Daniel 11, Knowing Your God on the Way to the Manger, Dr. John B. Carpenter

Daniel 11 as History Written in Advance

Daniel 11, hear the word of the Lord. And as for me, in the first year of Darius the Mede, I stood up to confirm and strengthen him. This is the angel speaking from the end of chapter 10, remember? And now I will show you the truth.

Behold, three more kings shall arise in Persia, and a fourth shall be far richer than all of them. And when he has become strong through his riches, 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 has arisen, his kingdom shall be broken and divided toward 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.

Then the king of the south shall be strong, but one of his princes shall be stronger than he and shall rule, and his authority shall be a great authority. After some years they shall make an alliance, and the daughter of the king of the south shall come to the king of the north to make an agreement, but she shall not retain the strength of her arm, and he and his arm shall not endure.

But she shall be given up in her attendance, he who fathered her and he who supported her in those times. And from the branch, from a branch, from her roots, one shall arise in his place. He shall come against the army and enter the fortress of the king of the north, and he shall deal with them and shall prevail.

He shall also carry off to Egypt their gods with their metal images and their precious vessels of silver and gold. For some years he shall refrain from attacking the king of the north. Then the latter shall come into the realm of the king of the south, but shall return to his own land.

His sons shall wage war and assemble a multitude of great forces, which shall keep coming and overflow and pass through, and again shall carry the war as far as the fortress. Then the king of the south, moved with rage, shall come out and fight against the king of the north, and he shall raise a great multitude, but it shall be given into his hand.

And when the multitude is taken away, his heart shall be exalted, and he shall cast down tens of thousands, but he shall not prevail. For the king of the north shall again raise a multitude greater than the first, and after some years he shall come on with a great army and abundant supplies.

In those times many shall arise against the king of the south, and the violent among your people shall lift themselves up in order to fulfill the vision, but they shall fail. Then the king of the north shall come and throw up siege works and take a well-fortified city, and the forces of the south shall not stand, or even his best troops, and there shall be no strength to stand.

But he who comes against him shall do as he wills, and none shall stand before him. And he shall stand in the glorious land with destruction in his hand. He shall set his face to come with the strength of his whole kingdom, and he shall bring terms of an agreement and perform them.

He shall give him the daughter of women to destroy the kingdom, but it shall not stand or be to his advantage. Afterward he shall turn his face to the coastlands and shall capture many of them, but a commander shall put an end to his insolence.

Indeed, he shall turn his insolence back upon him. Then he shall turn his back toward the fortresses of his own land, but he shall stumble and fall and shall not be found. Then shall arise in his place one who shall be an exactor of tribute for the glory of the kingdom.

But within the days he shall be broken, neither in anger nor in battle. In his place shall arise a contemptible person to whom royal majesty has not been given. He shall come in without warning and obtain the kingdom by flatteries.

Armies shall be utterly 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 fathers 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.

And he shall stir up his power and his heart against the king of the south with a great army. And the king of the south shall wage war with an exceedingly great and mighty army, but he shall not stand, for plots shall be devised against him.

Even those who eat his food shall break him. His army shall be swept away and many shall fall down slain. And as for the two kings, their hearts shall be bent on doing evil. They shall speak lies at the same table, but to no avail, for the end is yet to be at the time appointed.

And he shall return to his land with great wealth, but his heart shall be set against the holy covenant and he shall work his will and return to his own land. At that time appointed he shall return and come into the south, but it shall not be his time as it was before, for ships of Kittim shall come against him and he shall be afraid and withdraw and shall turn back and be enraged and take action against the holy covenant.

He shall turn back and pay attention to those who forsake the holy covenant. Forces from him shall appear and profane the temple and fortress and shall take away the regular burnt offering and they shall set up the abomination that makes desolate.

He shall seduce with flatteries those who violate the covenant, but the people who know their God shall stand firm and take action. But the wise among the people shall make many understand, though for some days they shall stumble by sword and flame, by captivity and plunder.

When they stumble, they shall receive a little help and many shall join themselves to them with flattery and some of the wise shall stumble so that they may be refined, purified, and made white until the time of the end, for it still awaits the appointed time.

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 is accomplished, for what is decreed shall be done.

He shall pay no attention to the gods of his fathers or to the one beloved by women. He shall not pay attention to any other god, for he shall magnify himself above all. He shall honor the god of fortresses instead of these.

A god whom his fathers did not know, he shall honor with gold and silver, with precious stones and costly gifts. He shall deal with the strongest fortresses with the help of a foreign god. Those who acknowledge him, he shall load with honor.

He shall make them rulers over many and shall divide the land for a price. At the time of the end, the king of the south shall attack him, and the king of the north shall rush upon him like a whirlwind with chariots and horsemen and with many ships.

And he shall come into the countries and shall overflow and pass through. He shall come into the glorious land and tens of thousands shall fall, but these shall be delivered out of his hand, Edom and Moab and the main parts of the Ammonites.

He shall stretch out his hand against the countries, and the land of Egypt shall not escape. He shall become ruler of the treasures of gold and of silver, and the precious things of Egypt and the Libyans and the Kushites shall follow in his train.

But news from the east and the north shall alarm him, and he shall go out with great fury to destroy and devote many to destruction. And he shall pitch his palatial tents between the sea and the glorious holy mountain.

Yet he shall come to his end with none to help him. May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word. Well, it's Christmas Eve, which means school is out. It's not a time for lessons, is it?

It's not for gaining new knowledge, for studying. We take a break from learning new things, from work. We just relax, right? It's a holiday, our most sentimental holiday, really. People like to listen to old songs, usually the same old songs that they've heard over and over again.

They listen to them this time of year, like on a loop, even the same performances of the same songs. They just don't want to hear anyone singing chestnuts roasting over an open fire. They want to only hear the Nat King Cole version.

Don't bother me with anyone else. They'll watch the same movies over and over again. Many people annually re-watch a few favorite old Christmas movies. One of the versions of A Christmas Carol, maybe the one with Muppets.

It's a Wonderful Life, A Miracle on 34th Street. Over the last decade, it seems Christmas Vacation has become a popular favorite for re-watching, and maybe now Elf. They've seen these movies so often, they even know the next line.

This is where Scrooge says Christmas is picking a man's pocket every 25th of December. This is where George Bailey runs through the town yelling, Merry Christmas, even. Merry Christmas, you miserable old savings and loan.

Where Kris Kringle gets bubble gum in his beard, or where Cousin Eddie says his subscription to the Jelly of the Month Club is a gift that keeps giving all year round. This is, I think, the most hilarious line ever.

And where Buddy the Elf accuses a department store Santa of sitting on a throne of lies. They just know it's coming because they've seen these movies over and over again. You watch the movies so much because you want the same feeling, the same sentimentality.

You want to learn something new. You don't have new characters or a new plot where you really have to pay attention. These movies you've seen so much, you could walk out, go get yourself a sandwich and come back and you know what happened in between just because you've seen it.

That's part of the point. There's nothing wrong with that. We need breaks, need time to recreate, recreate, to rest between working, even have a break between learning. God made us to have a day of rest per week.

And there are holidays, there's festivals and celebrations like they had in the law in Israel. Not only did they have the weekly Sabbath in Israel, they had three major celebrations three times a year.

They had Passover and then what's called Shavuot, which means weeks or Pentecost, and Sukkot, which is tabernacles or booths, the Feast of Booths. So they had these three major holidays that also kind of broke up the year to get a break from the weekly routine of six days of work and one day of rest, a break from life as usual in the world.

And today and tomorrow in our culture and our time is one of those. But a break from what? Is it just a break from making more money? Paying the bills from work? Yeah, it should be. You need that. We need a break from that, but we should not want to break from learning about and knowing God.

That's what we'll be doing here from Daniel 11, so that you will know your God. Do you know your God? We get to know him better here in Daniel 11 in three parts. First, about the eternal. Second, about the enemies.

And finally, third, about the end. But do you know your God? Know that he is eternal. And that doesn't mean he lasts through all time. He's just kind of really old from the beginning of time to the end of time.

No, he is actually over time and over history. He sees it all as one big picture. And this is important to remember at Christmastime, because when Jesus is born, is it when the sun first began to exist?

He always existed. This is the miracle of the incarnation. Incarnation means coming in the flesh. He existed eternally. He's over time. But in the incarnation, the one who is beyond time is the eternal, came into time.

And we see evidence of that here in Daniel. You notice what is going on here, particularly the verb tense is over and over again, almost every verse. It's the future tense, but it's talking about things happening.

It's talking about things in our point of view now are in the past. So this is history told in advance, told in the future tense, because God sees it. That's knows what's going to happen. And so he tells Daniel here through the angel.

And it covers much of the period from the time between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. And it was fulfilled in every detail, just as the angel told Daniel. For example, in verse two, the angel first began talking about Persia, which is the dominant empire of Daniel's time near the end of his life.

When he had this vision, he, this angel says that a wealthy king will arise from Persia. I think he's three kings and then a wealthiest king who will stir everyone up against Greece. And this was fulfilled by the Persian king Xerxes, who gathered all the wealth and the might of Persia to try to capture the Greek city-states.

Seems like he would have had enough land already, but whatever. He kept wanting to expand to try to attack Greece, what's known as the Peloponnesian Wars. And then in verse three, it says a mighty king will arise.

By the way, the Greeks withstood him, so he wasn't successful. But in verse three, a mighty king will arise. That is Alexander the Great, who conquered most of what we today call the Middle East. But he died young, died age 32 before he had any children.

The angel says that his empire goes into four parts, but not to his posterity, in other words, not to his children, because he didn't have any children because he died so young. And it says after he has appeared, this Alexander the Great, his empire would be broken up and parceled out into the four winds of heaven.

Alexander's empire was divided among four generals. As far as Judah was concerned, the two most important of those divisions were between Egypt, which is what is repeatedly here, so often here called the King of the South, and between Syria, which is what is called over and over again the King of the North.

These are the two kingdoms referred so much by the angel here, Egypt and Syria, King of the North, King of the South, North Syria, South Egypt. The Egyptian kingdom, the King of the South, is strong and it is dominant for much of this time.

Just as it says in verse 5, even little details are foretold just as they happened, and it's foretold in a future tense. Notice that in the middle of verse 6, the daughter of the King of the South will go to the King of the North to make an alliance.

And this happened when the Egyptian King Ptolemy II sent his daughter Berenice to the king of Syria, Antiochus II, to be his wife and so ally the two empires together through marriage. The kingdoms in those days often did that, send a daughter to the king and so you're allied together by marriage.

Now your in-laws can't do war with each other if you're in-law, if you're family, right? Well, they would still end up doing it, but whatever. And this happened in the year 246 BC, but God had already revealed it to Daniel about 300 years before.

As he says here, as he's predicting it, not just predicting, predicting is kind of like guessing the future. God's just telling, this is what's going to happen. And as the angel foretells, that alliance and the marriage did not last.

In fact, the previous wife, Antiochus II, his previous wife didn't like the second wife, Berenice, and so had her killed. Oh, things didn't go well with the family alliance. And on it goes in great detail.

There's so much detail here. If we spent time describing, you know, how this was fulfilled by that, we would go a couple hours and you may want to go home after that. So we're not going to go through all the details.

If you're interested, there are places you can read about commentaries or histories of the time. But what it shows, the important thing for us is that it shows us history written in advance, history written in the future tense.

So someone could ask, you're a little skeptical. Well, if that's the case, why doesn't God tell us everything? We want to know. We can use that knowledge. Why doesn't he reveal the date of Christ's return?

So we'll know how much time we have left to evangelize. Or why doesn't he give us perfect stock tips? If only like 30 years ago, he would have told us to invest in Google. Imagine how wealthy we could be.

We could take the profits. If he gives us an inside trader knowledge, we can invest the profits in missions, of course. And we'll keep a little commission for ourselves. God could have done that, certainly.

But this is here to show us this history in advance in the future tense. To show us that God is glorified by proving that nothing that has happened has caught him by surprise. Even though many of the events are seemingly bad for God's people, none of this has happened just by surprise.

That everything that brought history on the way to the manger, to the birth of Christ. Even how the enemies of God tried to destroy God's covenant. All the persecution, the torment, the killing they went through.

All that was guided by God toward his goal. It shows us the eternal standing over history. His story. Do you know your God? Second, know the enemies of God. There are three basic enemies. There's the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Now remember, chapters 10 to 12 are all really one narrative, one story. And we're taking just this part in the middle out of it and looking at it. But remember, I began in the previous chapter with this Daniel's encounter with this angel.

And first the angel tells him about the enemy we saw last week. He's awesome, whatever prince, demons, calls him chief. Chief princes, principalities and powers that we wrestle with, seeking to hinder the word of God.

That's the devil. Then there's the world. This prophecy is all about the kingdoms of this world. The world is one of our worst enemies. Here we see what the world will do to try to destroy our covenant and our commitment to and from God.

Here we see what the world will do to destroy our relationship with God. Every once in a while leaders arise in the world who are able to get great power and seek to grasp everything in the world. And that is what human beings have been trying to do ever since the fall.

They reached out their hand and grasped what God said don't grasp, is to do as we will. My will be done. That's the essence of sin. I'll do what I want to do with no accountability to God. But most of us are constrained by lack of money.

We can't afford, can't afford it. Lack of power or family tells us to go straight. Community obligations, the society around us or the law keeps us from doing what we would do if we had this unlimited power.

But once in a while the world has a powerful man who lives that quest to do as he please on a grand scale. Three times in this chapter, it tells us of men who are driven by this will to power, who are able to do as they please.

In verses 3, 16 and 21. On the way to the manger, they seek to do according to their own will. It says verse three is about Alexander the Great, who was a young man who imposed his will on most of the Middle East.

But he was called to account before God early at the age of 32. Then at verse 16, he who comes against him shall do as he wills. None shall stand before him. There's that will to power. And that's about Antiochus the Second, also called Antiochus the Great, who ultimately and finally decisively brought the promised land, much of Israel, fully under the control of his empire based in Syria.

He shall stand in the glorious land with destruction in his hand. Verse 21 reveals about another such man, says a contemptible person to whom royal majesty has not been given. And we mentioned this person before.

He's a man some call the Old Testament Antichrist. In verse 21, he is just called a contemptible person. Just contemptible, just scorn him. He was Antiochus the Fourth. He called himself Epiphanes, like from an epiphany or manifestation.

God manifest. That's what he said about himself. I am God manifest. I'm the manifestation of God. That's the ego that comes with that. And he was called by the Jews Antiochus the Wicked. He was a king of the north, a king of Syria, the Seleucid Empire, for 11 years from 175 to 164 B .C.

And just as the angel foretold in verse 23, he shall act deceitfully. In other words, he says things that are false, makes promises he doesn't keep. And he shall become strong with a small people. It starts out small.

He was never supposed to be king. He took the throne of Syria by plotting, by maneuvering, by deceit. Just as it was foretold in the middle of verse 24, he was initially about to achieve more than the other kings of the north had been able to.

He shall do what neither his fathers nor his father's fathers have done. He's going to take over the king of the south. He's going to expand, almost putting back together all of Alexander's kingdom. But Antiochus is rising over the king of the south in Egypt.

Nearly able to completely conquer it. And in the middle, think of if you know, you've got a map, you think Syria up there, Egypt down there. In the middle between the two, of course, is Judah, which is under his control with his temple and his covenant with the true God.

And like other conquerors, like all fallen people, he wants to do as he pleases. It says he does as he pleases. And then something happened that infuriated him. You know, we get furious when something interferes with what we want.

I want this and it's not working right. And someone who does as he pleases all the time, anything that gets in his way makes him furious. He was in the process of laying siege to Alexandria, Egypt, which is then the capital of Egypt, right on the Mediterranean coast up there in the north.

But Egypt allied itself with a new power arising in the west, Rome. The Roman ships, as he's laying, Antiochus, the wicked, laying siege to Alexandria. Roman ships arrived with a Roman ambassador on it, came to the negotiations with the king of the south, Egypt there, and the king of the north, Antiochus.

And these are the ships of the western coastlands, it's mentioned there, or of Chittim from the west, mentioned in verse 30. This is the first time in the Bible that I believe that the Roman Empire shows up.

And of course, the Roman Empire plays such a big part in the New Testament. Luke begins his account of the birth of Jesus with how the Roman emperor issued a decree that made Joseph take pregnant Mary to Bethlehem.

How did Rome get involved all the way with Israel? Well, this is kind of the beginning here. Here, Rome first appears when Antiochus is on the cusp, he thinks, of conquering Egypt. It's right in his grasp.

He almost has Egypt. He has Alexandria under siege. But then he's confronted by an old man, an ambassador from Rome, who demands that he withdraw his troops from Egypt. Antiochus says, I'll think about it.

And so then the Roman ambassador takes his staff, like his walking stick, I guess. He draws a circle. Imagine Antiochus is standing there. This old man comes and draws a circle all around him as he's standing there and tells him that before you step out of that circle, you had better decide whether you will withdraw your army or Rome will be at war with you.

Now, imagine this man so full of himself. He named himself God Manifest Epiphanes, always doing his will, my will be done. And he's humiliated like that. This old man, this ambassador from Rome, comes up to him and draws a circle around him and says, you make up your mind before you step out of the circle.

Imagine what that does to his mind. So he knew he couldn't stand up to Rome. So he retreated. He backed down. And then he showed that he was the Antichrist of the Old Testament. In the middle of verse 30, Antiochus, frustrated by the Romans, decides to vent his fury.

He's furious at the way he's been humiliated by Rome, but he couldn't take it out on Rome. And he's not allowed to take it out on Egypt now because of Rome. So he's going to take it out against, it says here in verse 30, the Holy Covenant.

He wasn't just like other enraged tyrants who simply want to kill people who are different than him. He was not trying to destroy the people of God, but God's covenant with them. He set out with all his power and his will to power to wipe out faith in the Lord.

He used bribery to get the people of Judah to betray their faith, like the priest. He would bribe a lot of them. That's how you begin to create the Sadducees, who were more allied with the Greeks and that culture.

Even leading priests in the temple turned as traitors and supported Antiochus, or Antiochus, sometimes it's pronounced. He tried to find and destroy every copy of the Torah, of the law, the first five books of the Bible, so people wouldn't have a record of God's covenant with them anymore.

He required the people of Judah to offer sacrifices to his Greek God, to Zeus. Then he set up an idol to Zeus in the temple itself, God's temple in Jerusalem, set up an idol to Zeus there, supposed to be for the Lord, because no idols, no images are supposed to be in the temple.

Set up an idol to Zeus on it and sacrificed a pig on the altar to Zeus. This was the abomination that causes desolation in verse 31. That's something so abominable that it makes the temple itself desolate or empty of holiness.

It's no longer a worship place for God because of that abomination. In order to make it suitable for God's worship, you have to take the abomination out and cleanse it. So Antiochus, or Antiochus, and the world through him, was determined to obliterate God's covenant, God's name from the earth, so there'd be no memory of God's promises anywhere on the earth.

It's almost like a Terminator movie. Somebody from the future coming back to try to stop the Savior before he appears. That's what Satan is trying to do here and the world's trying to do here. Stop the Messiah before he's even born.

And he almost succeeded. He almost succeeded because of the flesh. Remember the three enemies? It's the world, the flesh, and the devil. We dealt with the devil in chapter 10. And now we dealt with the world.

But the world makes people conform by appealing to their flesh. What's the flesh want? The flesh wants greed. It's greedy. It wants money. It can be bribed. It can be rewarded. Or the flesh is full of pride.

It likes to be flattered, told how great it is. Or the flesh is just concerned about preserving itself, so it's cowardly. So it appeals to greed or pride or cowardice. It punishes nonconformity and rewards conformity.

Today, with popularity, with clicks and likes and followers and money, do what we say and you'll be popular. You'll have a big crowd. You'll be very famous and you'll be loved. Antiochus got traitors to betray the covenant with God by bribery.

In other words, he paid them off appealing to their greed. Now do this. The world tells us today you'll be wealthy. Put the chasing of money ahead of seeking God's kingdom and you'll have a big house and you'll have lots of money.

You'll be rewarded. I will reward you. It appeals to your greed or by flattery appealing to your ego. If you do what we say, you go along. You're cultured. You're a tolerant person. You're a good person.

You're one of us. We accept you. We like you. In the middle of verse 24, Antiochus gets followers by distributing loot and wealth to people. He appeals to their greed so that they who care more about material things, their covenant with God, carry out this Antichrist plot to destroy the covenant.

And then notice again the beginning of verse 32. He uses flattery again by appealing to our pride. Also a manifestation of the flesh as a way of using people to help him eradicate the covenant. Come along with me if you do.

Tell them how great you are. You're wise. You're on the right side of history. Greek culture is the future. Don't you want to be with the future? It's where every civilized person is going to be at. Today they'd say, come along with us.

Affirm what we say. Affirm. Condemn what we say. Condemn. And if you do then you are tolerant. You are inclusive. You're sophisticated. You're a civilized person. We accept you and we'll put you in faculty here and you'll be a famous person.

Get lots of clicks and likes and all of that if you go along with us. And of course, being a violent man, a man so violent he was sometimes called the madman. Called him a lot of things, didn't he? Called himself Epiphanes.

Jews called him the wicked. Some others called him the madman. By threats of violence, by actual violence, he terrified many people into following him and forsaking God's covenant. He threatened and killed people who resisted him, sometimes thousands of them.

So loving one's life more than a relationship with God. In other words, by killing people, others would look at that and say, I don't want to be killed. So I'm going to do what he says. I'm going to offer the sacrifice to Zeus.

I don't really believe it in my heart, but I'm going to go along because I don't like to die. And so that's cowardice. And cowardice is a fruit of the flesh, a rotten fruit of the flesh. Does the flesh really have fruit?

It has works, I guess. It's a work of the flesh. So without the flesh, without the greed and the pride and the cowardice, it produces this antichrist of the Old Testament. I should say the flesh produces with greed and pride and cowardice this antichrist.

Without it, without those things, without greed or pride or cowardice, he could not have succeeded so well. He almost succeeded completely. But as it says in verse 32, verse 32, I think is the key verse in this chapter.

And the verse this chapter is most well known for. The people who know their God firmly resist the enemies of God. And then they take action for God. The key is knowing God. Those who do resist the world, the flesh and the devil, and they act for God.

There was an old priest living in a small town in Judah with five sons. And his name was Mattathias. One of his sons was named Simon. Another was named John. You read the New Testament. Why are there so many Simons and Johns around?

Because they were named after Mattathias' sons. His name was Mattathias. And when a few of Antiochus' men came to his town to get them to sacrifice to Zeus, you know, they're going around, you've got to send your bureaucrats around to make sure everyone's worshiping Zeus now.

Get there. I guess you get stamped or something. You've done it. You've done that deed of sacrificing to Zeus. When they came to his town, Mattathias and his sons instead attacked the Syrian men, Antiochus' men.

They destroyed the altar to Zeus. And then, of course, they knew they were going to be attacked by Antiochus' army. And so they went into the wilderness. They hid out there. And over time, other believers in the Lord who knew their God and wanted to preserve God's covenant came to them.

They began to gather together out in the wilderness, kind of like David and his men. They gathered in the wilderness. Over 14 years, they fought a guerrilla war. And finally, they were able to liberate Judah and restore the temple.

They took action. They took action because they knew their God. Now, some people say that if you believe that God has written all of history, you know, he's written it all out. It's set in concrete. You can't change it.

Like here, it's just predicted already. Right. You think about that here. Much of the history between the Old and New Testament is written out for us. Which means, you think about it, that means it can't be changed.

You know, the angel's not saying, well, it might happen if so and so does this or if he chooses that. We kind of think he could go that way or he could go that way. Who knows what he might do? No, he doesn't say that.

He says this will, this will, this will, this will. And some people say, well, if that's the case, then God is the eternal who sees the end of his enemies before they even arise. Then if you believe that, then won't you just be passive?

Just kind of go along. You think, well, God's going to take care of it. His plan will be fulfilled no matter what we do. So might as well just relax, do nothing. Don't resist anything. Don't take action for anything.

They say if you believe history is his story already written, then you'll be lazy, passive. You'll do nothing to change it. You won't evangelize. You won't go into missions. You won't try to change the world.

You won't resist any evil. You won't take any action for good because you just think, well, God's going to take care of it all. But the reality, but the reality, and if you look at real history, the reality is the opposite.

When you see that you serve a God who is eternal. Who isn't just kind of guessing that history might, if he could persuade people to do what he wants, that hope it goes this way or that. No, that he has it written out.

He's standing over time and that history is his story, that the defeat of his enemies is certain. Even before they arise, he sees the rise, they'll appear so triumphant, they'll do as they will. But their will, these enemies of God, their will ends up serving God's will.

You'll see that if you're on his team, God's team, you're on the winning team. You'll see that God is triumphant. And so you will be joyful and that inspires you to stand firm and take action. You see whatever it is coming your way.

Antiochus and his men threatening to kill anyone who resists them. You see that, you know, even if it looks just overwhelming, that you can stand up against him because you have God on your side. You can take action because God is triumphant at the end.

Well, here on the way to the manger, as God's enemies furiously tried to destroy God's covenant before Christ could fulfill it, the people who knew their God stood firm and took action. They resisted Antiochus, they defeated his forces, they liberated Israel for a time.

And verse 36 describes the enemy. The king shall do as he wills. There's that description again. That's their characteristic. They think they're doing their will. They're imposing their will. They're the enemies of God.

But it always ends up serving God's will. Three times it says that they do as they will. And at the end, God's will is done. It says he shall exalt himself. It's verse 36. Exalt himself. He magnifies himself above every God and shall speak astonishing things against the God of gods.