Daniel's Vision (pt. 2)

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I have entitled these two lessons, Daniel's Vision, Part 1 and Part 2, but that's really a misnomer.
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This isn't Daniel's vision. This is Nebuchadnezzar's vision and Daniel's interpretation thereof.
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If you want to get to Daniel's visions, you need to start in Chapter 7 to the end of the book.
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It covers the things that Daniel has seen, and you will find remarkable parallels in that passage of Scripture to the book of Revelation.
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In fact, Daniel is sort of the Old Testament revelation. But this morning, we're going to look at the remaining half of Daniel Chapter 2 that we did not cover last
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Sunday. And if you'll recall, last Sunday we sort of set the stage where we looked at King Nebuchadnezzar.
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He has this vision, and it disturbs him a great deal to the point that he actually becomes an insomniac.
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His sleep's gone from him. He can't sleep at night thinking about this vision that he has seen and what could it possibly mean.
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He realizes that this vision is something of great significance, and it has great significance to him.
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He's just not sure what it is. And so he does what you would expect a king to do in those days and calls in all of his advisors in his cabinet and all of the soothsayers and the magicians and all of those types of people.
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And he puts a task to them that he's never done before, in which he says,
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I want you to tell me what my vision is and then tell me what it means. Because he has come to suspect over the years that these guys really can't tell me the future after all.
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And while up to now it hasn't been a big deal, I've sort of just let it slide, this time
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I want to really know what this really is. So they, of course, panic and duck the situation and try to put the king off and try to stall for time and do all of those things that we normally do when we get faced back into a corner like that.
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And so the king basically loses his temper, and he says, hey, here's the deal. Either you tell me what this vision is and what it means, or I'm going to kill all of you,
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I'm going to kill all your families, I'm going to take all of your houses, and I'm going to make them all into trash heaps.
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Sort of, you know, gives you incentive there. And so they're all panicking, but here comes
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Daniel. Now Daniel is also ranked as one of the wise men, because the term wise men covers everybody in the
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Babylonian kingdom or the Chaldean Empire that knew how to deal with matters of science, matters of mathematics, any of those types of things.
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They were the advisors to the king. And, of course, he comes under this decree as well.
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It doesn't matter, excuse me, it doesn't matter that he is one of the exiled
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Hebrew children, the young men of the Hebrews that have been taken into the king's court, that he and his friends, you know, they haven't been lying to the king for years and years and years, it doesn't matter.
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They fall into this category, so their necks are on the chopping block as well. But Daniel, as we saw, approaches this from a totally different perspective.
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First thing he does is ask for time, but not in the way that the other wise men had done.
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He asks for time in saying, oh, king, there's a God in heaven that can reveal this.
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And if you'll give me a little time that I can spend in prayer, God will show me the interpretation of your dream.
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He'll show me what your dream was and the interpretation of it. And apparently, Daniel sat rather well with the king because the king grants this to him.
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And then the next thing Daniel does is get his three friends and they all hold a prayer meeting to get down on their knees and go before almighty
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God and to pray for wisdom and the revealing of this vision.
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And God grants their desire. And so Daniel then is able to go before the king.
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But again, with wisdom and with counsel, he tells the king, none of the wise men can interpret this dream for you.
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He's not claiming credit for himself and his three friends. He's also making sure that the rest of the wise men can't claim credit after the fact.
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But he gives all of the credit where it belongs to God. He said, there's a God in heaven. And he emphasizes this is the creator
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God. This is the real God. This is the God that really exists. This is the
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God that is in heaven and knows all things in all the hearts of men and has revealed this unto me.
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And so now he's about ready to start revealing the king's dream and to begin interpreting it.
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And so he starts in, in verse 31, thou, O king, sawest and beheld a great image, this great image whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee, and the form of it was terrible or awesome.
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The image's head was of fine gold, its breast and its arms of silver, its belly and its thighs of bronze, its legs of iron and its feet part of iron and part of clay.
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And thou sawest until a stone was cut without hands, which smote the image upon its feet that were of iron and clay and broke them to pieces.
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Then were the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold broke into pieces together and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors.
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And the wind carried them away that no place was found for them. And the stone that smote the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
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And you can imagine that right about that time, the king wanted to say something like, bingo, that's it exactly.
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Now kings don't say things like that, so he probably restrained himself. But that's what he was thinking.
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He said, you've got my dream exactly. Because up to now, the standard reaction has always been, well, king, tell us the dream.
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And then the wise men would come up with some interpretation that they thought would please the king.
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And the king is caught on to this. He's not being fooled. The king is actually a very wise, very smart man.
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And so he says, I want you to tell me what my vision was first. Because if the gods can reveal the vision to you, then
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I know that you also can tell me what the interpretation is. And Daniel comes in and he says, actually, king, there is a
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God, capital G in heaven, who can do that. And so here he is, he starts out.
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And what this vision does is lay out before King Nebuchadnezzar the flow of history.
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This covers everything from Nebuchadnezzar himself all the way to the second advent of Jesus Christ.
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There will be four great Gentile empires that are going to arise. And this is going to detail all of those.
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And so the first key principle we want to take away from this passage, that every historical event is keyed to the plan of God.
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It is all tied to the plan of God. Nothing is happening by chance. Nothing is handling at random.
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And history is unfolding precisely as God has decreed that it would.
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Everything is going exactly at the right time. Everything is going exactly in the right place.
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And that applies whether you're talking about nations and empires, or you're talking about individuals.
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Our times, the Bible says, are in God's hands. And so we should take great comfort from this, that things are not chaotic, things are not running at random, that God is, after all, in control.
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We sometimes sing that. I wonder if we believe it, that God really is in control of our lives.
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And so here's Nebuchadnezzar's vision. And this is called the times of the
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Gentiles, because remember, the Jewish nation has been taken into exile. It has been captured.
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It has been taken into exile. It no longer exists as a nation, with the exception as a puppet state of some other power.
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The 10 northern tribes no longer exist as a political entity at this point. Only the two southern tribes,
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Judah, the tribe of Judah and Benjamin. Thank you.
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That was a test. No, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin are the only two that even exist as political bodies at this point.
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And so things are changing. And you might ask, if you were alive at that time, has
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God abandoned his people? Because God made some covenant promises to Abraham, renewed them to Isaac and to Jacob.
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He's made covenant promises to David and to Solomon. And has
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God abandoned all of this? Because there are things that are unfulfilled in these promises.
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So what's going to happen here? It looks like Israel is going to disappear.
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And as a matter of fact, Israel is going to disappear. It's going to take it a few more hundred years from this point.
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But Israel as a political body is going to cease to exist. And it's going to cease to exist for almost 2 ,000 years until today.
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But God has his own timetable. And God keeps careful notes.
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God knows exactly where he's going. And God always comes back and fulfills his promises.
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We can count on that. And so Daniel describes this image.
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It's described as bright. It's the image of a man, very large, very bright, very excellent.
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It's described as terrible, which is a description actually of its strength and of its power.
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And top to bottom, first of all, there's a head of gold. There's a head of gold.
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And then there's a chest and arms that are of silver. And there's a belly and thighs that are of bronze, of brass.
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And there are legs that are of iron. And finally, there are feet that are of iron and clay mixed.
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And then he sees this great stone. And the text describes not a stone, but a huge boulder, a huge rock, if you will, that comes and smashes this thing and destroys the image completely.
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And finally, the rock grows and fills the entire earth. And so notice about the image, first of all, that as you go from head to toe, the materials decline in intrinsic value.
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Gold is the highest, has the highest intrinsic value of any of the materials in this statue.
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Silver has a little less value than gold. Bronze has less value than either silver or gold.
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And iron, less value still. As you go down the four empires that are laid out there, the intrinsic value or the moral quality, if you will, is going to decline.
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And that's kind of the history of mankind. Now, you look at the human viewpoint.
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Human viewpoint is that man has been, has struggled himself up out of the primordial ooze.
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And we're constantly clawing our way up. And we're getting better and better. You know, every day in every way,
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I'm getting better and better. My apologies to anyone that's a member of that organization. But, you know, that's the attitude that we have.
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And we look around, look at us. You know, how great we are. The Bible's view is exactly the opposite.
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That man started way up here. God created Adam innocent, if you will.
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He was created in sinless perfection. And he fell. And we've been, it's been downhill ever since.
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So that as time goes by, as history unfolds, mankind is getting worse and worse.
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And the Bible actually tells us to expect that. That things will get worse and worse until Jesus comes and sets things right.
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Now, we are not to become complacent. And as individuals, as individual believers, we are certainly to resist evil whenever it is in our power to do that.
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We're not just to throw our hands up and say, oh, well, let's bring on, let's bring on evil to speed up the return of Jesus Christ.
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That's the wrong attitude. But that is the trend of history.
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Fortunately for civilization, there are times when God seems to set the hands back on the clock a little bit.
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But if you look at the general, if you look at the general decline of civilization, as we've gone through the various empires, we're going downhill.
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And so head to toe, you start out with gold and you wind up with iron and clay mixed.
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But notice also, as you go down the statue, the strength of these materials increases as you go down until you get to the feet.
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But, you know, gold is very soft. It's not exactly what you would use as a structural material.
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In fact, one of the things that makes gold so valuable is that it can be manipulated so easily.
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Gold can be beaten thinner and thinner to extremely thin sheets because it's so malleable.
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But it has no real strength, but it's very decorative. And we use it for our...
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It's been used for money and for a medium of exchange for centuries, for millennia.
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And then silver, silver also has great intrinsic value, but not quite as much as gold.
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But it's a little bit stronger. It's a little bit stiffer until you get down to bronze.
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And now bronze, you can start using that for structural things. Bronze is basically a tin and copper alloy.
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Yeah, Andrew, Daniel, excuse me. I don't think that's specifically what they have in mind here.
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Although the kingdoms of Greece certainly did rack judgment upon the known world at the time.
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But I do not believe that that is what he's referring to at this point. But bronze, for example, though bronze was the material that you made swords and weapons out of.
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Because it was hard enough, it would take an edge and would keep that edge. And so as we entered into what was called the
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Bronze Age, where we could make tools and things like that out of bronze. And then you get into iron, and iron is better still.
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Again, for the making of weapons, the weapons that would take an edge and would hold it. It's even stronger.
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It's a structural material. You can build things out of it. Iron and steel still form the backbone, largely, of our construction industry for heavy construction today.
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We put up the steel skeleton and then we hang the facade on top of it. And then finally, you get down to the feet.
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And you heard the expression, if you were growing up, so -and -so has feet of clay. Well, now you know where it came from.
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It comes right out of Daniel chapter 2. It refers to anything which it does have some appearance of strength, and it has some real strength.
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There's some iron there. But clay is what? Fragile, breaks.
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It's not exactly what you would build out of if you want something to last.
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And so there he goes. And he goes to describe these four great empires that are going to arise.
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Now, a little bit of history here. Nebuchadnezzar's father was
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King Nabopolassar. And the Chaldean Empire first began to arise out of what is today
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Iran. And King Nabopolassar was hired by the
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Assyrians, not to be confused with Syria today. The Assyrians were occupying the area of the
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Fertile Crescent, which are basically the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, what is today Iraq. And so they hired
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King Nabopolassar. He had a pretty good army. Those guys were pretty good as a military force.
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They were very effective as a raiding force. And so the kings of Assyria hired Nabopolassar to come and to defend their country against some invading forces that are coming in from the ocean side, from the side of the
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Mediterranean. So he comes in, takes the job, comes in, enters Babylon under the banner of the king of Assyria, and promptly takes over.
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Foments a revolution, takes over, and all of a sudden, I'm in charge. And presto, what was the core of the
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Chaldean Empire suddenly has come into being. And he spreads himself out.
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And he turns all of this over upon his death to King Nebuchadnezzar.
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And at that point, the Chaldean Empire is at its height. And Daniel says to King Nebuchadnezzar, you, oh king, are the head of gold.
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Good thing to say to the king. You know, you're the head of gold. You're the very top.
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You're the peak. You're the acme. It's just downhill from here, king. And so, and as we will see,
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Nebuchadnezzar gets a case of the big head out of this. But anyway, what's gone on is that they've destroyed all remnants of the
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Assyrian military. They've come to dominate this entire region. And like so often happens, he builds this great, great empire.
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We still hear about the hanging gardens of Babylon that Nebuchadnezzar built for his favorite wife.
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And you can see the ruins of those today. It's still there down in Iraq, modern day
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Iraq. But as so often happens, Nebuchadnezzar is succeeded by a series of kings who are either evil or weak or both so that it doesn't take too many years until after Nebuchadnezzar is gone that the
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Chaldean Empire is captured by the Medes and the Persians. And you can look at Daniel chapter 5 to get the details on that.
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It happened literally overnight. There was scarcely a whimper from the
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Babylonian army. It just occurred and boom, all of a sudden, everybody, you know, the old guys are out, the new guys are in.
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Now, as an aside, the remarkable thing, and this shows how God exercises His control over things, because,
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I mean, kingdoms were always being overrun and conquered and what have you in those days.
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And what did you do as soon as you conquered a new kingdom? You took all the guys that had been leading the kingdom up to this point and did away with them and put your own guys in.
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That's just the way it worked. Not so for Daniel. Daniel has risen to a very high position and of great prominence in Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom.
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And when the Medes and the Persians come in, he is retained. In fact, not only is he retained in his position, he is promoted.
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And Daniel served a whole series of kings. Daniel is
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God's man on the spot, as are his three children, or his three friends,
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Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And so that's not really part of the lesson.
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That's just kind of thrown in. But we move on, because the next thing is the arms of silver, the chest of silver, and that's the
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Medo -Persian Empire, which succeeded the Chaldean Empire under Nebuchadnezzar. Now, the
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Medes and the Persians were also up in this area. Persia, again, always think
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Iran when you hear Persia. In fact, when you run into people who are from that part of the world today, in this country or in Europe, they will usually refer to themselves as Persian, not
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Iranian, to distinguish themselves from the current regime that is in charge there.
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But the Medes and the Persians, they were basically cousins. And like cousins sometimes are, or brothers sometimes are, they were basically hostile to each other.
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They were constantly squabbling with each other. They were constantly fighting for ascendancy one to the other. But if they agreed upon anything is that they might be hostile to each other, but they were definitely hostile to everybody else.
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And so the two of them would get together, the Medes and the Persians would get together and go out on raids and what have you and conquering.
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And they gradually expanded their area of control until finally, as I said, they conquered the entire
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Chaldean Empire. And they did it literally overnight when they invaded, essentially invaded and captured
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Babylon. And it's the events that surround Belshazzar and the handwriting on the wall.
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Your kingdom's been, you've been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Your kingdom is taken from you.
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Well, that's who God gave it to. Because it goes back again to the opening verses of chapter two, where one of the things
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Daniel said about God is that there's a God in heaven and he sets up kings and he puts down kings on his timetable.
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And so, oh king, if you have power, it's because God in heaven has given it to you. God gave it to you.
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God can take it away. And so, that's what happens. And so, that brings
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Cyrus the Great onto the stage. He conquered the Medes. He swept into the Fertile Crescent.
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Again, the Tigris -Euphrates Valley. He takes Babylon and he becomes one of the central figures that you find in this period of history.
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And he's mentioned all over the Old Testament. There's a whole series of mentions of him.
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He figures very strongly in prophecy. He was actually welcomed by the
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Jews. If you look at Isaiah 45 verses 1 and 2, that's describing
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Cyrus the Great. And he is succeeded by Darius I or Darius the
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Great. And the Babylonian captivity essentially ends. And Darius is also mentioned all through the
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Old Testament. He's mentioned in Ezra and Nehemiah and Daniel and Haggai and in Zechariah.
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And the reign of Darius is frequently used to date things. Because again,
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God is a God of precision. And we're talking about real history here. These are not made up stories.
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These are not made up myths about the time. They're real events that happened to real people. And King Darius and his reign is frequently used to date something in the first year of King Darius, in the fifth year of King Darius, whatever.
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And that goes. And there's actually some indication and some scholars would say that Darius became a believer.
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So we move on from there to the belly and the thighs of bronze.
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And this is basically the Greco -Macedonian Empire that rose later under Alexander the
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Great. Now, Alexander was the son of Philip II and Olympias.
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And although he was, as a child, he was not thought of that he would be anything special. They didn't even call him
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Alexander the Pretty Good. You know, he turned out to be the greatest conqueror of his day.
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He took off and basically he had one thing he was really good at, and that was conquering things and running a military force.
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And the first thing he did was conquer Greece. And then he organized the Greeks because at that time,
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Greece had been these little city -states. Each one is independent. Well, he organized them into a unified military fighting force.
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And as an interesting aside that shows you how God deals in history, you remember when
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Jesus Christ was born, it's described as the fullness of time? Well, it really was the fullness of time.
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God had set up everything in place necessary for Jesus to come, Jesus to minister, and for the gospel to go out.
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And one of those things is occurring right here under Alexander, because Alexander has got a problem.
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He has got this army set up, you know, great army all ready to fight.
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So he says, you know, right face, forward march. Nobody moves except for the
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Macedonians, because everybody speaks a different local dialect of Greek. And so again, the genius that he is, he says,
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I got a problem here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put my staff to work and we're going to invent a language.
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And the purpose of this language is to give instructions so that there can be no mistake about what
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I mean when I write down my orders and send them out to my commanders. There can be no mistake whatsoever about what
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I intend for everybody to do. And this is where the rise of the Koine Greek begins.
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The common Greek, because all of these guys all spoke Greek, but they all spoke the
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Spartacan Greek or the Attic Greek or some other Greek. And so we're going to all speak a common
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Greek. And now Alexander goes out conquering the known world. And what's he doing as he goes?
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He spreads his language. As soon as he conquers a people, you know, brings the local leaders before him.
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He says, here's the grammar book. When you have mastered my language, come and talk to me. And so Greek is being spread.
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And by the time that several hundred years go by and Jesus comes, Greek is the common language throughout the known world.
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Everybody speaks Greek. They might speak something else too. They might speak Aramaic or Hebrew or Latin or whatever, but everybody speaks
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Greek. And so God is preparing the way as this goes.
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So anyway, back to Alexander. He goes out and 334
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BC, roughly, he starts out. And by that point, he has conquered, essentially conquered the known world.
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Now, as these empires arise, we call them worldwide empires, because at the time they conquered the known world as it existed in their day.
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It's not that there weren't people somewhere else, but the world of commerce, the world that was known at that time, basically, during the time of the
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Chaldean Empire, it was what we now call the Middle East. And then you get to the
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Medes and the Persians, and that's spread out a little more. And now you've gotten to the Greco -Macedonian
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Empire. And that has spread out into Egypt and all over, you know,
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Greece, all of that area of what we would now call Asia Minor. He runs all of that.
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He's conquered everything. And so, but as typically happens, excuse me, again,
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Alexander died at a very young age. And his empire split up among his four generals.
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He had four generals, and they squabbled among themselves. And finally, the empire sort of split into four pieces that are known to historians as the
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Hellenistic monarchies. And so you get this dividing effect, so that you get the belly and the thighs, the splitting of the thighs.
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This is where you start dividing in to these four smaller kingdoms that are under these four generals that had been
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Alexander's generals. And out of this situation arises the
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Roman Empire, which to some, to certain extent at least, is the greatest empire the world has ever known.
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It is the last of the truly worldwide empires that has ever existed.
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Nothing has arisen like it since then. Even the British Empire did not cover the known world the way,
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I mean, the sun never sat on the British Empire, but there were places all around the world that were not under their rule.
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The upstart Americans, for example. But the Roman Empire begins to arise out of this, and it starts off with a very humble beginnings, but basically these guys know how to fight, and they know how to conquer.
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And away they go. They conquer first of the Italy, what is modern day Italy. They conquer Spain. They conquer
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Sicily. They conquer Macedonia. They conquer Greece, and then Syria, and North Africa, and Asia Minor, and Gaul, or France, Egypt, Great Britain.
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You go to Great Britain today, you will find things that the Romans built that are still there. The Romans were the great engineers of their time, and they built things that still last.
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It's an interesting experience. I've had the experience of walking on Roman roads.
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I got a chance to go to Petra in Jordan, and the road that leads down to Petra, the
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Romans built. And it is the equal of any road that you've been on today. It's cobblestone paved.
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It's arched the way a modern road is so that the rain runs off. There are gutters on the side to carry the rain away.
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These guys knew what they were doing, and they built to last. And so they extend their influence over the known world.
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And they didn't just conquer. They conquered and they absorbed.
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They absorbed into their empire. So that when you became a part of the
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Roman Empire, this was a good thing in many, many ways. Because what did the Romans do?
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Well, first of all, the Romans built infrastructure. They built these roads so that you could travel.
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And that means commerce can go on. And they established the Roman army all over the world to keep order.
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So that you could always appeal to the Roman magistrate. And if you were a
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Roman citizen, this was called the Pax Romana, the Roman peace. And if you were a
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Roman citizen, you could go anywhere in perfect safety. Nobody was going to mess with you.
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For example, what does Paul do when he's about to be strung up?
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He appeals to the Roman government. He says, I'm a Roman citizen. I claim the protection of Roman law.
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And what does the Roman governor do? He runs out an entire battalion of troops to take care of this one guy.
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And make sure that he gets to the, that basically he gets to court safely. So that's happening.
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That's happening all over the Roman empire. And all of this begins to come up.
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Now, this is God at work. Like I said, nothing has happened like this before or since.
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And yet this is exactly the time when Jesus Christ comes. He ministers on earth.
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He dies for our sins. He rises from the grave. And now the gospel is beginning to go out.
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And it goes out, if you will, under the protection of the
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Pax Romana. The apostles can move around the empire.
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Paul can go all the way to Spain on his missionary journeys.
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These people can go out protected. They've got the infrastructure to move. And the world is set up for the spread of the gospel.
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Everybody speaks a common language. Everybody speaks a common language.
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And they can go out. It's the fullness of time. And this can happen. Now, other things that happen under the
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Roman empire. The final destruction, the final temporary destruction of Israel as a political body happens under the
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Romans. 70 AD, Titus sacks Rome. The Israel, tiny little country of Israel, has caused the
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Roman empire more headache, more headaches than practically half the rest of the empire combined.
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It's just one little bunch of guys over here that are causing all this trouble. So finally, you know, the Romans have had it.
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And we're going to go in here and we're going to crush these people once and for all. And so they do.
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From the human viewpoint, 70 AD, Titus, Titus legion sack
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Rome throws down the temple, not one stone left on another, exactly as Jesus Christ predicted it would be.
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And it appears that political Israel has disappeared. And as a matter of fact, there will be no political
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Israel from 70 AD to 1949. That's a pretty long time.
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But God is not through with his people. Because what happens also in here is that there is a great parenthesis.
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Now, Daniel doesn't refer to this. Daniel didn't see this. The Old Testament prophets did not see this.
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But there's a great parenthesis that's called the mystery that comes right in here.
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And that is the church. Starting at Pentecost, ending at the rapture.
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But here, this period of time, which is at least a couple thousand years now, maybe goes on for another thousand years, who knows?
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But there is this there is this thing called the mystery. And that is that's not a whodunit type mystery in the
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Bible. In biblical terms, a mystery is something that was hidden and is now revealed. And so Paul also uses the same phrasing when he says,
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Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep. You know, we shall all be changed.
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But some of us are not even going to see death. The ones that are going to be alive at the time when
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Jesus comes back for his church. And so the church age is going to be stuck in here.
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Now, we're still running in what's called the time of the Gentiles. The overarching thing is called the times of the
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Gentiles. And that will not come to an end until the end of the Great Tribulation. But the church age is layered over that, if you will.
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And that's going on. So that's the next thing that's going to happen.
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We now we're now running through this great this great parenthesis area. But at some point.
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Jesus Christ is going to come back for his church. This is called the rapture. And we are going to be caught up and we are going to meet him in the air.
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At that point, Jesus Christ does not come back to earth. His foot does not touch the earth.
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At that point, we meet him in the air. If if you are if you are alive, you actually become you go second.
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Because what does Paul say? He says the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we who are alive will be caught up to meet him in the air.
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And at that point, the church age is over. But we resume what's happening and being described in Daniel.
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And like I said, if you want to go see Daniel's visions, start in chapter seven.
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And Daniel's 70 weeks, he says there are 70 weeks. And those are weeks of years that are laid out against my people
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Israel. And 69 of those weeks have expired. There's one week to go.
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One seven year period still to go. And that seven year period, which we also call the
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Great Tribulation, will wrap up the time of the Gentiles. We'll bring all of this together and we'll start into the kingdom age, which will follow.
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And the promises that have been made to Abraham, to Isaac and Jacob and to David and to Moses will all be fulfilled.
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In that period of time. And so here we go. And during that period of time, there's going to be a revived
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Roman Empire. Which will be the have the worldwide economic system under it.
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It will have the worldwide religious system under it. And all of that will go forth, but it won't last very long because what's going to happen.
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And this is the culmination of the vision. He sees a stone cut without hands and the word that is used here is a gigantic rock.
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A gigantic rock. Jesus Christ, the rock on which the church is built.
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The rock on which the church is built is Jesus Christ. It's not Peter. I know all of you know that, but I'd emphasize it anyway.
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Jesus is referred to as the rock in Deuteronomy chapter 32, in Isaiah chapter 8 and chapter 28, in Psalm 118, in Mark 12, in Matthew 16, in Zechariah 3, over and over and over.
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Jesus is described as the rock. And at his second advent, when he actually comes to earth.
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He shatters the revived Roman Empire and establishes his kingdom. He is going to ultimately succeed.
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And shatter the world systems and all of the satanic forces that are arrayed against him.
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He shatters all of this and his kingdom takes over the entire earth. So the rock becomes a gigantic mountain and that's and takes over the entire world.
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And this is what Daniel sees. And this is what
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Nebuchadnezzar sees. And so what happens? As would be predicted,
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Nebuchadnezzar, now Nebuchadnezzar is a man of his word. And he has promised that whoever can describe this vision to him accurately will be greatly rewarded, have all kinds of honors heaped upon him.
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And he does all of that. He elevates Daniel. And like we said earlier, we get the impression that Daniel stood pretty high in the opinion of the king in the first place.
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And now he stands even higher in the opinion of the king. And he puts him way up.
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He puts him way up. But Daniel does not take account or credit for himself.
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Daniel has gone out of his way to emphasize all the time that is God in heaven. That has revealed this dream to me.
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It is God in heaven that has revealed its meaning. That there is no human being.
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There's no human agency. None of the wise men, none of the wise guys, whatever you want to call them, can interpret this.
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It's only through the mercy and the grace of God that I can do this, O king. And so he doesn't take credit for himself.
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He does, however, remember his friends. He does remember his friends.
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And he says, they helped. They were in the prayer meeting. They helped with the praying.
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Verse 49, then Daniel requested of the king, and he said, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego over the fairs of the province of Babylon.
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But Daniel sat in the gate of the king. So that's where he winds up.
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Now, what happens? Nebuchadnezzar, you say, well, surely after this. Now, Nebuchadnezzar is going to become a believer at this point, right?
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Well, no, actually. Verse 47, the king answered unto
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Daniel and said of a truth, it is that your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings and a revealer of secrets, seeing that thou couldest reveal this secret.
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Now, you might think, OK, he is now acknowledging the God in heaven, but he's really not at this point.
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All he's saying is that he's sort of saying to the rest of the court, boy, this guy's
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God, he's something else, and we want to be on his good side. So I'm going to say good things about Daniel's God, but that's not the equivalent of I'm going to put my faith and trust in him.
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As a matter of fact, as we see from the later chapters, Nebuchadnezzar, unfortunately, the part about Nebuchadnezzar being the head of gold apparently went to his head.
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And he got a case of the big head about this. And as you know the story, he's walking on his portico and he's saying, look at this great city that I have built.
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And a voice comes out of heaven and says, that's it, Nebuchadnezzar. And when voices start falling out of heaven to you, you're in big trouble.
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And Nebuchadnezzar, you know, he goes basically goes insane. And he goes out and lives like a wild animal for a number of years until he learns.
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And we have from his own mouth, I finally learned that there is a God in heaven and he does control things and he sets up kingdoms and he takes them down.
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And, you know, did Nebuchadnezzar become a believer at that point? Theologians speculate about that.
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We don't really know. We might see Nebuchadnezzar in heaven, who knows? Maybe not. Daniel? No, because we can't read more into that than is there because of the following chapters tell us what he really did.
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The actions that Nebuchadnezzar displayed in the following chapters are not the actions of someone who has become a believer and has placed their faith in God at that point.
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And so otherwise, he's basically just saying nice stuff. You know, it's sort of like, you know,
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I'm not convinced that this is the God, but obviously this God of Daniel is pretty hot stuff and I want to be on his good side.
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You know, that's kind of the feeling that you get behind what Nebuchadnezzar says at this point.
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So now we're about out of time. But wrapping up the lessons out of Daniel chapter two.
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First of all, man's crisis is always God's opportunity. Man's crisis is always
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God's opportunity because it is only when we come to the end of our rope, if you will, and we have no place to go and we're back into a corner and, you know, we don't know what we're going to do.
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This is where God can display his works.
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He can display himself. He can bring glory to himself.
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And that is God's objective. God is due glory. God is due worship.
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We are to worship him. And that applies, by the way, to all of his creation.
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Not just from believers. God is due worship from everybody, sinner and saint alike.
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And God will have worship from everybody, ultimately, sinner and saint alike. So man's crisis is always
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God's opportunity. And the second thing we can take away from this is that human wisdom is futile.
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None of the wise men had any hope of solving the king's problem.
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And, yes, the wise men were largely charlatans, but they were very smart charlatans. They did know an awful lot.
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They really did. You know, they were the scientists and the mathematicians of their day.
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They were the diplomats of their day. They really were wise men.
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But they were hopeless when it came to solving this particular problem. Nebuchadnezzar had a problem that they could not solve.
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They could not address. It was actually true when they said, they finally admitted, no man, no human being can do what you've asked us to do.
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They were absolutely right. You know, nobody is going to be able to do that in their own power until Daniel comes along and says, there's a
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God in heaven and he can help. But that's number three.
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God always has a man for the crisis. Whatever the crisis is, God always has a man.
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You look back through history, just read through your Bible, God's always got a man. Oh, your people are slaves in Egypt?
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Well, here's Moses. Oh, you need to have the gospel preached to the
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Gentiles? Here's Paul. Whatever it is, God's got a man. You can count on God for that.
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God always has a man to address the crisis. And so the fourth thing is that, humanly speaking, great men.
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Nebuchadnezzar was a great man. Nebuchadnezzar was the king of the foremost empire of his time.
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And yet, those men are most often the most miserable or frightened individuals.
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Because possessions and position do not ensure peace of mind. Peace of mind comes from God.
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Security and safety comes from God. And if you do not have that orientation, if you're not properly oriented to the plan of God, if you are not properly oriented to Bible doctrine, you have no grounds for having peace of mind.
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And so, like Nebuchadnezzar, great men in great positions are very often very disturbed and very worried.
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But what happens? The crisis provides opportunity for witnessing. What's Daniel doing all through this?
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King, you have a real problem, but there is a God in heaven. The creator God, the
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God that really exists, the God that is there, can provide the answers you're looking for.
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Nobody else can provide those answers, but God can. And so the next thing is, is that you have to be in fellowship before you can serve.
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Fellowship is imperative for service. Now, how do we establish fellowship with God? First John 1 .9,
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if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
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That is the mechanism by which fellowship is maintained. Now, what's else?
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Well, knowledge of doctrine strengthens faith and provides confidence. Daniel has got confidence.
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Not in himself, but Daniel knows his Bible. Daniel has spent his entire life studying his
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Bible, and he has confidence in God. But notice also,
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Daniel has spent time studying his Bible before the crisis started.
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That's the time when you want to be studying your Bible and taking in doctrine and learning your Bible. You know, the
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Bible is not a fire escape. You don't wait till there's a crisis, grab your Bible.
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It's not a magic lamp. You know, you don't grab your Bible in the crisis and rub it, you know, and hope a verse pops out and solves your problem.
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That's not the way it works. You learn your doctrine ahead of time.
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Because during the crisis, there's not a lot of time for study. You know, you're busy working on the crisis.
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And then fellowship with other believers is important. Daniel didn't try to go alone on this.
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Daniel got his three friends together, and they, all four of them held a prayer meeting, an all -night prayer meeting until they got the answer that they needed.
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And so prayer is required in a crisis. Prayer is required in a crisis.
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And that brings us to the end of Daniel chapter 2. I would encourage you to continue in Daniel.
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Daniel is a very interesting book to study. Again, like I said, it is the equivalent to Revelation.
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It is the Old Testament Revelation. I would commend it to you and encourage you to spend some time there.
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Let's pray. Our Heavenly Father, we do come before you praising you, number one,
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Lord, because you are worthy of praise. We worship you because you are worthy of worship. We acknowledge,
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Lord, that all that we have, that all that we are comes from your hand, that whatever positions we might have, whatever possessions we might have, whatever has come into our lives is at your hand and for your purpose and by your decree.
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And so, Lord, we would pray that you would continue to work in our lives.
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May we constantly be focused on you. May we constantly look to you for guidance.
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May we not lean on our own understanding, but may we face whatever comes into our life as what it truly is.
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It's something that's been put into our lives by your hand. It is a gift from a loving Father and that you have a purpose, whether it is to teach us something, whether it is to refine us.
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You have a purpose for everything you do in our lives. And may we look for that purpose and embrace it,
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Father. We pray for our pastor as he opens the word to us this morning. May our hearts be prepared to receive the message that you have for us.