21: World News & Prophecy - Daniel 11:40

[Darris McNeely] Welcome back to our class. We're going to finish in this class, Daniel 11. And we are at verse 40 in the flow of the story. And I ended the last class by saying that our understanding of verses 35 where it talks about the king. And though it is not explicitly called the king of the north, it has to be understood no other way as we see it. That it's the context of the chapter is the king of the north and the king of the south. And so the king in the flow is still the king of the north. But there's been a change. And what we have said for many decades in the church and our narrative, our received prophetic narrative of the Bible is that at verse 35, it signifies a change in who the king of the north is.

Keep in mind to this point, we've always identified the king of the north and the king of the south. The two generals, Seleucus and Ptolemy, out of the time of Alexander the Great, those two floated to the top and they become in the story the king of the north, the Seleucid king and the Ptolemaic kingdom becomes the king of the south. And through the narrative of Daniel 11 up to verse 35, we've been talking about the king of the north up here. But now we say, beginning at verse 35, that that king is the Roman Empire, no longer a Greek, part of the Greek Empire. Now we've always said that and I would remember through the years we would get into certain prophetic sermons or discussions or even see it in some of our writing, we would say essentially that. By the time you get to verse 40, we would say, the king of the north is now the king of, is now Rome, not a Greek Empire.

And I would think to myself, how do we know that? Do we just say it? And poof! It is. And being an inquiring mind and not necessarily skeptical, but I would say, how do we know? You can't just make a statement without backing it up. But I never saw in our writings how that can be. And it's not until I started teaching Daniel and had to really get into Daniel 11 that I personally figured it out. And I did by looking at secular history, histories of the time, other history, and understanding what was taking place here.

And I'll kind of give you a little sidebar at this point. One of my interests as I've studied history and prophecies, et cetera, and taught it with our teaching is to be able to look at secular histories, other books and writings from history to find and glean from them support and backup for our prophetic narrative. Either on these topics in Daniel or our understanding of the modern English-speaking nations being the recipient of the Abrahamic promises.

And we'll get into that next semester in one of our doctrines more. But what can we find from history? And to be fair, a lot of our past scholarship in the church of ministry and faculty members and writers for the publications going back 60 or so or more years have done a lot, get a lot of that in terms of bringing out from Josephus, from a book, histories like Langer's History and others, facts to support the biblical interpretation. But this one I never saw anything.

And I thought we had this interest in doing that with more modern books. And I've collected a number of books that do support our teaching about the Abrahamic prophecies, promises, even though they don't believe in that. But as they have chronicled the rise of the English-speaking nations, America and Great Britain, and Canada and Australia and New Zealand, because we have Australians here, I can't leave them out this year. You can always make sure you're noted. The fact that we have the wealth, the power that we've had in modern history can be documented and shown to be unique.

Well, we believe it's unique from the biblical perspective. And so other aspects of the prophetic narrative, I've tried to ferret out in my own limited way. I don't claim to be a trained historian. I'm an armchair historian, but I've always had an interest in it. To this point here, how do we know that Daniel 11:35, and 40, the north becomes now the Roman Empire rather than the Greek Empire following Alexander?

When you understand what this Seleucid Greek Empire, this part of it was, opposed to even the Ptolemies and the King of the South, it becomes clear. If you look at this map, just look at it as kind of a bridge, a land bridge. Over here we have Babylon. We've studied Babylon Empire. We studied the Persian Empire that came out of here. And we've seen how Babylon kind of came down into here. The Persian Empire expanded over into here and even tried to take over Greece. Then the Greek empires we studied comes out of Greece, takes over everything, all the way Alexander goes all the way to India and way up into what is Afghanistan and the stands up here. And then he has, you know, he dies early. And then the breakup of his empire brings us back here.

What we have been studying, one of the things that I've told you is that remember the image of Daniel 2, the head of gold Babylon. And the head directs the whole body. That analogy is helpful to understand the flow of what begins in Babylon historically and biblically. And we begin to, we trace it moving almost like a river. I like to use that metaphor of a river. That Babylon moves like a river westward in history through these other empires.

Persia, then Greece, then Rome. And you can see this progression. And what flows is the system that begins in Babylon. We've defined that as Satan's system, which is a spiritual, religious-based, economic-based, cultural-based, and in every way, culture and system that is the biblically antithesis of the way of God. Babylon, Jerusalem, the two great cities that we've talked about. And what begins in Babylon, though the empire disappears, what begins there doesn't disappear. The religion, mother worship, monarchial worship, worshiping some of the deities or some of the kings as almost divine. Nebuchadnezzar gets himself in trouble, remember? Daniel 4 claiming to be this great guy who built all the Babylon.

God strikes him down for seven years to eat grass like a cow. And yet, the system with a band over it, remember Daniel 4? The iron band over that tree stump that's been cut down and the life through the roots continues to flow. And the Persians pick up part of it. And when we come to the Greek empire, it is very interesting to see that a lot of that is picked up in unique way by this Greek Seleucid empire, king of the north, that has flowed from the east, oriental, a whole different culture than what Alexander came from in Greece. Greece was the birthplace of democracy. They didn't have kings. They didn't want kings.

Remember we studied in our early histories, we studied that democracy begins here and actually begins in Rome too because the early Romans kicked out their last king sometime in the fifth century BC. And for 400 plus years, they didn't want a king. They didn't have a king. They didn't have a king until they got to Augustus. And the reason Julius Caesar got killed is he tried too early to become a king or an emperor and they killed him, the eyes of March. Augustus pulls it off. But he pulls it off because something has already happened here with the Greeks and that is through this Seleucid empire.

So look at this as a kind of a land bridge through which is flowing a culture that we read about biblically that continues to grow. The Bible calls it Babylon Mystery Religion, Babylon the Great in Revelation 17. This whole religious, economic, political system that is this fantastic beast ridden by a woman when we open up Revelation 17. And the Seleucid empire played a very important part in it which is why we say that in Daniel 11:35, and 40, the king of the north is no longer Greek, it's now Roman. Here's what happened. And this is kind of where I found it in a history written by a guy named Will Durant.

He wrote a multi-volume series. He and his wife, Ariel Durant, wrote a multi-volume series, the history of civilization. For years and years it was quite popular. Somebody gave me a set of them, I still have them, and every once in a while pull the volume off and look at it. But what he wrote about Greece, and particularly the Seleucid empire, Will Durant, nails something in terms of the Seleucid monarchy, its kings. We've already studied Antiochus Epiphanes, the God manifest. Keep that in mind. By the time we come to him in the second century BC, he's called, he's minting coins with his image on there as Antiochus Theos, Epiphanes, the God manifest. I'm divine. Worship me. Where did he get that? The Greek, he didn't get that from, Alexander actually had intimations of divinity. That's another part of the story.

But originally the Greeks, they didn't have, they're kings and all, they were human. Where did Antiochus get this? He gets it from the east. He gets it from what began in Babylon and this tradition over there where there was a tradition of absolutism by the monarch.

And any civil assembly had very limited power. And all power is vested in the king. That's called in history, the divine right of a king, divine right. In other words, they rule by God's design, God's right. I'm the king, you do what I say. I'm the king, give me your property. I'm the king, and a lot of other things we'll go into, what the king did. And that's, that's how it was. That's an oriental thing. The Greeks adopted it. And that was the structure of the monarchy. That was a structure that passed into Persia. When you study some of the aspects of the Persia, though the Persian kings didn't look, call themselves divine, they were absolute. When we saw Daniel 6, where the king made a decree, remember, and it couldn't be removed, the power that was in that decree recognizes that power that the kings had during that time in that way. Couple that with the culture of the Greeks.

And I've talked about that as it impacted Jerusalem. When the Hellenistic Greek culture comes into Jerusalem, the Jewish young men wanted to be like the Greeks and others as well. And so it creates this tension among the Jews because everybody wanted to be Greek.

The influence of Greek culture is phenomenal, huge in this whole story. And all of this prepares for this flowing through the system of what begins in Babylon comes to a full flower in Rome. Durant writes, he said, let me just, where I want to go into it here as he's talking about this particular topic. He says that all of this prepared the way for what eventually becomes the Pax Romana of Rome. And then the synthesis or the embracing of a false Christianity. Durant gets it right. He says, “for a century, Western Asia belonged to Europe,” this area right here. “And the way was prepared for the Pax Romana and the synthesis or the combining with a Christendom.” And that's a false Christianity as we should understand that. But he says, “The East was not conquered.” It's this area completely over here. He said, “There was not a fusion of races and cultures that Alexander dreamed of. There was Greek and Greek civilization. There was Asia and many other cultures underneath.” And he said, “The qualities of the Greek intellect made no entry into the Oriental mind.”

In other words, the Greek way of thinking didn't really change the Oriental Babylonian. Persian, we'll just call it Babylonian for the sake of simplicity, didn't really change their way of thinking and enter in. He said, “As time moved on, Eastern or Babylonian ways of thought and feeling surged up from below into the ruling Greeks and through them flowed westward to transform the pagan world. In Babylon, the patient merchant and the temple banker regained ascendancy over the volatile Greek in the business world.”

Remember I told you how that the Babylonian system was very strong economically. The priests were involved with that, what we come from that, gain from that. He basically is showing how all of this Asian theory of the divine right of kings passed down through Rome and Constantinople into modern Europe, which it did. “The Greeks,” he said, “readily accepted the gods of Babylon and the East as essentially identical to his own. But as the Greek did not really believe and the Asiatic did, the Oriental gods survived while the Greek god died.” They just transformed themselves.

When I go to take the groups to Ephesus and we tour the museum at Ephesus, there's a display I always point out to them of the progression of the goddess Artemis. Artemis, by the time Paul comes into the city of Ephesus, is a multi-breasted goddess. It's kind of slim, except for multiple breasts. Some scholars say it's the multiple breasts or beehives.

Others say that they're what they look like and that's breasts. It's not exactly pornographic, but it is what it is. But that's the image that Paul sees. But Artemis actually begins way over here as a big fat lady, sitting on a throne as a fertility goddess. And she gets thinner as she moves to the west because she goes on a keto diet. And by the time Paul writes about Artemis, Diana, the Ephesians in Ephesus, she's slimmed down and she's attractive and she's the great, you know, what he's showing here is that the Greeks were skeptical, even though they had their gods and goddesses. But the people over here really did believe and they want out in time, ultimately because people want and need religion and they need something to believe in. That's part of the story as well here.

And so he says the Greeks offered the East philosophy, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato. The East offered Greece religion and he said religion won because philosophy was a luxury for the few. Religion was a consolation for the many. People are always going to believe no matter what the times bring about. In the historic alternation of belief and unbelief, religion and science, religion returned to power because it recognized the secret helplessness and loneliness of man and gave him inspiration and poetry. A disillusioned, exploited, war-worried world was glad to believe and hope again. The least expected and most profound impact of Alexander the Great's conquest was the orientalization of the European soul. Alexander set out to conquer all of this. All of this eventually conquered the Greeks and found its way into Rome as well.

And what happened in the second century or the first century BC, Rome came and took over all of this. And it becomes a part of the Roman Empire, which is why when the New Testament opens up, it is at the time of Augustus and Mary and Joseph are going to Bethlehem because of the decree of Caesar at a census. And Romans come in here. Romans take it over all of this.

That's why it has become the king of the north, biblically speaking at this point in the story flow of Daniel 11. Nothing has gone away. And by this time Rome takes it over. And that's why we say then that Daniel 11:35 and 40, all of this is now the king of the north is that of ... it is Rome. And Rome absorbs all of this. And it creates a change in Rome.

That's another part of the story we don't have time to go into, but it does begin to create a change in Rome by their absorption of all of this. And I will say this, make what's one point right now, and maybe we'll come back to it in Revelation 2. Part of what they absorb is centered right here at a place called Pergamum. Pergamum. I want you to remember that name. We'll see it in Revelation 2 because there's a church there called the church at Pergamos. It's just a difference in the name. This was a kingdom that ruled over this part of the world at that time. When the last king of Pergamum died, he willed his kingdom to Rome. And that was a key factor in bringing Rome into this. And what happened at Pergamum was a fascinating part of the story that not even Durant fleshes out altogether. But in Revelation 2, Christ says that you dwell ... it says to the church at Pergamum, you dwell where Satan dwells, where Satan's throne is. And I'll show you pictures at that time of what Pergamum looked like and a great altar to Zeus that was there that the remnants of today is in Berlin in a museum that most feel was the very throne of Satan referred to by Jesus in Revelation 2. In other words, Satan had his center here. And it's the death of this king, Adalus, willing his kingdom because he didn't think his sons were competent, he gives it to the Rome. And that brings Rome in here. Gives them a foothold in Asia which they eventually expand and take over. Satan is behind the movement of all of this. And Satan's throne goes over here. So when we say that there's a lot of factors that are working when we say that the king of the north is now Rome when we come to the story here in Daniel 11. So with that as a background, as a long background, let's go to Daniel 11:40.

Let's read it and let's see how far we can get into this.

Daniel 11:40 It says, “At the time of the end.”

Now Daniel, the story jumps to the time of the end. And it jumps to a period ahead of us now. We're in 2024. This setting now is in the future.

“At the time of the end, the king of the south shall attack him and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind with chariots, horsemen with many ships. And he shall enter the countries overwhelm them and pass through.”

All right? That's verse 40. All right? So that's a lot. All right? So let's go back and kind of unpack this at this time. The king of the south. We've always identified the king of the south as the Ptolemies down here, but we're now 2,000 years later. Who do we identify as the king of the south today? We don't say that it's Egypt. Although Egypt is Muslim and it has the largest standing Arab army, and it will no doubt be a part of the system of the king of the south. What we do is we interpret the king of the south today as an Arab Muslim power, an Arab Muslim power.

And when you look at Islam today and with the coming of Muhammad in the 600s AD, the rise of Islam as a power, they eventually took over North Africa and Egypt and all of these lands when they came out of Mecca here in what is today Saudi Arabia.

The only logical conclusion for an end-time setting of the king of the south has to include an Arab power. Some will say that they will go further and identify it as Iran. I do think Iran will be a part of it. Where the nerve center of it will be, God knows. I don't think we have to get that specific, but an Arab power. And we've already saw what we've done is we've shift as we look at the geopolitical world historical scene to look at the king of the north as somehow based in Europe, alright, and the king of the south a power down here.

That is a logical and in my view, the only conclusion we can come to when we look at the scripture coupled with the story that we can piece together in history to identify what does this mean? We've talked about the warring times between the king of the north and the king of the south through Antiochus and that period. Now we shift to a whole different period of time, two millennia later, and a world scene that still is focused on this part of the world, but now we've got a global impact, global powers that have shifted. And you cannot deny historically what we are dealing with as we look at this. And so we'll go to this one slide here that I put together that I think can kind of show you. If you look at the box down in the area of the Middle East with the mosque and the minaret on top of it and the arrow pointing toward the image up in the upper left of the woman riding the beast and representing a European-based power or Babylon, this comes out of Revelation 17.

What is being described here in Daniel 11:40 is the king of the south shall attack him, the king of the north, and the king of the north will come against him, the king of the south, like a whirlwind. And so in some way what we have described here is an effort by a power that is based in the regions once part of the king of the south and beyond making a push or an attack as some translations have it against that of the king of the north or a power that is that of the north that has evolved through history as well to become something different European-based in that way and it then retaliates. And that other arrow pointing out of let's say Europe comes down into the Middle East as what is described here in Daniel 11:40.

Daniel 11:41 Says, “He,” this power, we'll call it the beast, a large power that is described in Revelation 13, king of the north, “will enter the glorious land” which is interpreted to be the holy land and that today is the modern state of Israel, the Jewish state of Israel. “Many countries shall be overthrown, but these shall escape from His hand.” And it mentions “Edom, Moab, and the prominent people of Ammon.”

All right, now these three countries, Edom, Moab, and the prominent people of Ammon, we'll come back to in a moment. That takes us up to there. Why and how would we further corroborate this idea that an Islamic power coming out of this part of the world would attack or push at a European-based power? Watch my words very carefully as we look at it in the future context, a European-based power. It doesn't relegate it only to Europe, but a European-based power.

But why would we say that? Well, when we look at history, we can see that that indeed has happened more than once. In the year, bring up this slide, approximately 100 years, within 100 years, after the death of Muhammad, the founder of Islam, Arab armies came out of the Arabian Peninsula down here, and they swept across North Africa. They came through all this area, and they conquered these lands. That's the facts of history. In fact, they went all the way over here in North Africa, and off of our map here, they jumped across into Spain, and they conquered Spain. Have you ever heard of Moorish Spain? The Moors of Spain? That's talking about the Arab conquest. They have other names for it as well. And these armies went all the way up into what is today France. And in the year 732, less than 100 years from the time of Muhammad's death, they engage in a battle in France with a Christian army, and the Arabs are defeated. Their goal is to go as far as they can. All right? The Vikings came out of the north, and they went as far as they could. The Arabs came out of the south in their time, and they went as far as they could. But they hit their barrier in 732 at the Battle of Tours, and they were stopped by a Christian army.

A man named Charles Martel. He was the grandfather of Charlemagne. We've already studied Charlemagne.

But they get their act together, and they stop them. And that basically draws a line to the north as to how far they went. Otherwise, they would have conquered all of Europe, and it would have been a whole different story in history. And so, that could be interpreted as a push or as an attack by this power coming out of the south into the north. That doesn't end there. There are two other incursions in history by Arab armies coming out of the south in 1529 and in the year 1683. And they come out of this region, and they go up through what are the Balkan states of Europe. And they are intent on pushing into Europe from the east this time. And on both occasions, they are stopped at what is the site of Vienna today in Austria. And they are defeated there by, again, Christian armies of the Holy Roman Empire.

1529, 1683, and they are pushed back. Otherwise, they would have swept on through Europe. And again, they would be speaking Arabic in those countries today, and they would all be Muslim to the core, not just, you know, 51%, as many as some of them are, like France, maybe completely. They were stopped. Why? Well, we're dealing with spiritual forces here. What did we read in Daniel 10? What did we read in Daniel 10? A great battle between the Prince of Persia and Prince of Greece. And we read about the clash of powers at that level. And that what is played out on the charts of history have already been, in a sense, mapped out and are instigated by powers and principalities on high. And it flows along the patterns that Daniel was inspired to write down here in Daniel 11 of these attacks that have gone through history. So what do we say today that we're looking in the future at an attack coming out of the South as the king of the South against a European-based power? We are looking at this story as we can see it in history, not only from the time of the Seleucid Empire here, but also the subsequent Arab attacks into Europe. And when we look at where we are today, and even in our current world seen today, what do we see?

You know, I don't know how much you were paying attention last Thursday and Friday, Friday especially, but in the Netherlands, a group of Jewish sports enthusiasts were attacked on the streets of Amsterdam by Muslim people who hate the Jews because of what's going on in the Middle East and attack them, throwing them into the canals and beating them. And the state of Israel flew up their planes to evacuate their people. There had been a soccer match between an Israeli soccer club and a Dutch soccer club. And a group of Muslims in who live in the Netherlands, and there's a lot of them there, they hatched this plot to attack the Jews coming out of the soccer match, anti-Semitism. And that shocked. It was just a shocking thing, but it's one of many. Throughout Europe, Arabs from this part of the world have immigrated through the last number of decades to France, to the Netherlands, to the UK, to Germany as workers. They needed the workers in those areas. These people needed the jobs. And I go to Germany today, and one of the things I want to eat is what's called a durner kebab. Anybody ever had a durner kebab? It's a Turkish, kind of like gyros.

They slice it off, it's a little different. And the Turks have gotten little shops and little stands selling durner kebabs all through Europe. And it's a great thing, but they are there. They have gone for jobs, and not all of them have assimilated. And that's created some terrorist problems in recent years as well. The seeds are there for some type of a push or an attack in the future that will result in a retaliation on the part of this king of the north. So when we look at this and consider this fulfillment of what we read here in Daniel 11:40, all we have to do is look at history to understand that the reality, there will be some event that will trigger this. Now that's in the future. It could be energy related. It could be religiously motivated. Whenever it comes, it's going to be bigger than anything we've ever had. And it could be some type of a major terrorist attack.

If a nuclear Iran, if they achieve a nuclear weapon and they decide to drop something in this part of the world, that could have tremendous repercussions. Now this part of the world, today, they're not ready to do what this scene here of a retaliation from a European base power. They're not ready to do that. They don't have their act together politically, economically, militarily. What might happen to galvanize and cause that? Any number of things we could talk about beyond the scope of our class here today. But our narrative of this event has all this happening according to what I've sketched out. And I think that it is correct because of what we see in history. And when we come to this final system that will arise and trigger this event, and again, I want to say what happens in verse 40, whatever – put a star next to it in your Bibles, mark it in whatever color you want – purple, red, pink, green, chartreuse, or whatever it might be. It's a key verse. Because Daniel 11:40 triggers events of the time of the end. And I will say, as of today, we're not there yet. But when this event occurs, it triggers the events of the Tribulation and even specific time events that we will read about in chapter 12. It triggers them. And we begin this march toward what we will read about in the book of Revelation. And again, I'm going to say we are not there yet. And if you were to look at the political scene in Europe today, the world scene, a scoffer would say, you guys don't know what you're talking about. And if I were to be cowed by that, I would say, well, maybe we don't. But I'm not intimidated by that. I would say, well, you know what? This fact of history, this point of history shows that it doesn't take long for a power out of Europe to get their act together and to arm and to develop.

And with the world the way that it is today, it could be even quicker than it's been done in more recent history, such as the beginning of World War II. And a power could come about that would be based in Europe, but also be global. I think what we have to understand, and this is perhaps skewing a bit into broader understanding that we could label as speculative, this system with the picture of the woman riding the beast in Revelation 17 is called Babylon. And what is pictured in Revelation 17 and 18 is a global system. I say European-based because it's based in Europe, but I don't think that it's only going to be in Europe. I think that it will be powers beyond Europe into this final system called the King of the North here in Daniel's terminology, but Babylon in Revelation terminology and an obvious global political, religious, and economic powerhouse that the world, unlike anything the world has ever seen. And I think, and I'll conclude on this, we're not going to get through Daniel 11 today, we'll do that in the next class.

I'll conclude with this. I've said that Daniel 11:40 hasn't happened yet. We can talk about living in a Babylon today, a spiritual Babylon, and we need to be like Daniel to resist the cultural, religious, spiritual impulses of the world around us as we come out of the world and live like the Hasidim or a Maccabee, or those that did great things at the time of Antiochus and hold to the faith. And to do that, we've got to understand what the Bible is telling us in these verses and these prophecies here and in other places about this system of called Babylon to come. And I think that you will live to see it. And I think that my job is to teach you what to look for.

So that as you go on into your life from this point, grow and mature into adults, have your families and your children hold to your faith and yet have a realistic view of the world and know what the Bible prophecies show that you will be able to identify this system as it develops even further and resist it and not come under it because…

Revelation 18:4 Says, “Come out of her my people and do not be partaker of her sins.”

And I think that you will see that. That's what I think. And I think my job is to help you to understand and to detect it as it develops. That's why this is critically important. Well, in the class at that point and we'll finish Daniel 11. Next time won't take us that long. Famous last words.