Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How to Read Apocalyptic Literature | Daniel 8

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

Are you confused by the "weird" books of the Bible like Daniel or Revelation? What does "apocalyptic" mean? Is the world about to end? What is the goal of such books? In today's bonus episode, Keith��and Patrick walk through Daniel 8 and discuss why and how to read apocalyptic literature in the Bible. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Daniel 8 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Normally on 10-minute Bible talks, we do, well, 10-minute long devotions, but every now and then, Keith and I like to have a little bit of fun and go long form on you. So if you already saw the timestamp, you realize this doesn't fit into your normal 10-minute Bible talks diet. And yet, I think if you like the Bible and you're interested in learning more about it, you're going to love this conversation. Right now at our church, we're actually going through the Book of Daniel. And if you don't know anything about the book of Daniel, the last six chapters are full of these wild apocelian. visions. And a lot of Christians are interested in the idea of apocalypses or just apocalyptic literature like Revelation in general. And so we thought it would be fun to take a little bit of an opportunity to talk about how we should read these kinds of wild text and focus specifically on the book of Daniel.

So we'll talk about how to read apocalyptic literature and then we'll look specifically at Daniel Chapter 8 as a bit of a case study in how to apply what we've learned during our church's study of this really fascinating book. Okay, so Patrick, let me ask. ask you a couple questions to get started. And here's my first one for you, the private school intellectual that you are. I'm sure you won't have any problem with either one of these. What's the best song ever? You know, that's a funny question for me because I don't spend much time listening to music. So it really depends on my mood. Well, just the best song ever. Well, man, if I'm in a dark mood, I really like box mass and B minor. That's a classic. If I'm in a...

Such a private school answer, really. I mean, I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I don't. I Oh my gosh. You just play to this duetotype. I don't know if it's on purpose or if that's really who you are. If I'm in a happier mood, I love the Brandenburg Concerto.

Oh, God. Now, if you want something more modern, I'm a huge fan of the French techno artist daft punk in their song, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. You can't go better than that. Okay, so another question for you. And this one's probably easier for you,

more up your alley. If music's not your thing, I know the Bible is your thing. How many versions? are there in the Bible? Oh, man, I don't know. Really? Really?

I was the top of my head, no. You didn't learn that in seminary? That feels like a useless fact, but sure, no, I didn't. Well, just what do you think? I mean, how many would you guess? How many verses would you guess are in the Bible? 190,000. Really?

I don't know. I know there's 66 books of the Bible. I was trying to do quick math. It was like, hey, the average book is maybe, you know, eight chapters in length, and then you multiply that by however many verses, whatever. Well, okay, so you didn't get A's in math, I take it. So how are those questions different? How are the answers different?

Well, obviously, the first one is a matter of opinion and taste. Lots of people are not going to go and enjoy a nice bach break like I am. Second one is a factual question, although, you know, it is a little bit more complicated that because depending on how your verses are numbered, there are some differences there across Bible. You didn't want that answer, did you? Well, I'm not sure that's accurate, but nonetheless, I mean, yes, some verses are included. No, one's a subjective question. It's about my taste. The other one is a factual objective question. I can say, for example, in the NIV, there are X amount of verses, and that's not changing.

Right. So it's hard for us to say what the best song is. I mean, in fact, impossible, because like you said, it's a preference issue. but for the record, there are 31,102 verses in the Bible. I was way off. You were slightly off, right? Okay. But you're right. The vast majority of people I asked that question, too, wouldn't know the answer. I didn't know it until I Googled it.

And yet, you could have answers that were closer or further away from it. So where I'm driving this is, what do you think understanding the Bible is more like? Is it more like what the best song is? Or is it more like how many verses are there in the NIV? Oh, man. question. I think it's probably somewhere between both in the sense that these are books written by humans that had actual intentions. They were hoping to communicate something, but I'm not that person. I'm also not God, so I don't have direct access objectively to what it is they were

hoping to communicate, which means that me as a subject has to do the best I can. And that means I'm going to get it right. I'm going to get it wrong. Well, yeah, I think the way I was thinking of at least, is that it's more like, not the exact same, but more like how many verses are there because you can get closer to what the Bible is trying to teach, or you can be further away from it, but there is something it's trying to teach, whereas the songs are preferences, and what we're really not saying when we come to the Bible is what do I want this to say? What do I prefer it to say? Yeah, when you frame it that way, I think I would absolutely agree. In fact, I think it's really dangerous to come to the Bible and say, hey, what does my personal taste make of this particular verse? Words have meaning.

So when you go to a small group and somebody sing around and says, well, here's what it means to me. there's almost nothing more worthless than that, right? I mean, if what they say is, here's my best attempt to understand what the Bible's saying, then, of course, that's a fair statement. But nobody really cares what your preference is that it would say. Yeah, I mean, I think our goal as Bible interpreters, and everybody listening to this is a Bible interpreter, is not to say, what's it mean to me? It's to ask the question, what did the author mean to communicate to me?

So then it's really hard to try to answer that question. I mean, we can get closer to it, and maybe sometimes we're pretty far away. but it's hard to figure out what is the author trying to say. And yet, the author has given us clues that we are supposed to use. And a lot of those clues center around context. There's all different kinds of contexts, which we'll go through here in a moment. But the context gives us a clue as to what the author is trying to say to us. Yeah, I mean, this is what we have to do every time we do one of our little 10-minute devotionals.

We have to take into account what's the context of this passage that I'm reading. And sometimes that's like the literary context. So what are the verses that came before and after this? Because that helps me understand what I'm reading right now. Other times it's the cultural context. We've been going through the Torah. And so we've had to think about the cultural context of an enslaved people living in Egypt in ancient times. That's a very different cultural context than what I live in. And of course, there's also historical context, which is where in history does this particular book fall? Because if I read, again, the Torah as though it was written to 21st century Americans who are spending all their time scrolling on social media, I'm going to inevitably misinterpret it. They didn't even know what social media was. Or as we've been going through the book of Daniel, what we find is that Daniel is in exile in Babylon and then Persia. But imagine if you think the United States, we today are Israel in the promised land. So now we are in power. God is our king and we are directing things.

That's a lot different than being God's people in exile in a foreign country. So the historical context and where it falls in the story of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is really important on how you might understand the Bible. Well, I mean, as you say that, it makes a ton of sense to me. I think Ronald Reagan, other people throughout American history have taken a passage in Second Chronicles. It essentially says that if you obey God, walk in his ways, he's going to bless you, and they say that applies to America. But the problem is that totally ignores the historical context. This was a promise made to Israel at a very particular time in its history. Right. So just to review, we have cultural context, we have historical context, we have literary context, which is the one that we're most familiar with. But there's another kind of clue that the author uses to communicate truth to us, and that is genre. Now, genre is one of those words that you maybe remember from your education, or maybe you're like me and you don't, and you need a little bit of a refresher of what it means. So genre is a word that says that there is a form or style. a piece of art can come in. So music can have genre, classical, rock, others. I don't know what they are, but I'm sure there's plenty of others. That's all you listening to, classical and rock. That's good. There's literary genres that we will kind of unpack here a little bit. But genre is really important in communicating meaning. You don't read all genres the same. They come with their own

rules of interpretation. Yeah, so let me give some examples. If you pick up a newspaper, or I guess these days no one reads newspapers. If you're reading an online newspaper and you're reading an opinion column, you're going to read that differently than the way you would read a news story. You expect an opinion to give you an opinion to make a case to try to persuade you, whereas a news story you expect to be more factual. It's just giving you the information with as little interpretation as possible. And so when you read those two different things, you kind of have the operating system, if you will. You know, like our phones, they've got operating systems, that all the apps work. That's what the genre does for you. It says, hey, here's how to read this particular thing that you're reading.

Yeah, so you would read a love letter a little bit differently than you would read the box scores of a baseball game in the newspaper. Now, the Bible has genres as well. In fact, it has quite a few different genres. For example, there is poetry in the Bible. There are parables, which are short fictional stories that you find in both the Old and the New Testament. There's the law code. There is history. Well, I think, you know, in the book of Proverbs, you have aphorisms, so these little type phrases that give you wisdom. You've got genealogies. You've got history. And of course, when we read these genres in the Bible, no one has to tell us, hey, you're reading poetry. We just look at it and we can see the way it fits on the page and we know, hey, this is how I read poetry. Poetry is full of metaphors. It's full of

illusions and imagery. And because I'm an intelligent human being, I know that I shouldn't read those metaphors literally. Whereas when I'm reading a history, I think, well, maybe I should read this a little more literally. This is trying to describe the facts. And one of the genres that you'll find in the Bible is apocalyptic literature. Apocalyptic literature is its own genre, and it needs to be read according to its rules. You can't read it like poetry or parables or history. If you try to, it won't make any sense. So let's talk for a little bit about how we should read apocalyptic literature. And I think this is an important question for one simple reason. We no longer have apocalyptic literature. I mean, we have apocalyptic movies, and usually that means, you know,

films that are telling the story of the end of the world, but that's not the same thing as apocalyptic literature. And we'll get into that in just a moment. But maybe the best place to start is by simply saying this. And this little phrase I've discovered can insult some people, so we'll try to clarify it. The Bible was not written to you. The Bible was written for you. In other words, every text that you read in the Old and New Testament was written to someone else. Maybe it was written to ancient Israelites, or maybe it was written to the early church, but it wasn't written directly to you. And again, that's going to change how you read things. One little story that illustrates the point. This was a few years ago. I opened up an

Amazon package. I'm pretty sure it was during COVID. And when I opened it up, there's a thing of coffee inside of it called Cinnobun coffee. Except instead of like Cinebun, it's S-I-N, like Cineobun coffee. And it's got this kind of demonic-looking dude murdering people on the front of it. And it freaked me out because I didn't order this coffee. And so my first thought was, is someone sending me a dark message? Or is this like some sort of threat? Like, you know, you better watch out because the Cinebun coffee is coming for you. Of course, it's kind of ridiculous, but I couldn't figure out where did this come from. And so I pulled back out the box, and I looked on the front of the box, and I realized that I had received someone else's mail.

It wasn't for me. It was for a house. It was actually like two streets over. It was their mail. They had ordered Cinebun for themselves. It would have made sense to them had they opened up that box, I guess, right? I mean, exactly. For that, they wouldn't have been confused. They wouldn't have taken it as a threat. I think it's what happens when we read the Bible, is we think that it's written to us, and we forget the fact that in reality we're actually reading someone else's mail. Yeah, and so what happens when we think it was written directly to us is that we bypass going through the context that we talked about earlier, thinking about historical context. Where does this fall inside the canon of the scripture from Genesis to Revelation, or where does it fall within the cultural context? How does that shape what the author is saying?

We try to read it as 21st century Americans, and that's where we get into. trouble. And perhaps we get into the most trouble when it comes to reading other people's mail when we're reading a genre that we don't understand. You understand poetry, you understand history. But if you're like Keith and I, it's taken a lot of effort and a lot of learning to understand apocalyptic literature because it's just so foreign to us. But here's the good news of this. Remember what we said. The Bible is not written to us, but it is written for us. So while these apocalyptic passages might not be directly written to you and me, they do have a message for us. God is trying to teach us something important through them. And so the best way to

approach them is to say, okay, I'm going to put my mind and maybe my feet into the ancient sandals of ancient Israelites and try to read this passage the same way they read it. Because when I read it like their mail, I can actually hear the message for me in the modern era. So let's kind of walk through four questions that a person could ask as they read apocalyptic literature. And then we'll unpack Daniel chapter 8. Before we get into those questions, it might just be helpful by naming this, what does apocalyptic actually mean? It has a different meaning in our world and it does in the ancient world. Like you said earlier, when we use apocalyptic, it usually is talking about the end of the world. But when the Bible

uses the word apocalypse, it's talking about something being unveiled, something being revealed. Yeah, the word apocalypse actually comes from the Greek word apocalypsis, which like you just said means to reveal or to unveil. In a real sense, what an apocalypse did, it wasn't about telling what was going to happen in the future, which is how we tend to read it. It was about pulling back the curtain to show you what was happening behind the scenes of history. It's kind of like a Wizard of Oz moment. You know, they see the wizard and he's there. And then they finally pull back the curtain and they see what's actually happening,

which is that it's a totally normal man using technology to trick everyone. And that's what apocalyptic literature does. It pulls back the curtain on major political historical events and says this is what's happening in the spiritual realm. And before we get further into those four questions, let's just try to identify where would a person find apocalyptic literature inside the Bible? We know the book of Revelation is apocalyptic. It's using symbols to communicate this spiritual truth you just talked about. And I guess Daniel does. That's the whole point of us bringing it up here, the second half of Daniel, not the first half. Are there other places in the Bible we'd find apocalyptic literature, or is it limited to those two places? I think there's a few other places. Jesus has what's called the little apocalypse.

I guess he didn't get a big apocalypse, poor guy. You can find that in Mark 13. It's also in Matthew's Gospel. Another example would be the prophet Ezekiel. In Ezekiel 40 to 48, he has these apocalyptic visions of a new temple being built, these kind of demonic figure. It's called Gog and Magog fighting against each other and fighting against the people of God. Do any other examples come to mind for you?

I don't think so. I'm not saying there aren't any, but the ones that get the most attention are the Book of Revelation, Daniel, second half of Daniel, and what you just mentioned. So here's the first question that you need to wrestle with as you read apocalyptic literature. What is being symbolized? What are these symbols pointing to? Because apocalyptic literature relies heavily on symbols. And if you don't stop and say, okay, what is the author referring to in these symbols, then you're just going to be completely confused. And thankfully this isn't too hard for us because we read all kinds of literature was symbolism. I read the Chronicles of Narnia to my daughter, and I had to explain to her continually

that Aslan symbolized Jesus. He was a symbol of Jesus. Another example comes from the Wizard of Oz, which has the Yellow Brick Road. And you taught me, I didn't know this. The Yellow Brick Road symbolizes the gold standard, because what was written there was a debate over whether our currency should be based on the gold standard or the silver standard. Well, the whole weird thing about the Wizard of Oz is there's all kinds of crazy interpretations. There's what you just referred to, which I would say it's interpreted there as a parable on populism. But it's also kind of been used by religious people or atheists or feminists. And they all read different meaning into those symbols, which takes us back to our question of

what do these images symbolize? And that's a really important question. If you get that wrong, you're going to start down a wrong road to end up in a crazy place. Well, one of the nice things about the book of Daniel, now this isn't true in every example of apocalyptic literature is that Daniel typically interprets the symbols for you. You read the first half, he gives you all these crazy symbols. There's wild, you know, dragons and animals. And then the second half says, and here's what it means. Now, that makes reading Daniel, as far as apocalyptic literature goes, relatively easy. I think another question that we need to ask is, what does the imagery reveal about

the symbol, right? Because the symbol itself isn't just a stand-in for something. The imagery that's around the symbol tells you something. So one of my favorite examples of imagery comes from 1942. There was a Polish Jewish artist who painted a portrait of Hitler. And if this was on a podcast, we would show you a picture of it. But if you look closely at the artist's work, inside of Hitler's eyes, instead of a light gleaming like you might normally see in a painting, there's skulls. So he's got skulls in his eyes. Behind him are these vultures and skeletons, and they're carrying a flag bearing lyrics of a popular Nazi song that said, today, Germany is ours, tomorrow the whole world. And all of these images are used to communicate the true nature of Hitler's Germany, that it's a place of death

and destruction. The imagery is deathly. It's awful. And so it's telling you something about the reality of Germany at the time. If you want to look it up, I'll just give you the name. The artist's name is Arthur Zyke, S-Z-Y-K, and the painting is called Antichrist. So there you go. So in Daniel, the way this plays itself out is one of the images that is used over and over and over are kind of bloodthirsty beasts. I mean, they're just these horrible sounding animals that are out attacking people. And what Daniel tells us is that those animals, those beasts, represent different governments, different empires. So what do we take away from the fact that they are bloodthirsty and that they're attacking people and they look real scary?

Well, what we take from it is that those governments are evil, that they are trying to do a lot of damage to God's people, that they are not to be trusted. So the way the imagery is used tells us, us something about how Daniel wants us to see these empires. Yeah, so let me put some legs on this. If I said that the modern day United Kingdom was a goldfish, I'm using symbolism and imagery. Like Dory? I'm symbolizing the nation with a goldfish. And I'm also using imagery because goldfish, they're supposed to be dumb, they have short attention spans. So you would realize what I'm saying is that the UK is a dumb country with small short attention spans. But if I said that the UK is a roaring lion, You'll get a very different symbol with very different imagery associated with it.

You might take that as a symbol of strength or maybe a symbol of violence. So let's go to the third question. And as we should ask ourselves, does this sound familiar? So if I were to say to you, I am your father. You might, if you're a Star Wars junkie, pick up what I'm saying, that I am Darth Vader and that you are Luke Skywalker. Now, it's not absolutely apparent from the very get-go. but with a little thought, you would be able to come to that conclusion, even if you probably hadn't seen the Star Wars movies before. Yeah, and Daniel's full of this. So in the literary world, this is called an illusion. It's a phrase or a set of words that recalls something else inside of Scripture. And so when you read the book of Daniel or the Book of Revelation, they constantly have illusions which are trying to make you hyperlink into some other part of the Bible. And the example you just gave is a great one. You could hyperlink me into the Star Wars story by implying that you are on the dark side and trying to convince me to join the dark side, which is what I feel like a lot with you.

Now, that's really important. The Bible will interpret these symbols because what happens a lot of times is that people read their own current modern day meaning into those symbols and don't look to the Bible. So, for example, what we've seen is that some people have read the scorpions in the book of Revelation as being modern attack helicopters. And they've kind of seen this imagery in Revelation about telling us about this upcoming war that will happen between countries today and that they will be these beasts are these helicopters that will be coming after you and trying to hunt you down and kill you. And what they're doing is

they're making the mistake of not allowing the Bible to define the images. Now, are you sure it was scorpions or do you think it was locusts? Oh, it was low. Oh, I just had to get you on that one. No, I knew I said scorpions. It wasn't right. But I couldn't see. It's what came to my mind. Here's why that really matters. So what you're saying is, hey, we see this symbolic image of locust. And we think it's an illusion to modern-day Apache helicopters. The problem is it's actually an illusion to Joel 2, which talks about a swarm of locust. It's that we get our illusions all wrong,

which means that we end up misinterpreting the passage altogether. Scorpions aren't never in the Bible, are they? I don't know if they are. So the fourth question is, what's the goal? Why is the author using this genre, and what are they hoping to communicate? Well, remember what you said earlier that apocalyptic literature is meant to review,

reveal or unveil. And so what they're trying to do is show us what things are really like behind the scenes. What are empires really like? They present one image to the public. But behind the scenes, there are dark spiritual forces who are at work using those empires to accomplish their own objectives. Yeah. So to read a genre properly, you always have to know what's the goal of the genre. That's what you're saying. So when I read an essay, I know what its goal is, which is to educate. When I read a poem, know what its goal is, which is to move my heart. If I read an opinion column, I know what its goal is, which is to change my mind. And what you just said is, hey, when you read apocalyptic literature, the goal is to reveal spiritual realities happening behind the scenes of these world political events.

And why was that important? Why would it be important for the author of Revelation or Daniel to not just come out and speak directly? Why would they want to use symbolism to communicate this truth? Why wouldn't they just come out and say, hey, government empires, whether it's Rome or Babylon or Persia, they are evil, don't trust them? Well, I mean, I think the answer is obvious on two different levels. One is, you really like your own head. And if you don't want someone to take it off, sometimes it is prudent to hide your meaning behind symbols. So they were trying to communicate truth in a way that it wasn't so obvious that they would be killed for it. Yeah, I think on another level, it actually goes to the way that our hearts are changed.

If you just said to me, empires are evil, I might say, I don't know, I'm not sure about that. But if you give me an image of a beast devouring people and I start seeing the connection between that devouring beast and the empire that I'm a part of, that might actually convince me more through the symbolism. So it gets my attention. It moves my heart. It causes me to maybe see some things that I wouldn't see if you used a more direct approach. Yeah, and I think part of this has to do with the audience. If you think about the people that Daniel was writing to, people living in exile, in Babylon, they had to be tempted by the empire in the sense that empires are really attractive. I mean, imagine you move into Babylon and they have the world's greatest collection of literature. They have

the world's greatest arts. They have the world's most extravagant cities. You might be tempted to believe that Babylon's gods really are better than Yahweh, that Babylon's way of life really is superior to what you see in the Old Testament. Empires are incredibly attractive. They easily win our hearts. So this is part of why Daniel wanted to reveal the true nature. of empires, which is that as attractive as they may seem on the surface, there's something deeply dark and wrong in its heart. And of course, we can understand the pressure that Daniel was under because we feel it in our own day. We feel the pressure to be on the right side of history. We feel the pressure to conform to the cultural values. And so if Daniel were writing today,

he might want to say to us, resist the temptation to follow the cultural path and instead submit to the one true king and follow Jesus. So if the goal of an essay is to, educate if the goal of an opinion piece is to change your mind maybe the goal of the apocalyptic genre is to help exiles like you and me peter calls us exiles it's to help exiles resist becoming like the empire it's a way of saying yes just like daniel you might have to live in it yes you're going to have to serve it as well as you can but no you must not assimilate no you must not bow down to their gods no you need not participate in their violence and conquest no you don't need to embrace their misogyny, their systems of racial superiority, sexual immorality, and corrupt governance.

That's the goal, ultimately, of apocalyptic literature, is to help people see the true nature of empire and, on the other side, to resist becoming like it. All right, so let's go into Daniel chapter 8. Now, the first six chapters in the book of Daniel, Daniel, Daniel is interpreting other people's dreams, but starting in Daniel 7, he starts to have his own dreams. And one of the things that you notice is that the ancient, world thought about dreams differently than we do. If we have a bizarre dream at night, we might get up and say, huh, I wonder what's going on inside of me that caused me to think about that all night. In other words, dreams reveal something about our inner life. But in the ancient world,

they believed that dreams told them something about the reality and the true nature of the world outside of them. So with that in mind, let's dive into Daniel chapter 8. Okay, Daniel chapter 8 versus 1 and 2. In the third year of King Belchazar's reign, I, Daniel, had a vision. This is one of those dreams after the one that had already appeared to me. He's talking about Daniel 7. In my vision, I saw myself in the citadel of Susa in the province of Elam. In the vision, I was beside the Uly Canal. So those verses are giving us some historical context. And what they're telling us is that this takes place late in the Babylonian Empire right before it is destroyed. The first vision, as you said, was in Daniel chapter 7. And now here is a second vision that is taking place. And in Daniel chapter 7, he has a vision of four different beasts, and each beast represents a different empire. And every successive beast eats the beast before it until they're finally defeated by the son of man, this Christ-like figure who represents the kingdom of God. And why I bring that up is that it sets us up for Daniel 8 because now we know that

empires in the book of Daniel are often represented by violent beasts. And that's exactly what we're going to see in the next few verses. And why do you think the empires are represented by beasts? Is there a strategy there? Well, I think there's a number of strategies. One is the one right on the surface, which is that the animals he picks, a lion, a bear, a leopard, and a dragon, which is super cool. Except it's not because they are bloodthirsty. These are animals that people were terrified of in the ancient world because they would shred you to pieces.

So one thing he's saying is that these empires, at their core, are violent conquistadors. That's what they are. But isn't there also something more about that? them alluding back to the earliest chapters of the Bible back in Genesis 1 and 2, where human beings are meant to rule over the beasts, but then we are deceived by an animal, by the snake. By a serpent, a dragon. And then, starting in Genesis 4, we start acting like the beast with Cain killing Abel. So what he's showing us, I think, is that these governments are established by God and can

be used for good. But with human beings, corrupt human beings behind them, these governments are can also be corrupt and turn themselves against God and his people. Yeah, so it seems like maybe the message is humans at their best rule over the beast and humans at their worst become like the beasts. And in some ways, the empires are the quintessential example of beastlike human behavior. All right, so let's go to verses three and four. I looked up and there before me was a ram with two horns. Wait, was it a truck? Like a dodge rame? Oh, a different kind of ram. Sorry. Again, see, that's what happens. If you start putting things into the modern You end up with some weird stuff, don't you? Keep going.

All right. This is Daniel again. I looked up and there before me was a ram with two horns standing beside the canal and the horns were long. One of the horns was longer than the other but grew up later. I watched the ram as it charged toward the west and the north and the south. No animal could stand against it and none could rescue from its power. It did as it pleased and became great. Okay. So later in Daniel's vision, he will explain exactly what this rams. is, but I'll let you in on the secret right now. Remember, he is having this vision during the Babylonian Empire, but the Babylonian Empire would fall to the Empire of the Persians and the Means. And that's who he's describing as the Ram. It's the Persian Empire, which came from the east,

and you notice where it's going. It's going west. So it's going into Babylon, then it's going to go down south into Israel and all the way down into Egypt. All the directions make perfect sense. But this beast is the Persian Empire, which is coming to conquer Babylon and the rest of the quote-unquote known world. Right. And history tells us that in 530, Cyrus the Great, who's the king of Persia, he conquered Babylon. So Daniel's theology of history here conforms very well to what we find in the historical record. Yeah. And again, what's the goal here? It's not merely to tell things that are in our future, although they would have been in Daniel's future to a very small degree. I mean, this is just years later. The goal is to tell us something true about the Persian

empire, which again is that it's this indomitable ram. And I guess I would even say that the point here isn't to tell us history. If that's all this is, is a history lesson of what happened, then it really doesn't have anything to say to us because this is centuries in our past. This is a theology of history. This is a way of thinking about history in every era. Right. So he's using his current events to teach us how to think about all empires throughout history, from the beginning to the end. Okay, let's pick up in verses five to seven when we get another animal in the picture. As I was thinking about this, suddenly a goat with a prominent horn between its eyes came from the west, crossing the whole earth without touching the

ground. It came toward the two-horned ram I had seen standing beside the canal and charged it in a great rage. I saw it attack the ram furiously, striking the ram and shattering its two horns. The ram was powerless to stand against it. The goat knocked it to the ground and trampled on it, and none could rescue the ram from its power. So like you said earlier, Daniel is really helpful because he will tell us what this means. If you keep reading down into the chapter, what you find is that this goat that kills the ram... It's a levitating goat. You know, it doesn't touch the ground, but anyways. The goat is Greece, the empire of Greece, and we know from history that the king or the ruler of Greece is the very famous Alexander the Great. And after Alexander the Great dies, which he dies

very young in 323 BC, he dies in his early to mid-30s at the time. His empire is absolutely huge, but that empire then is divided into fourths. It's divided into four smaller empires. Two of those empires are really important in Israel's history because they fight over Israel's land. Yeah, so let's pick up that story. Verses 8 to 12. The goat became very great, but at the height of its power, the large horn was broken off. And in its place, four prominent horns grew up toward the four winds of heaven.

So let's just pause. Remember, the goat is Alexander the Great. and like Keith just said, Alexander the Great, after he died, his kingdom was divided into fourths. Four of his generals all took different portions of the empire. That's what's being described here with the four horns. Out of one of them came another horn, which started small, but grew in power to the south and to the east and toward the beautiful land. So now it's talking about one of those four rulers, and for some reason this ruler, he is interested, like Keith just said, in the land of Israel. It grew until it reached the host of heavens, and it threw some of the starry hosts down to the earth and trampled them. them. It set itself up to be great as the commander of the army of the Lord. It took away the daily

sacrifice from the Lord and his sanctuary was thrown down. Because of rebellion, the Lord's people and the daily sacrifice were given over to it. It prospered in everything it did and truth was thrown to the ground. So let me pause here for a second and tried to describe what was happening in this particular passage, which Daniel again explains later. There was a king in one of those four empires, the Seleucid Empire, and his name was Antiochus Epiphanes the Fourth. I love. that name. It is kind of a crazy name. Roland Blomyer the third. Huh? I mean, isn't that awesome? I'm going to start calling

Antiochus Epiphanes the fourth, Roland Blomio the third. Yeah, that's too long of a story to share right now, but I just love the fourth. So Antiochus Epiphanes is an interesting figure because he was kind of a Greek supremacist. He really believed that Greek culture was the height of human existence, and he wanted to eradicate anything in his rule or reign that was not fully Greek. Now, because he was a conquistador, he wanted more land, he moved southward and took the land of Israel from one of these other Greek empires, which would have been the Tolmese. Okay. And now,

once he's in charge there, he wants to get rid of Yahweh worship. And the way he does that, he marches into the temple, he sacrifices an unclean animal, a pig on the altar, and declares it a temple to the Greek gods. And of course, this causes a huge rebellion inside of Israel. You can read about that in the book of Maccabees, because Israel says, no, we wore it. We were, worship Yahweh, you can't take our temple from us, and it creates this guerrilla warfare moment. And eventually the insurgents from Israel, they actually defeat Antiochus Epiphanes. Yeah, and so this guy, Antiochus Epiphanes, the fourth. Now, can you imagine that means there were three before him?

And they just kept going with it. They liked it so much. But he was horrible, torturing the Jews, doing all kinds of unspeakable things to them. Trying to prevent people from speaking Hebrew. I mean, awful stuff. And here's how First Maccabees, which is in the Catholic Bible, in the Apocry. It's not part of our Bible. It's not inspired by God.

And yet it's really helpful to understand history. This is how the chapter ends, the first chapter. It says, but many in Israel stood firm and were resolved in their hearts not to eat unclean food. They chose to die rather than to be defiled by food or to profane the Holy Covenant. And they did die. Very great wrath came upon Israel. Now, the point here is not that Antiochus Epiphanes the Fourth is unique, or that this is a unique time in Israel's history. The point is that there will always be evil in the world, and

oftentimes that evil will turn itself against the people of God. So what Daniel 8 is trying to get us to do is to ask the question, how should faithful people, faithful believers respond when they are being persecuted? How should they think about suffering for their faith? And again, this goes back to the goal of apocalyptic literature, which is to help us resist the empire. One of the cool things for me about Antiochus Epiphanes, not that he was a cool guy, but it's interesting, is that he kind of gives us an archetype of what a evil national leader really looks like. Daniel describes him in verses 23 to 25. He says, in the latter part of their reign, so he's talking about Antiochus Epiphanes, when rebels have become completely wicked, a fierce-looking king, this is him, a master of intrigue

will arise. He will become very strong, so beware of strong. men, but not by his own power. He will cause astounding devastation, so be wary of those who cause cultural devastation that cause violence or that stir up violence, and will succeed in whatever he does. So he'll look like he's doing a great job. Everything around him is great, which is the kind of leader, by the way, that people are often tempted to follow. He goes on, he will destroy those who are mighty, the holy people. He will cause deceit to prosper. So bad leaders, they have misinformation, disinformation, and he will consider himself superior. He thinks he's the best. When they feel secure he will destroy many and take his stand against the prince of princes yet he will be

destroyed not by any human power and again this goes back to your point daniel is speaking and telling people when you are under this kind of leader just know their time will always be up their time will always come to an end he will be destroyed all right let me pick it back up in daniel 815 while i daniel was watching the vision and trying to understand it there before me stood one who look like a man. So first of all, I'm encouraged by the fact that Daniel has to kind of figure out, what does this mean? He's trying to understand it the best he can. So there standing before him is one who looks like a man. And I heard a man's voice from the Ulai calling. Remember that's the Ulai Canal. Gabriel, this is what the voice is saying. Gabriel, tell this man the meaning of the vision.

And he came near the place where I was standing. I was terrified and felt prostrate. Son of man, he said to me, understand that the vision. vision concerns the time of the end. While he was speaking to me, I was in a deep sleep with my face to the ground. Then he touched me and raised me to my feet. He said, I am going to tell you what will happen later in the time of wrath, because the vision concerns the appointed time of the end. So what this is talking about is not the end of the world. By the way, we already know this. I mean, Daniel explains the images later, and as we just said, all these things correspond to things in our past. So this cannot possibly mean the literal end times. But this is how the Bible,

by the way, talks about end times. Very rarely does it view it as a single period in history. It often views it as periods within history. Don't you think it's right to say that what he's talking about here is the end of the time of the suffering under Antiochus Epiphanes the Fourth? Exactly. There will come a time when it seems like evil is winning. And yet it never ultimately wins. God will win. So that's part of what apocalyptic literature is doing is saying, hey, look, right now it looks like evil is triumphing, but you can take heart, be courageous, keep your faith, keep following Yahweh, keep following Jesus, because God will ultimately triumph. He will ultimately establish his kingdom. Yeah, and maybe this is kind of depressing news for us because maybe what we would

like Daniel to say is that the holy people picked up their arms and they went to battle against the beast and they defeated him. And that's actually, by the way, what happened in history, the Israelites did take up arms. But that's actually not how Daniel frames it. Interestingly, the role he gives to the holy people and this maps onto Daniel 7 is to die. It's kind of a bummer, right? It's not the message you want. You don't want the message to be, your role is to be faithful and to die. And yet, I think that's at the heart of the way of exile. When these dark spiritual forces are working and they work in every nation, we will be tempted to pick up our arms. And yet the call is to lay down your arms and to die and to trust God to make things right in the end.

In Daniel 8 in verses 13 and 14, it talks about 2,300 evenings and mornings that will pass until this end comes. And so what a lot of people have done is they've used that number, 2,300 days, and they've tried to figure out when Jesus is going to return, as if Daniel was giving us a timetable for that. But I don't think that's the point of the 2300 days is to tell you this is exactly when Jesus will come back. Instead, what I think it's telling us is that the time of evil's triumph is limited, that there's an end coming, and it might seem long to you, but it is relatively speaking pretty soon when evil will be destroyed. So there's two ways to know, by the way, that the 2,300 evenings and mornings are not telling us about the time of Jesus' return.

Here's way, number one, every time someone has tried to do it, you know what they always end up finding out? They're wrong. Not just that they're wrong. Jesus is always coming in my day. Everybody feels like they're living in the last days. Everybody, because guess what? We live in this.

We are. We are. Jesus said that this era, the church era, from his resurrection to his return, he calls that, however long it ends up being, he calls that the last days. And so these patterns, they repeat themselves throughout history. And so one of the problems is because that history is repeating, we often think, oh, he must be coming back during my lifetime.

Things have never been worse than they are right now. But here's the second reason why we know it can't tell us the day of Jesus return? Because Jesus told us. And Jesus's little apocalypse, he says not even I know the day that I will return. If Jesus doesn't know the day that he's going to return, how in the world could we guess it using the book of Daniel? We haven't been invited to do that. I think again, Key's point is the key. This will not last forever. The time is limited. The king of heaven will come down. Apocalyptic literature is not designed. It was never intended to give us a roadmap to the future. it was intended to tell us how history works, how the world will work until God comes to establish his kingdom.

I love how the chapter ends because in some ways it tells people like us who all live in evil times, who all live in the last days. It tells us what to do in the midst of that, which again is surprisingly not to take up arms. Here's what he says, Daniel 827, the very last verse, I Daniel was worn out. Amen. It says high-lay exhausted for several days. I'm exhausted just reading it. Seriously. And there is a real exhaustion to living in an evil broken world. We all feel exhausted by the evil we see around us. And we might, just like Daniel, need to just lay down for a few days and mourn and lament what's wrong. But then catch this. Then I got up and went about the king's business. This is the king, by the way, who he knows is going to fall. That's how his vision begins,

is the king I serve is going to be destroyed. Then I got up and went about the king's business. I was appalled by the vision. It was beyond understanding. Yeah, he goes back to work. I mean, all this talk about evil rampaging, all this talk about God is ultimately going to defeat it. It doesn't make him become passive. He doesn't just sit back and say, well, okay, God said he's going to defeat it. I'm just going to let him do his thing. And I'm just going to sit back and do nothing. It doesn't cause him to change vocations and to be a missionary and say, well, if the end is coming, then I'm going to stand out on the street corner and just preach the gospel because that's the only thing that matters. It doesn't cause him to set up a website, you know, saying this many days until God returns

Because end times countdown ticker. Right. He doesn't do that. Instead, what he does is he goes back to his vocation, which is working inside of this court for the flourishing of that kingdom, right? Which he knows is going to fall. Because this is still Jeremiah 297 is still applicable here, that we should pray for the prosperity of Babylon, for the land there in exile.

And he goes about his work, he goes about his job. And he has this robust theology of God reigning over history. and that gives him the power to be faithful in his moment and trust all this to God. Here's what I love about Daniel because it honestly helps calm down my anxious nervous system. It's that he lives loosely to the powers at hand. He knows that the empire he's serving is going to fall. He knows that the next empire he will serve will also fall one day. He knows, most importantly, that one day God will bring evil to an end.

And that allows him to do his job well, but not be captivated by the empire. It allows him to do his job well and yet not think that the empire and its future success, whether it's military success or cultural success, he understands those aren't ultimate things. The ultimate thing is the sovereignty of God, that King Jesus is ultimately on the throne. And I think this is helpful for us because right now I'm seeing a lot of the quote-unquote culture warriors gain a lot of steam. People are following them because a lot of people feel like we're living in the end times right now. Things are worse than they've ever been.

And I think Daniel would look at that and he'd say, yeah, yeah, we are living in the latter days. yeah, these empires will rise and fall. Yeah, there's some serious problems here, and we should mourn them, and they might make us feel exhausted. And yet, I think he would say the king is on the throne. And because you know that, you can live loosely to those powers. You don't have to change culture by fighting to take America back for God or whatever country you're in back for God.

Instead, you can do your job faithfully with character, with kindness and gentleness and all the things Jesus calls us to because you know that there's only 2,300 days and nights. One day, Jesus will return. And then the very last line, it was beyond understanding. It gives me comfort because I don't think I've got this chapter figured out, right? And I don't think I have the evil times we live in figured out. And I don't have it figured out how I should operate in these evil times and exactly what the church should be doing.

I mean, we've got kind of a general idea. He's given us a general roadmap of how we should behave, which is what you just laid out. But on the other hand, there's a lot I don't know. But that's okay. Daniel didn't understand it all. And that gives me permission to say, I don't understand it all either. but I can go about the job that God has given me to do. I can pray that his kingdom would come and his will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.

I can, trusting in him, filled with the Holy Spirit, hopefully bearing the fruit of the Spirit, work for justice, tell people about Jesus, love my neighbor. That's what God has called us to do. And so let's do that as Christians. Let's move forward in these evil times, trusting our God who reigns over all. let's be faithful to him let's lay down our life if necessary to see his kingdom come on earth