lent day 19

 Daniel chapter 11 1-34

You can read the whole thing yourselves. It is a revelation concerning what is going to happen to the people of Israel from the time of Daniel going forward until....well until the end of everything.  It is such an extraordinarily detailed and accurate foretelling that for centuries people have been saying that it cant possibly have been written by Daniel at the time he said he wrote it.  😀  But thats the essence of prophecy isnt it? Telling things that are not yet as though they are.

The words spoken by the angel concern the Gentile nations and cover the reigns of Cambyses, Pseudo-Smerdis, Darius Hystaspes and Xerxes (aka Ahasuerus)  This last guy is mentioned in the book of Esther as being vastly wealthy and commanding a vast army.  He attacked Greece but was unsuccessful.  150 years passed pretty uneventfully before Alexander the Great arrived on the scene to conquer the world. But as we have seen previously he died suddenly at 33 and didnt leave his vast empire to a successor. So the angel's prediction comes true and the kingdom is divided into 4 and 'it was thrown to the four winds.' What does that mean? A great battle ensued for who was going to rule, and the battle was won by four generals, and the kingdom was divided into four parts: Cassander took Macedonia, Lysimachus took Thrace and Asia Minor, Ptolemy took Egypt, and Seleucus took Syria. Egypt is south of Israel. Syria is North. Those two become the ones we focus on the 

remaining of the chapter, because they are the ones that are right around the nation Israel. In Egypt, a Ptolemaic line of kings was established; and in Syria, a Seleucid dynasty was established; through the centuries, those two dynasties warred with each other, and they fought most of their wars on the soil of Israel. So Israel became the pawn in this. From here on to the twentieth verse, we cover about 200 years when these wars waged on the borders and throughout the land of Israel.

After lots of battling between north and south (with the land of Israel being slap bang in the middle) a sort of peace was brokered by a marriage - but that didnt work out well and wars broke out again. The next major leader to arise is Antiochus the Great who is from the northern kingdoms. He marches against the south with 75,000 soldiers and tears through Egypt and Israel but is met by 73.000 soldiers, 5,000 cavalry and 73 elephants by Ptolemy in the south.  Theres a massive battle with huge casualties and nobody really comes out on top so 13 years later Antiochus comes back with an even greater army and this time he is outright winner

Antiochus offers his daughter Cleopatra to Ptolemy as a sort of peace offering (although actually he wanted a spy in the camp of his enemy) and he then goes on to extend his kingdom right to the coast and the Mediterranean -which by this time was ruled by Rome.  In 190BC he was defeated by Rome.

verses21-34 speak about the next ruler, Antiochus Epiphanes who was an evil corrupt leader who came to power through deceit and corruption and who wreaked havoc in Israel.  Rome was closing in so Antiochus tried to buy support from some sectors of the Jewish population but in the end he opted to go to Jerusalem and desecrate the temple in the most appalling ways. He had pigs slaughtered on the high altar and made the priests eat the pork. He had naked athletes performing in temple grounds, halts all worship and slaughters women and children at whim. He is truly vile and is definitely 'an abomination'.  He erects a statue to the Greek god Zeus in the temple and makes people worship it.

With flattery he will corrupt those who violate the covenant, but the people who know their God will firmly resist him.v32

God always has people who know Him 'firmly resisting' the enemy.  Refusing to bow down to foreign Gods.  Daniel was one such and now he is being told that hundreds of years into the future his people will suffer in the middle of wars and be ruled by despots.  Far from the 'happily ever after' Daniel had hoped for having read the prophecy in Jeremiah. he now understands that the story is just going to be one long struggle.  Depressing or what?  How would you have felt if you had been the one receiving this message?  Daniel not only heard it but he then had to remember it in detail and write it down. Who did he tell?  He was an old man at the end of his life. On the one hand he was chatting to angels, on the other hand he was being given the responsibility of recording God's words - and those words were really hard to swallow.

Most of the prophets seem to have been given the difficult job of delivering fairly bad news.  Why? Why did God tell His people beforehand that hard times were coming. Better not to know perhaps? Well I think He told them a) to give them a chance to repent, seek Him, come back, devote themselves and b) to remind them that He is in control. He knows.  How often are we tempted to think that in the hard times God has forgotten all about us?  That He has taken His eye off the ball and let bad things happen almost by accident.   No. He knows. He has planned it this way.  He sees it all.  Because He is standing outside time He sees every moment in history as though it is now. Which is why He can intervene and step in at any time to change things. 

If we know our God we will be able to firmly resist the culture, circumstances and consequences which are not sourced in Him.  If we dont, we will be swept away in the flood of godless corruption which is rapidly rising around us.  I dont know about you, but I want to make sure I really do know Him as well as I possibly can.