Daniel 8

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Daniel 8 Do You Want to be Great?

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Daniel chapter 8, be reading the entire chapter, hear the word of the Lord. In the third year of the reign of Belshazzar, a vision appeared to me,
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Daniel, after that which appeared to me at the first. And I saw in the vision, and when
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I saw, I was in Susa, the capital, and was in the province of Elam, and I saw in the vision, and I was at the
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Ulai Canal. I raised my eyes and saw, and behold, a ram standing on the bank of the canal.
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It had two horns, and both horns were high, but one was higher than the other, and the higher one came up last.
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I saw the ram charging westward, and northward, and southward. No beast could stand before him, and there was no one who could rescue from his power.
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He did as he pleased, and became great. As I was considering, behold, a male goat came from the west across the face of the whole earth without touching the ground, and the goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes.
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He came to the ram with the two horns, which I had seen standing on the bank of the canal, and he ran at him in his powerful wrath.
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I saw him come close to the ram, and he was enraged against him, and struck the ram, and broke his two horns, and the ram had no power to stand before him.
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But he cast him down to the ground, and trampled on him, and there was no one who could rescue the ram from his power.
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Then the goat became exceedingly great, and when he was strong, the great horn was broken, and instead of it, there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven.
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Out of the one of them came up a little horn, which grew exceedingly great toward the south, toward the east, and toward the glorious land.
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It grew great even to the host of heaven, and some of the host and some of the stars it threw down to the ground and trampled on them.
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It became great, even as great as the prince of the host, and the regular burnt offering was taken away from him, and the place of his sanctuary was overthrown, and a host will be given over to it, together with the regular burnt offerings because of transgression, and it will throw truth to the ground, and it will act and prosper.
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Then I heard a holy one speaking, and another holy one said to the one who spoke, for how long is the vision concerning the regular burnt offering, the transgression that makes desolate, and the giving over of the sanctuary, and the host be trampled underfoot?
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And he said to me, for 2 ,300 evenings and mornings, that the sanctuary shall be restored to its rightful state.
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When I, Daniel, had seen the vision, I sought to understand it, and behold, there stood before me one having the appearance of a man, and I heard a man's voice between the banks of the
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Ulai, and it called, Gabriel, make this man understand the vision. So he came near where I stood, and when he came,
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I was frightened and fell on my face, and he said to me, understand, O son of man, that the vision is for the time of the end.
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And when he had spoken to me, I fell into a deep sleep with my face to the ground, but he touched me and made me stand up, and he said, behold,
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I will make known to you what shall be at the latter end of the indignation, for it refers to the appointed time of the end.
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As for the ram which you saw with the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia, and the goat is the king of Greece, and the great horn between his eyes is the first king.
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As for the horn that was broken in place of which four others arose, four kingdoms shall arise from his nation, but not with his power.
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And at the latter end of their kingdom, when the transgressors have reached their limit, a king of bold face, one who understands riddles, shall arise, his power shall be great, but not by his own power, and he shall cause fearful destruction and shall succeed in what he does, and destroy mighty men and the people who are the saints.
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By his cunning, he shall make deceit prosper under his hand, and his own mind, he shall become great.
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Without warning, he shall destroy many, and he shall even rise up against the prince of princes, and he shall be broken, but by no human hand.
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And the vision of the evenings and the mornings that has been told is true, but seal up the vision, for it refers to many days from now.
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And I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days. Then I rose and went about the king's business, but I was appalled by the vision and did not understand it.
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May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word. Well, do you want to be great?
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Well, Christians should rightly reject selfish ambition, greed, self -exaltation, that kind of narcissistic quest just to be over others, what's called megalomania.
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You know, like when people pass you on the highway. You ever had anyone pass you behind you on the highway? They pass you, and then they slow down, slower than you were going, because they're not really in a hurry.
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They just don't want to be behind you. Now, it's right to seek to be great, provided you know what greatness is.
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Now, think about it. If the alternative to being great is being mediocre, mediocrity, then why would you want to be that?
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There's something just wrong with being content, with being average, studying just enough to get by, playing sports just well enough not to get cut from the team or not to be embarrassed in your competition, cooking just well enough to make the food barely edible, working on your job just well enough not to get fired, playing a musical instrument just well enough to keep from being irritating with it, preaching a sermon that's just barely good enough to keep most people awake.
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Yeah, we should strive to be great. We serve a great God. We should want to be great.
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Well, do you want to be great? Well, if so, there are all kinds of advice on how to be great.
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Major league baseball player and then manager, Buck Rogers said, attaining greatness must be built on the bedrock commitment to excellence and a rejection of mediocrity.
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You can sum it up as commitment. Friedrich Hegel said, nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.
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So passion is key. Harry Gray said, no one ever achieved greatness by playing it safe.
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Let's call it daring. Perhaps the greatest political leader of the 20th century, Winston Churchill said, responsibility is the price of greatness.
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So to be great, we need commitment, passion, daring, and responsibility. But that all begs the question, great at what?
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All these qualities can be used for being great at anything. Great at something good, great at something bad.
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Great at sports, at academics, at business, money making, great at drug dealing, great at contract killing, great at terrorism.
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You can be great without being good. You can conquer the world and be called the great and do it all because you wanna bring peace and justice to the world or because you just wanna be the greatest.
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Pablo Escobar was a great drug kingpin and terrorist who pursued his cocaine business with commitment, passion, daring, and probably,
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I guess, responsibility. But that didn't make him a great man. In fact, he was hunted down and killed because he was great at what he did and what he did was criminal.
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He was great without being good. Well, here in Daniel 8, we see greatness.
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First, the world's kind, and then three secrets to being truly great. First, know your place.
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Second, know your person. And third, know your prince. First, know your place in God's plan.
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That is, know your place in history. History is, as we're conveniently reminded in the English language, His story.
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I don't know if anything like it in any other languages, in Chinese, what they call history, but very convenient in the English language. It is
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His story. What is God doing now and how am I a part of it?
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To be great is to contribute to what God is doing. Now, here in chapter eight, we have history. It's history in advance, but this is a history lesson that we just read from chapter eight.
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This chapter's consumed with two empires, two empires that are mentioned previously in chapters two and seven, but were kind of passed over very quickly there, and here they're focused on.
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In chapter two, the kingdoms were compared to a chest of silver. Remember that vision of a statue of a man?
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The chest of silver in the middle of bronze. And in chapter seven, the two kingdoms were compared to a kind of asymmetrical, like an out -of -balance bear, one side bigger than the other, and a four -headed leopard with four wings.
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Well, thankfully, we're spared from any speculation about what the empires mean, what the symbolism means.
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People look at that, what does all this mean? Well, we're told explicitly here, Daniel himself admits in verses 15 and 16 that he doesn't understand this.
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Well, he's told this vision. At first, he doesn't understand what it means. Then he sees someone, says, like, he says, having the appearance of a man, implying that he's not really a man, verses 15 and 16.
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This one having the appearance of a man is called Gabriel in verse 16, and Gabriel means God is my strength, and Gabriel is commanded.
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Here's a voice, kind of implies it's the voice of God, doesn't say it specifically, implies it's the voice of God coming from the canal.
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Gabriel is commanded, make this man, Daniel, like him, understand the vision, and Daniel's frightened as Gabriel comes near him, and he prostrates himself on the ground, falling into a kind of, he says, fall asleep, but I got a feeling it's more like a comatose, catatonic state, but Gabriel touches him, raises him up.
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Daniel's probably overcome with terror, psychologically, mentally, and that causes him to be paralyzed, but Gabriel raises him up and reassures him, verse 18, and then tells him what the vision means, and so the rest of the chapter from verses 19 is from Gabriel's interpretation of what the vision in the previous verses means.
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He tells Daniel and us, so we know outright, you don't have to speculate, what's this, all this, what's this, two horns and the goat with the one big horn, tells us outright in verse 20 and 21 what it is about.
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The vision is about, first, the Medo -Persian Empire, and then the Greek Empire, which is coming in Daniel's future, but is now in our past, and so this is history of about 300 years into Daniel's future from near the end of the
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Old Testament to about the year 160 BC. It's history told in advance, and that tells us that the future is set by God.
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It fulfills God's plan. Well, here we have a problem. A lot of people today don't care much for history.
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They'll call themselves, they'll call something, whatever, irrelevant by saying, you know, that's ancient history.
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I don't care. That's ancient history, but I found in reading history that the only thing that makes us different from people in the past is that they are dead and we're not, and that difference won't last for very long.
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This is the history of what happened between the Testaments. Told in advance. A lot of people, what happened between the
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Old and the New Testaments, because you start reading the New Testament, it appears everything's so different from the Old Testament. Well, we're actually told why we got from the end of the
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Old Testament to the New Testament. We're told here in Daniel. It is the history of what God did on the way to the manger.
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Well, Daniel sees himself in the vision of the city of Susa, which is a major city in what is now
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Iran, which became one of the capital cities of the Medo -Persian Empire, and this empire is symbolized by a ram with two high horns.
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He called it Medo -Persian because it had two parts, actually originally two empires that allied themselves together, and the two horns are the symbols for each of those two parts.
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One is higher than the other in verse three. You notice he says it came last, it came later.
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The second larger horn grew up later, and that's actually what happened in history. There was a kingdom of the
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Medes first, and then later nearby, that kind of next to it, the Persians arose under Cyrus.
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Instead of fighting each other to destruction, they basically joined each other, they merged with negotiations, a little bit of force.
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The Medes, Cyrus got the Medes to join him, making the combined kingdom of the
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Medes and the Persians, so two horns, and the Persians became the latter kingdom and came to dominate, so the larger horn.
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No one could stand against him. Notice how he says that about both these empires, that no one could stand against him.
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God had given him the power, and so no one could resist their power. And so verse four says, he did as he pleased and became great.
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Now for most people still today, being able to do as you please, that's basically the definition of being great.
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Do anything you want, you're great. You have no accountability, no one to say no to you, no restrictions or hindrances, you don't have to get up at any time, you don't have to produce anything, no one could devaluate you, nothing frustrating you or holding you back from everything that you could possibly want, that they think is the definition of being great.
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And so people will use their religion as a way to try to attain that, to get that kind of greatness.
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And they may love the promises of God about them getting all the desires of their heart, about them ruling, being more than conquerors, as we saw last week, and they may love all the blessings that they are told they can have, but then they think they don't have to pay any attention to the restrictions, to God's commands, to the accountability of the church.
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Oh, they may love to sing about, you know, lead me to the cross, but they don't want to bear the cross of not being able to do as they please.
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They want greatness as the world, and Cyrus defines it.
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Well, Cyrus wanted greatness, and so as pictured here, history was told in advance, from the time of the end of the
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Babylonian empire, Cyrus would arise as the high horn of the ram and extend his kingdom in all directions, doing as he pleased.
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So he is called Cyrus the Great. Then the second kingdom, the
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Greeks, comes, symbolized by a billy goat, a male goat. In verse five, he came from the west, that's from where Daniel is situated, from the west, they go
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Greece in the west. It came so fast, as pictured here in this vision, it didn't even touch the ground.
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You know, someone's running. I think there's a lot of gaps. There's times when they're not even on the ground. This goat is so fast, he's flying.
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And speed is what marked the Greek conquest of the Persians and beyond. It butted heads with a ram and broke its two horns, making it, meaning that it destroyed the power of the
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Medes and the Persians, and that's exactly what happened. Alexander did just that. This is a pictorial way of showing what
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Alexander did. He was born in the year 356 BC, and is a young man in his 20s, and he led an army storming out of Greece and conquered basically what we would call the entire
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Middle East, out of Greece, what we call Turkey, and down to Egypt, and what is now Israel, and Syria, and into Iran, all the way to India.
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And he ran at the ram in his powerful wrath, in verse six, he struck the ram, the
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Medo -Persian empire, and broke its two horns, and then he trampled it down, in other words, he just totally wiped it out.
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There wasn't like a pocket of Persia left somewhere he didn't get to. In verse seven, no one was able to help the once great kingdom of the
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Medes and the Persians. There's that phrase again, both times, no one is able to stand against them, because God has raised them up.
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And that's why the single horn on the head, he, that's Alexander, is the single horn on the head of the male goat.
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And he is known as, of course, Alexander the? Great. Right, great.
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Not the mediocre, but the great. And verse eight says that the goat became exceedingly great, like Cyrus, he had achieved greatness.
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But verse eight says, when he was strong, the great horn was broken.
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Alexander died at a very young age, of a fever, I think, but he died at the age of 32, in Babylon.
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And so his empire was divided into four parts. So he dies, he's conquered all this land, what we now call the
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Middle East, all the way into India, and all this territory, instead of it all following into one successor, it fell, it broke up into four separate parts, four separate kingdoms.
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After his death, and hence a division, in verse eight, there grew up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven.
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In other words, there was a northern, a southern, an eastern, and a western kingdoms that divided up his kingdom, that he had conquered, that came out of the
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Greek empire. And so the land of Israel fell under the control of one of those, I think we'd call it the northern kingdom, but the
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Seleucids, centered in Syria. And Daniel sees in verse nine that out of one of the horns, out of those four horns, came out of the one big horn, is
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Alexander, the four horns out of him, and then there's one of those, comes what he calls the little horn, out of one of those kingdoms.
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It's with that last king that Daniel is most interested in for the rest of the chapter.
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That gets his attention. Verse nine says that this king, this little horn, grew exceedingly great.
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Verse 10 says that he grew great, even to the host of heaven.
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The host means the gathering, the large multitude of. That is, he began to challenge even God's people.
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Verse 11 says he became great, even as great as the prince of the host.
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First as great as the gathering, the enormous gathering of all God's people, then as great as the prince himself. So now he is challenging
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God himself, the prince or the ruler over his people. And this king is named
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Antiochus IV, often called Antiochus Epiphanes, at least that's the name he gave himself, who ruled the
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Seleucid empire as one of the breakoffs of Alexander's empire from 175 BC until his death in 163
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BC. Now like Alexander, he wanted to be great. He was driven to be great.
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And so he's trying to expand his empire in all directions, basically trying to reconquer all of Alexander's empire.
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Never did it, but he was trying. He also wanted to stamp his culture and his beliefs on the people he ruled.
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He wanted them to conform to him, to what he believed, the way he did things. But there was one group of people who just would not conform, of those who believed in the
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Lord. They were living in Judea, around Jerusalem, and so he decided to make them conform.
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He's not gonna put up with this insubordination. Who do these people think they are that they can resist me?
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And so in verses 10 and 11, the little horn threw down some of God's people to the ground. He humiliates them, he kills many of them.
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He trampled on God's people. In the actual history, he attacked Jerusalem, reportedly murdered 40 ,000 believers in the
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Lord, and then he sold others into slavery. That's the host, it says the host that was given to him.
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And so he killed many of them, sent many others out as slaves in verse 12. They were given to him, given by who?
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Notice again, like we looked at last week, this is a passive sentence about the sanctuary and the host.
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That is God's people, the church. It has been given over to be trampled.
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Given by who, you ask? Well, of course, by God. And then in verse 11, his, that is the prince of God's people,
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God himself, his people, the Lord's people, and his sanctuary is overthrown.
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The temple was occupied by the little horns, you know, pagan soldiers and people.
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The offerings were taken away from him, that is from God, and he destroyed many, in verse 25.
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He outlawed circumcision, which is the mark of the covenant, the old covenant. He outlawed keeping the
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Sabbath. He had any copies of the Old Testament that he could find burned. So he's trying to destroy faith in the
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Lord. He's trying to destroy the Bible as it existed then, fulfilling what verse 12 says about throwing truth to the ground.
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He's trying to trample it down, trying to destroy it, because he wants to make these people conform to be like Greeks and pagans, worship the gods he wants them to worship, and they're resisting.
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So he tried to destroy everything about their faith in the Lord. He required the people to eat meat, sacrifice to Zeus. He set up an idol of Zeus in the temple, in the
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Lord's temple. Sets up this idol there of Zeus in the Lord's temple in Jerusalem, and then had a pig sacrificed to it.
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And that was the transgression that makes desolate in verse 13. Notice that verse 13, it mentions there's a transgression that is a sin, that's a violation of God's law, crossing it, that makes desolate, makes it empty.
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That's what Antiochus did when he had the pig sacrificed to Zeus in the Lord's temple. The violation of God's law that makes the holy place into an unholy place, makes it desolate or makes it empty of holiness.
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So now it's a pagan temple. And then the offerings to the Lord were canceled. Daniel hears, you know, he's hearing all this and he hears a holy one, it could be a saint or it could be an angel in verse 13, ask, how long will the sanctuary be desolate?
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I think this is there, this is what Daniel is, what the Lord is trying to point Daniel's attention to.
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One holy one asked, how long will the sanctuary be desolate? Notice another holy one answers, and it says, answers
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Daniel. Daniel, you need to know this. It's for 2 ,300 offerings, that's in verse 14, a very specific number.
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Sometimes people get real skeptical about these prophecies, it looks so ambiguous, you can interpret it in any way, which is actually true for a lot of these kind of pagan,
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Nostradamus, you ever seen some of these so -called prophecies? You can interpret to mean anything, it's so ambiguous, it's hard to tell.
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Sometimes some people say, skeptics say, well, the Bible says similar things. Well, not always. Right here, you have a very specific number, 2 ,300 offerings will be canceled until they are restored, and that's what ended up happening.
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In verse 14, 2 ,300 offerings, with the little horn, Antiochus, is trying to completely wipe out faith in the
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Lord. He's trying to destroy everything to remember God's promises with. And that's history, that actually happened.
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And it happened on the way to the manger, from the time of Daniel, to the time of Antiochus, and beyond.
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But if you're an average modern person, you may be thinking, okay, maybe you're into history, maybe you're not, but you think, well, what's that have to do with me?
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That's all ancient history, literally, it is. Well, know your place in history.
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These men, and worst of all, Antiochus, they didn't know their place. They thought history was all about them.
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It's about them conquering, trying to impose their way, even trying to make the people of God conform to them.
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They didn't know that they were just setting the stage. Cyrus is the Lord's shepherd, according to Isaiah, set the stage by bringing the
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Jews, by bringing the people of God back to Jerusalem. Alexander set the stage by bringing in the
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Greek language, which became the language of the New Testament. And so the gospel ended up going west.
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Even Antiochus was used by God to provoke a backlash that created what Israel was in the
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New Testament. History was not about these men. They didn't know it, they thought it was, but it was not. It's not about you or me or our country, our politics, what's going on in the
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Middle East right now. It's about the prince who was placed in a manger. And we see that here where we're told in verse 17 and 19 that this is for the time of the end.
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But the end of what? Now, some people think, well, it must mean the end of the world, the end of everything.
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And so they interpret this as about the future and our future, because they just reason, well, this can't be about the
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Persians or the Greeks because after all, the end did come then. But verses 20 and 21 tells us explicitly, clearly as can possibly be, that it is indeed about the
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Persians or the Greeks. Now, our problem is so often that we think we are great.
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And so we assume everything has to be about us. That's the way narcissistic people think. Everything is about me.
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That's the way we're kind of trained to think. Everything's about us. It's about them. What's that mean to us? I don't want to read their history. That's gotta be about me or I don't care.
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That's the way people think today. So we assume everything has to be about us and that the goal of history is us.
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Or otherwise I won't read it, won't pay any attention to it. That's because we don't understand our place in God's plan.
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We so often don't know what the end, the goal, the pinnacle, what the finish line is.
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Well, what is the end here then? It's explained for us in verse 19. It's to be the end of what he calls the indignation.
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That is, there's a period of wrath, of God's judgment. When God gave his people over to be oppressed by other nations, to be punished for their sins.
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He talks about the transgression here in this passage. First they were given over to the
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Babylonians and then the Persians and the Greeks. Sometimes during those, under those empires, especially under the
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Persians, they lived quietly. They lived peacefully and they could grow and worship the
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Lord. But other times, particularly under Antiochus, they experienced suffering and persecution and resistance.
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Daniel is told in verse 17 that the vision is for the end of this period of wrath, for the end of this judgment.
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What Daniel sees as the end of the beginning. God is ending the indignation.
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He's ending the beginning. Winston Churchill said when the
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Allies had finally won the battle for North Africa in November 1942. Now, this is not the end.
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It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.
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And that's what Daniel sees here. History told beforehand, the end of the beginning.
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Now for us to know our place is to look back on what God has done in Christ and see how great that is.
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Not great because it leads up to us, it's great because it leads up to Christ. That God has brought us now after the cross and the resurrection to now where we are is the beginning of the end.
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To be great, we need to celebrate that, which is what we're here for.
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Well, second, know your person, know who you are.
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To be great, we need to know that we are persons, that we're just persons, mortals.
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Each of these kings, Cyrus, Alexander, Antiochus, thought they were great. Cyrus, it says in verse four, he did as he pleased.
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He proclaimed himself king of the four corners of the earth. How'd you like that as a title? Alexander believed that he was the son of Zeus.
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Antiochus said that he was God manifest. That's what epiphanies means. I am the manifestation of God.
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That's what he thought. Verse 25 said that he became great in his own mind. There's a lot of people like that today, aren't they great in their own minds?
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Like a narcissist who just assumes the world revolves around him. Really a megalomaniac.
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They don't know they're persons, that they're just persons, that they're mere humans. They're not really great.
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Bertrand Russell described megalomania, quote, the megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming and seeks to be feared rather than loved.
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To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history.
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Antiochus didn't know his person, who he was. He gave himself the title Theos Epiphanes, meaning
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God manifest. Coins minted during his reign. We actually have, we still have them.
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During his reign, you have a picture of him sitting on a throne with the inscription, King Antiochus, God manifest, bearer of victory.
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He is indeed a bold face. That was described verse 23, a bold face.
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And to become great he determined with commitment, passion, daring, and I guess, like Pablo Escobar, responsibility.
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He sought to wipe out the worship of the Lord. He's gonna make everyone conform to his ways, his pagan ways, even believers in the
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Lord. And in one sense he was great. The Bible calls him great several times here, saying in verse 25 that his power shall be great.
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He is able to overcome even mighty men, which means he's mightier. No one is able to stop him, just like those other two, like Cyrus and Alexander.
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No one's able to stop him for a time until suddenly, God does. He was broken in verse 25, says he will be broken.
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But by no human hand, according to 2 Maccabees, as he was rushing along in his chariot, he fell out of it and died of his wounds.
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He was a megalomaniac, thinking he was God manifest. Today we're tempted to think that we really won't die, that we can be great, and we know theoretically we'll die, but we don't really believe that.
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That's why we're so shocked and horrified by the idea. We can be great, we can do as we please. No one can get in our way.
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We so often spend our lives trying to make ourselves great. Great money makers, great business people, great scholars or athletes, whatever, and yet when our short breath is over, it all goes for what?
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All the tragic irony of human life. We strive and strive to be great, and yet waste all our efforts because we don't know what greatness is.
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In order to be great, we must know our person, know our place in God's story, and know our prince.
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Third, our prince. Eniachus didn't know his prince.
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He used his power to try to be great as the prince of host. In verse 11, to be as great as the prince of host.
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He became great in verse 24, but not by his own power. He kind of inherited the power, really because God gave it to him.
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He caused fearful destruction. He succeeded, verse 24 says, for a while.
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We would call him successful, a successful man. By his cunning, he made deceit prosper.
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You notice he turned people into hypocrites. He lied to people in verse 25. Now, he wasn't all stick.
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He would use the carrot, too, by deceit, by bribing people. Like any smart leader, he'd use rewards to get people to join him in his cause, and his cause here was making
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Israel Greek, Hellenizing it, making it as pagan as everyone else around it, so they worship the same
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God, the same Zeus as everyone else around there. Rewarding, he would reward the priest who joined him, and he ended up creating the people who later became the
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Sadducees. Others, without warning, he destroys, and finally, after the evening and morning sacrifices had been canceled for 2 ,300 offerings, as in verse 14, the people of God finally had enough.
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They rose up. They started a guerrilla war that eventually ousted Antiochus' forces out of Israel.
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Antiochus' persecution set off the chain of events that would lead to independence, a fresh dedication to the things of God, then traditionalism,
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Pharisaism, a surrender to Rome, and the belief that once again, all we need next, they thought, is another leader who could rise up, resist these
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Romans like we resisted Antiochus way back, and throw out the foreign occupiers.
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That's what they thought they needed. What they needed, they thought, was a prince to lead an armed rebellion, and many of the forces and the factors that led to the crucifixion of Christ were the result of the reaction to Antiochus.
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God used him, the little horn, a bold face, thought he's so great, used him to take us on the way to the manger and the cross.
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Antiochus sought to rise up against the prince of princes in verse 25. That's why he's known, not as Antiochus the
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Great, no one calls him that, or Cyrus the Great, not like Cyrus the
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Great or not like Alexander, but he's known as the Wicked. Antiochus the
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Wicked is the model for all godless leaders, rulers trying to just stamp their own ways onto everyone else, including on the people of God, all the megalomaniacs, striving with everything they have to be great, and resenting any ascription of greatness to anyone else, even to the
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Lord, and so making everything about them. Antiochus is then the first great anti -messiah, the antichrist, he's an antichrist, like Nero or papists who say that they represent
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Christ but really misrepresent him, or like Muhammad who taught that Jesus was just a prophet, that he didn't really die on the cross for our sins, because Muhammad could not imagine how someone could be great and go to the cross, or like Napoleon who crowned himself emperor because he wouldn't recognize the authority of anyone else to do it, there's no one with the right to crown me, so he crowned himself, or like Hitler who could speak of God, but would only allow a
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Nazi church, churches that repeated their beliefs, the Nazi beliefs, and surrendered to him as their
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Fuhrer, or any communist dictator over the last century that we must believe in their atheistic materialism and worship the state, many great rulers like Cyrus and Alexander never recognized their prince, and never worshiped him, and so in the end, they're not really great, but some, like Antiochus, go beyond just not recognizing him, and try to attack him, try to tear him down, they're not only not great, they're the wicked, you wanna be great, you must know your prince, but we could wonder, how did
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Antiochus attack the prince? Who was the prince? Was he the high priest or a
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Jewish king? No, notice that in verse 10, before mentioning the prince of host, in verse 11, before that, he mentions the host heaven, all of God's people, the gathering of God's people, that is the multitude, the assembly of heaven, heaven being
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God's realm, that is, he was attacking the people of God first, and notice the same thing in verses 24 and 25, first he attacks, this is
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Gabriel's interpretation, first he attacks the people who are the saints, and then the prince of the saints, so he's saying that here, that by attacking
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God's people, the saints, he attacked, or tried to, attack
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God himself, their prince, their ruler, now he may not have seen it that way, he may not have believed that there was a
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God whose temple that he was desecrating, and whose word he was burning, and whose people he was killing, but it doesn't matter if he saw it that way or not,
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God did, an attack on his people is an attack on him, and this is the principle in God's word, that as you treat
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God's people, so you treat God, as you treat the prince's subjects, so you treat the prince himself, just as when
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Jesus appeared to Saul, later to become Paul on the Damascus Road, and ask him, Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?
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Paul thought he was just throwing Christians in prison, these deranged followers of this troublesome cult, he didn't believe in Jesus, Paul didn't believe in Jesus, until Jesus appeared to him, and told him that as he's treating these people he's persecuting, so he was treating him,
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Jesus, or just as we saw in the Lord's Supper, where Paul tells us to consider, to discern, think about the body, and people debate, well, does he mean the body of Jesus' literal body, think about it, that he was crucified, or does he mean the church, and the answer is, well, both.
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Jesus' literal body is the body of Christ, the body of Christ is the church, you can't separate them, as you treat the body of Christ, God's people, you treat
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Christ, and people here and now, particularly in this area, they need to know that, they're working hard to be great, make a lot of money, so they can be great, have a great house, and great cars, but they treat the body of Christ as if it were nothing, as if it were trivial, as if it's optional,
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I work now to make a lot of money, maybe when I get old, and then I'll come back to church, some call themselves
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Christians, but they treat their business as more important than the church, they skip being part of God's people, so they can make more money on Sunday mornings, but the way you treat the body of Christ, you treat it with respect, with reverence, with love, or with detachment, with boredom, disinterest, lower priority,
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I'll make the money now, I'll think about church later, that way is how you treat
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Christ himself, people can imagine that that's not so, they can have in their own minds, be greater in their own minds,
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I'm a great spiritual person, I really believe in Christ, I don't care about the church, but they're like Antiochus here in verse 25, with delusions of grandeur, thinking that they are these great spiritual people, but in reality, they don't know their prince, to be great, we have to know our prince, do you wanna be great?
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Well, that's not bad, as long as you know what greatness is, Cyrus, Alexander and Antiochus, they threw themselves into their quest for greatness, they each had great power for a brief while, a long time ago, now we're not even sure where they're buried, their tombs for all three of them have been lost, there's no grave anywhere where you could go visit, this is where Antiochus is buried, we don't know, it's lost, none knew their place in God's history, none knew their persons, that their life was just a breath, and worst of all, none knew their prince, one even persecuted them, and for that, he is best known as the wicked, not the great, well, that's the vision, what
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God did on the way to the manger, and like Daniel in that last verse, our reaction should be to be overcome with awe and with humility, our self -centered view of history, that is not important unless it leads up to us, that needs to be overcome, we need to know our place, you know, the delusion in our own minds that we are great, that our lives are longer than our breath, that needs to be overcome, our megalomania, that life is all about our money, our pleasure, our position, our power, that needs to be appalled, we need to see this vision, and like Daniel, be overwhelmed and even appalled when we see how so much of what is great in the world is not really great at all, do you wanna be great?
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Be appalled at these three great rulers who did as they pleased, be appalled that now their bodies are dust and their tombs are lost, but if you wanna be great, know that their prince and your prince came first not to a palace where great men are usually born, but to a manger, and then to a cross to ransom captive Israel, to save his people who had been trampled down, the prince had to do what did not please him, praying on his knees with only a few followers and them asleep, praying not my will, not what pleases me, but yours be done, know that he came to serve and that he served his people all the way to the cross, and from there he became great, so that now his body is not dust, but alive, and his tomb is not lost, just empty, know your prince.