, cars run on gasoline.

Humans run on hope.

What is your hope when the world seems chaotic?

What is your hope when kingdoms are colliding?

I think for some of us, our hope is just that whatever's happening out there will stay out there and it won't affect our families.

I know Ukraine's being invaded and people are dying over there, but my hope is that it'll never touch my children.

And we live that way, right?

We put our heads in the sand, we think that it can never happen to us, and we don't prepare for when crisis and tragedy happens to us.

What's your hope in?

Maybe your hope is in political action.

Maybe your hope is if only we can get the right person in office, if only this election can happen like it needs to, then all of God's purposes can come to pass.

That's a misdirected hope.

If you look back at Israel's history at any given time, in fact, there's not a lot of mountaintops.

There's a lot of valleys, a lot of deep valleys and a few mountaintops in Israel's history, but all along God was working and preserving his people.

What is your hope in today?

In whom are you trusting?

During the harsh winter at Valley Forge, during the American War for Independence, George Washington's army sort of camping out while the British soldiers were in the cities and around fires and sleeping in cots.

George Washington's army faced extreme hunger and extreme cold, and then despair over ever winning against Great Britain, this one of the world powers in that time of history.

And I mean, who are we?

Can you imagine when you start getting hungry, start getting really cold, and you start thinking like, wait a minute, what are we doing here?

We're going against a world power?

Why don't we just like pay the taxes and just get over this?

You can imagine, and they were suffering under low morale.

According to reports, Washington would be seen daily on his knees in the snow, melting a circle of melted snow around him, praying to God for help.

At the end of the war, and Washington is elected as the first president, appointed as the first president, he said this in his inauguration speech.

He said, No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States.

Every step by which we have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.

That's a really fancy way to say if anyone in the world should be grateful in testifying to God's interactions and his control and his workings in human history, it's the United States of America because look at what just happened.

How did we just win that?

George and Washington himself, you can look this up, it's fascinating.

He was really almost invincible on the battlefield.

He had three horses shot out from under him.

He had multiple bullet holes in his coat.

He'd had his hat shot off numerous times, and he just kept going.

He was leading his soldiers into battle.

And literally, there was one uh, I wish I could remember the general on the British side who told his snipers to take Washington out because he was kind of like leading everyone and he was kind of galvanizing the movement.

Just take him out.

And they kept shooting, kept shooting.

He'd fall off his horse and then he'd get back on, and they couldn't kill the guy.

And they're like, there must be something going on here.

We can't kill him.

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Benjamin Franklin, which is really interesting to me because he had been a staunch deist, as a lot of them were then, who believed that there was a God who created everything, sort of wound up the clock and then stepped back, and he was not involved in human affairs.

At the end of his life, that deist Benjamin Franklin said this to the Constitutional Convention.

He said, I have lived a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth.

That God governs the affairs of men.

And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?

Brothers and sisters, I wonder if we have that kind of confidence in our God and in our world today.

When we are going through business ventures and we're raising a family and having children and trying to build our marriage and trying to build a career and trying to plan for retirement, is God an afterthought?

Are you melting the snow around you on behalf of your family, on behalf of your future?

Like those who've come before have done.

I wonder when you wake up tomorrow morning if Daniel 11 will shape your responses to a world that rewards compromise and punishes faithfulness.

Here's a couple things I think we can learn.

Four things I think we can learn from these remnant in them just surviving and remaining faithful to God, even though Antiochus was trying to force pagan worship on them, was killing them by the thousands, and yet they remained faithful.

Four things.

The first thing is that we must draw clear moral boundaries.

If you don't feel like you're on the chopping block of some political, um uh some political issue or religious issue or moral issue in the workplace or in your family or whatever, now's the time to think about all the hot button issues in our day.

What are the things people are talking about?

What are the things that people are, the direction that sort of society as a whole is going and it's against God, and to know ahead of time where you stand on that.

And to know what you are going to say by God's grace if someone asks you about what you think or stand on that.

We must draw clear moral boundaries.

I think we would probably tend to put our heads in the sand, rely on just gut instinct to answer something in the moment.

And what we do when we usually do that is we either blow it or we compromise.

Now is the time to purpose to say no.

Now is the time to purpose to be willing to relinquish popularity or opportunity or approval or even life itself to remain faithful to Jesus Christ.

Number two, we must pray boldly for courage.

Before you face tough conversations or social pressures and compromise, do you pray for courage to honor Christ, courage to speak of Christ, courage to be one of the wise Daniel talks about, who instructs others even in persecution.

Thirdly, we must resist isolation.

The people Daniel was talking about, this remnant, they did not stand.

The ones that didn't compromise, they did not stand alone, and neither will you or I.

And in so doing, being encouraged yourself.

Are you resisting isolation or are you sort of like just skating by with the bare minimum?

We need to live as if we're under attack, because if we're not at the moment, we will be soon, whether by Satan or by pressures around us.

Fourthly, we must remember that God sets the limits of our suffering.

God sets the limits of our suffering.

We should be reminding ourselves and our families, our wife, our husband, our brothers, our sisters in Christ often that even though evil may rage for a time, God draws its boundary lines.

Hope is found in God's ultimate rule and victory over evil.

And in fact, it is this hope that verses 36 to 45 finish up the chapter with.

And so, number three, we read about the checkmate.

Hope beyond the reign of evil.

The checkmate.

Verse 36 says this And the king shall do as he wills.

He shall exalt himself and magnify himself above every God, and shall speak astonishing things against the God of gods.

He shall prosper till the indignation.

I want you to notice this.

Till the indignation is accomplished.

Who determines when the indignation is accomplished?

God.

For what is decreed shall be done.

Man, talk about a powerful statement of God being in control, God orchestrating the chessboard, this guy who's gonna be unprecedentedly evil, exalting himself, magnifying himself even above every God, doing astonishing things against God.

He'll be allowed to prosper in God's providence until everything God is gonna allow is accomplished, and then what God has decreed shall stop him.

These verses describe a king who exalts himself above every God.

And many commentators, most notably John Calvin, he reads this and he recognizes that when it starts talking in the remainder of the chapter about some of the events that are happening, it doesn't really fit with Antiochus Epiphanes, which was the person right before this.

And so it'd be most natural to read Antiochus Epiphanes from verses 21 through the end of the chapter.

Um, but most commentators realize that Daniel the angel shifts to another king without telling us he did that.

And John Calvin actually believes that this describes the rise and the dominance of the Roman Empire itself.

And it's not just one king, it's uh uh an empire and kings in succession.

And even he goes so far as to say that so much of what is said here actually matches what the New Testament says about the Antichrist.

In fact, 2 Thessalonians chapter 2 quotes Daniel 11, 36, when he talks about the Antichrist exalting himself above every God and speaking astonishing things against the God of gods.

2 Thessalonians 2 · chapter mention

And so I think we have here a picture of the future of this world empire rising, starting through Rome, that in the end is going to culminate in the ultimate enemy of God and his people, and that is the Antichrist, who's going to be this figure in fullness, even as other people before him were in part.

Obviously, lots of mystery here, and maybe afterwards you can explain to me what it means, and if you're dogmatic about it, then I'll know not to trust you.

Let's read verse 41.

He, if we think about the Roman Empire, its associated emperors, and possibly the future Antichrist, he shall come into the glorious land, which is talking about Israel, and tens of thousands shall fall, but these shall be delivered out of his hand, Edom, Moab, and the main part of the Yemenite.

He shall stretch out his hand against the countries, and the land of Egypt shall not escape.

Verse 45, and he shall pitch his palatial tents.

He's got tents that are like palaces, palatial tents between the sea and the glorious holy mountain.

Yet he shall come to his end with none to help him.

You ever heard the phrase from the river to the sea, right?

It's the chant of uh pro-Gaza and Hamas individuals, right?

Well, this is the same exact territory between the sea and the mountains of Jerusalem.

Right there.

Between the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and Jerusalem is where a lot of this is going to happen.

Fascinating.

But despite his reign of terror, the world power will come to an end with none to help.

In other words, this is how Daniel 11 ends.

And if you think of that, Daniel 11, it's right before Daniel 12, which is the end of the book.

And Daniel 12 is a very hope-giving chapter.

Here we have essentially the final word, the last verse of the last sort of negative thing talked about in the book of Daniel.

As the exiles who've been living under captivity for 70 years, they've been lied about, they've been ostracized, they've been marginalized, they obviously have been taken and ripped out of their culture, and their families have been killed, and that sort of thing.

And here we are at the very end of Daniel, and the last negative word is this promise of hope.

Yes, they may pitch their palatial tents between the sea and the glorious holy mountain, yet they shall come to an end with none to help.

There's our hope.

God is going to define the end of all the suffering of all of God's people, and in the end, the enemies of God, they'll look around, there'll be no one.

In fact, you read in uh Ezekiel that in the day of God's indignation, the enemies of God will look around and they'll look for a tree to hide behind, a rock, and they will cry out to the earth to cover them like an earthquake, because they cannot hide from the gaze of God's justice.

He will come to an end with none to help.

Is it not comforting this morning that every earthly kingdom, every Iran, every North Korea, every wicked regime will fall before the King of kings and the God of gods.

And that everything that happens until that point is being limited according to God's wise plans, so that in the end, He is glorified over the nations.

We can, and I think we must interpret the fears of our day in light of these truths, so that when the world seems unstoppable and unmoved before us in our prayers, we can remember that God has set an appointed time, verse 35, and that every word that is exalted against God will be silenced.

Evil will not have the last word.

The final move on the board belongs to the true King.

As we think about Jesus Christ, we have to remember and see the Christological sort of trajectory of this entire chapter, which isn't just about sort of having fun like you're in a time travel machine or something.

It's about showing that yes, horrific things are going to happen in Judea.

But God is going to preserve a people through it all and through that faithful remnant.

350 years later, a little baby would be born.

A little Jewish baby boy named Jesus of Nazareth.

And he would be a Jew who would be raised under that Roman oppressive empire.

He would be raised as someone who would be rejected by the Jewish religious establishment.

He would experience all the things that the remnant had experienced, even unto death.

But in dying, he would be victorious.

In rising, he would seal the fate of all of God's enemies.

Satan, death, hell, the grave, all the oppressors in Jesus' resurrection, he became the highly exalted one.

In December of 2016, Timur Garyev, a chess player from Uzbekistan, made history by playing 48 chess games at once, blindfolded.

Imagine playing chess 48 games at once, blindfolded.

Over the course of about 20 hours in a ballroom in Las Vegas, Timur sat in the middle of the room, had this pitch black blindfold on his face, and he sat on a stationary bike to kind of keep going.

He must have been a kinesthetic learner or something.

He's moving his legs for some 20 hours, and 48 boards are around him in a circle.

And the only way he knows who went where is when they call out the moves from the boards.

Board six, night to f3.

Board six, night to f3.

Okay.

And he can see it in his eye.

He sees the board and he sees them move the night to f3.

Board 27, pawn to e4.

In his mental memory, he pictures that and he remembers the other 17 moves they've made.

He knows where he's gone on all 48 boards.

Board 48, Bishop takes c5.

Sweat is trickling down his face, pieces are clicking.

But at the end of almost 20 hours, he had won every single game blindfolded and set and blew away the record, the Guinness World record for the number of games won blindfolded.

If you and I are amazed by this feat, and I am, imagine the sovereign rule and the scope of God's rule over the world.

As it's not 48 games, it's 195 nations.

It's 17,000 people groups within those nations.

It's 7,000 plus languages in families.

It's an estimated, if you take conservative estimates and then you take liberal estimates, between 50 and 100 billion people who've lived until today.

And God knows every heart.

He's not wearing a blindfold.

He's got perfect knowledge of not just what someone's thinking, what they're feeling, what they are going to do, but what they would do in a different set of circumstances.

Every contingency, every possibility, perfectly known to God.

If we marvel at humanity's fearsome power, how much more should we revere and trust and rest in God's meticulous providence?

He wouldn't be God if he weren't like this.

And so, in conclusion, no matter what is happening to you today or around you, will you let Daniel 11 inspire you to first trust in God's providential rule over all the pawns in your life?

Secondly, to take a stand, encourage in the face of pressures to compromise as God's faithful remnant, no matter what it costs you.

And thirdly, to firmly root your hope in the fact that Christ will have the ultimate checkmate over every opponent.

He's already determined his final moves, and in the appointed day, every pawn, every bishop, every king and queen will fall before him.

As Paul says, at the name of Jesus Christ, every tongue will confess, every knee will bow, every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

That's going to be the final day.

And if you're faithful until the end, Jesus says you'll be there to enjoy it.

Let's pray.