The Beasts of Daniel 2, 7 and 8

We started doing two different series at the same time. We're doing the one on the Beatitudes, which we did last time, and now we're going to go over to the prophecy series. In the prophecy series, we started with, and we've given, two sermons in a Bible study, where we went through the first prophecy in the Bible that sets the foundation for all prophecies. What we're going through today, as we have in those two sermons in that Bible study, are just foundations. They're just...it's...when you look at these templates, then all the other prophecies are built off these templates. So if you know these first, you can make sense of things. Otherwise, there are certain prophecies I have no idea what they mean, if I don't have a template to build it off of. So we went through the first one, Genesis 3.15, which is the basis of all prophecy. Human beings were kicked out of Eden. Satan was now going to be their oppressor for a period of time only, because God is still God. And he let Satan have humanity for a period of time to influence them. And he was going to send someone who would take over Satan's position and then rule over the entire earth. And we showed how, if you look at certain prophecies that are built off of that, that Christ is coming and He comes twice. The first time to die is the sacrifice for humanity's sins, and the second time to set up God's kingdom on earth. That's the basis of all prophecy. That's what God's doing. And we just scratched the surface of that. But now we understand that. That's the basis. The second sermon in the Bible study was on how God has done that through a series of covenants He's made. There's 10 covenants entirely in this series of covenants He made. We only went through three of them. The covenant made with Abraham and what He promised that through His seed all nations on earth would be blessed. When you get into the New Testament in three different places, it says that seed is Jesus Christ. So we have what God did through Israel through all those centuries was to make sure this teenage girl is in Bethlehem exactly where she's supposed to be. It's just amazing. And so the Messiah comes into the world. And of course, His Second Coming is what we are proclaiming because the Church is to proclaim that Jesus is the Christ and He's coming back. So that defines who we are as the people of God. So we went through the Sinai covenant, which was made with Israel to carry out the promises made to Abraham. Then we went through the New Covenant, which was opened up to all people to be part of the New Covenant. Anybody that God calls can come and be part of the New Covenant, and that is carrying out the preparation for His Second Coming.

So now we're going to look at another template. We're just... those two things I wish I could have spent two more sermons just on the covenants. The covenant God made with David is all about the Messiah. They would come through His family. And so that covenant is very important. But we laid those two templates. That's what prophecy is all about, what God is doing. Now we're going to begin to look at some other templates. Now remember, templates don't have all the details. They're what you build off of. And I was thinking some of this gets a little complicated. I was going to build a PowerPoint for this. I went back and looked. I gave a PowerPoint on this subject a number of years ago. So some of you are going to remember this, especially the Muppet version of the fourth beast. Okay, you'll see that one. But this was done probably six, seven years ago. And where I went through this template of Daniel 2, Daniel 7, and Daniel 8. We're going to be going through a lot of information. It's not necessarily somehow that you memorize all this information. We're going to be going through a lot of history. The reason I want to go through this is so that the end you can say, ah, I see why the United Church of God teaches what it teaches. Because there's all kinds of ideas about prophecy out there. And by the way, we don't know everything there is about prophecy. Sometimes we get off and start speculating, and we tend to make fools of ourselves. That's the reason I work off of templates. Templates, and then I don't know all the details. But we know we can get an idea of what God is doing. So the first thing we're going to look at is the statue in the book of Daniel.

Okay, let's start with who is Daniel. We know the book of Daniel. Daniel was a Jew, and the Babylonians came into the country of Judah. They did not destroy it at first. No, they eventually destroyed the nation. They did it first. What they did is they took young people, most of them were teenagers, from the sort of wealthy family, the family, the royal families, the ones that they thought were the most educated, and they took them to Babylon. And the reason why is if you take that generation and you're brainwashing and you send them back, you will create a new society. So this was the purpose of bringing them there, was to teach them how to be Babylonians, you know, the best, the brightest, the smartest, and then send them back eventually to create a new society. That's not what happened. The Jews just would not buckle under, and eventually, of course, the Babylonians came in and destroyed their civilization. They invaded in 605 BC, and that's when they took Daniel. A few decades later, they marched in and destroyed Jerusalem and took them captive. They eventually would come back. That's part of our story. We're not going to get into it much, but they would eventually come back because we're going to be seeing what God does. And some of the things we're going to cover today we're going to have to go back to, to fill in details, but these are just the templates. We see what God does to make sure His plan is carried out, but now He's going to tell us what the world's going to do. And this is always in context, by the way, of Jerusalem. The Bible does not contain information about the many empires that the Chinese have had, or the Japanese have had, or other parts of the world. There have been major empires in Africa, major empires in South America. They're not mentioned in the Bible because the Bible is always in reference of Jerusalem. And that's because that's where Christ is coming back. So that's the reference point. It's not that He's ignoring the rest of history. God's just telling you, this is what's going to happen. It's what I'm doing, and it's what the world is doing, and it's what Satan is doing, and it always ends up at Jerusalem. So these empires we're going to talk about in this statue all have to do with their relationship with Jerusalem. He took the sacred objects Nebuchadnezzar did. He was the king of Babylon from the temple. Now they would come back 70 years later, but they were there in Babylon. And Daniel spent almost all his life, the rest of his life after this, in Babylon. He was there when the Persians came and destroyed Babylon. So he was there for a long time. He never went back. He never went back to Judea. But what he did do was be there as a government official and a faithful servant of God at the same time. And if you read the book of Daniel, you'll see how hard that was. To be a government official and be a faithful servant of God means, well, people try to kill you. You're thrown in a lion's den to be eaten alive. Your friends are thrown in a furnace that he burned up. This is what it was like. But God said, no, they brought you there because they wanted to propagandize you to go back, but I want you to be there to propagandize them. So he spent his whole life there. And I always say, that must have been lonely to be in this position. But all the Jews have been brought there at one point, or most of them, not all of them. And he was there to help lead them also. So this is Daniel. Now we have in chapter 2, we'll go there in a minute, Demignezzar had a dream. So let's go ahead and go there.

Daniel 2. I like the introduction to this. I'm going to read it because it tells us something about Nebuchadnezzar. He was known as a brilliant man, organized his father before he started it, and that he took over this empire and expanded it out.

And he was known as a great leader, who is also incredibly vain and can be incredibly ruthless. So verse 1 says, Now in the second year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams, and his spirit was so troubled that his sleep left him. Then the king gave the command to call the magicians, the astrologers, the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans to tell the king his dreams, so they came and stood before the king. The Chaldeans was a group of people.

It was the Babylonians and Chaldeans. It was two different tribes of people that had come together to form this empire, and the Chaldeans were sort of known as the intelligentsia of the empire. So he's bringing in all the people that are astrologers and sorcerers and different religions because it's a very pagan world. They had a lot of different religions. The king said to them, I have had a dream, and my spirit is anxious to know the dream. Then the Chaldeans spoke to the king in Aramaic, O king, live forever, tell your service the dream, and we will give you the interpretation.

Okay, tell us what it is. We'll tell you, you know, we'll explain it to you from the gods. The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, my decision is firm. If you do not make known the dream to me and its interpretation, you shall be cut in pieces, and your houses shall be made an ash heap. He says, no, no, no, that's not how this works. I know what you guys do. You're always tricking me. So if you can't tell me the dream, I'm going to kill you and burn your houses down. How's that? However, if you tell the dream and its interpretation, you shall receive for me gifts, rewards, and great honor.

Therefore, tell me the dream and its interpretation. The answered again and said, let the king tell his service the dream, and we will give you its interpretation. The king answered and said, I know for certain that you would gain time because you see my decisions firm. He says, you're trying to buy time here, so you could, you know, I'll give you what you want to know.

And then you'll just make up something. If you do not make known the dream to me, there's only one decree for you. For the words before me, fill the time, until the time has changed. Therefore, tell me the dream, and I shall know that you can give me its interpretation. So what continues is an argument here. Nobody can do this. So verse 13, so the decree went out, and they began killing the wise men, and they sought Daniel and his companions to kill them. Why would he do that? Well, because Daniel and the Jews that had come with him are considered some of the wise men of the empire.

So you're bringing in the best and the brightest of the entire empire to come in and help you rule. And Nebuchadnezzar decided, you know what? You're not worth anything. Just kill them all. I'll just make all the decisions, because they don't know. They tell me they're all brilliant. They all tell me they have connections with the gods. And so here's what's happening. This is what is happening. So the king threatened to kill his advisors.

Just a synopsis of what we've covered here. Daniel asked the king for some time to interpret the dream. I'm not going to read all that. We're going to just read the highlights here. And after all, Daniel prayed, God revealed the dream and its meaning to him. Now, here's what the dream he had. Like I said, this is an old slide.

How many remember this? Somebody have to remember this. Okay, a few do. I always thought that was a sort of corny picture of the thing, but, you know, hey, it was cheap. You know, sometimes you got to buy images for things like this. And this was a cheap one. Okay. The head was gold. The chest was silver. The belly and thighs were bronze. And the legs were made of iron. And the feet were iron mixed with clay.

So this is the dream. He sees this statue, this image. And it's made out of four different metals. Then a large rock struck and destroyed the statue and became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.

Daniel told King Nebuchadnezzar the dream and he interpreted it. So you can see why this is disturbing. You know, this dream makes no sense to Nebuchadnezzar. And he says, this dream has to have a meaning. So let's go to verse 28 now, because he's going to tell him what it means. Verse 28, there is a God in heaven because the king says, you can tell me? And he says, no, but there is a God in heaven that can tell you.

He says, this dream was given to you. So, and I'm here to interpret it for you. But there is a God in heaven who reveals secrets and he is made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days. Your dream and the visions of your head upon your bed were these. And so he goes on and he explains and tells him, this is what your dream was. Now, Nebuchadnezzar is really listening now because, wow, I haven't told anybody and this man has told me what my dream was. So down to verse 36. This is the dream. Now we will tell you the interpretation of it before the king. You, O king, are a king of kings. For the God of heaven has given you a kingdom, power, strength, and glory. Now, Babylon was under the rule of Satan. Babylon was not a empire, a nation that believed in God. Well, they believed in God because they believed in all the gods. This was not a righteous people. What the point here is, even under Satan's rule, when Satan does things, he only does it by permission of God. So God has given him permission to let you do this. Now, this is, God is still God. Now we wonder about, well, when will the kingdom of God be on earth? Well, the kingdom of God exists. It's never going away. It's just that God's let Satan have a little time here and he's let us have time to try to figure out, like we know what we're going to do. It's the problem with free choices, I always say. Free will says, you get to make choices. If you listen to me, it's better. If not, it's going to be a mess. Well, here we are. A long time after this, and it's a mess.

And so, he says, he's given you this. He's allowed you to have this.

And wherever the children of men dwell, verse 38, or the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, he has given them to your hand, has made you ruler over all, and you are the head of gold. So, this whole area throughout the Middle East, around Jerusalem, would now be given to this man. He says, you're going to be able to rule over this. But after you shall rise another kingdom, inferior to yours, then another, a third kingdom of bronze, shall rule over all the earth. Now, none of these kingdoms rule over all the earth, by the way. They did rule over all the area around Jerusalem. This is the center point of prophecy. And the fourth kingdom shall be as strong as iron, inasmuch as iron breaks in pieces and shatters everything. And like iron that crushes, that kingdom will break in pieces and crush all the others. Whereas you saw the feet and toes were partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, the kingdom shall be divided, yet the strength of iron shall be in it, just as you saw the iron mixed with ceramic clay. And as the toes of the feet were partly of iron and partly of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly fragile.

Now, it's very interesting here in verse—because he says in verse 43 that they won't mix together. We'll come back to that in a minute. So here we have what he saw.

So the king made Daniel, after hearing all this, and he always said, this rock comes down, destroys it. We read that. Okay? He destroys it. This is what the image is. And he says, that is going to be from God. And he's going to destroy all the kingdoms and set up one kingdom. And he believed him because why? Because he told him the dream. How in the world would he know his dream? So he knew this is something divine, something supernatural has happened. So let's look at—and we'll give you some history here. And I know history can get boring. So I'm going to go through it a little quickly. But try to get the picture. We're going to look at thousands of years of history here. So what we have is that this head of gold is Babylon. Babylonia was an empire that ruled from 626 to 539. It wasn't a long time. But Babylon rose at one point, then was taken over by the Assyrians, and then rose again and crushed the Assyrians, and then they became this empire. So this wasn't the first time they had been an empire. It was the first time there being a major player here in what's going to be happening in the future of what God is doing. About 600 years before Jesus was born—now, this is in Iraq today. In fact, they think they have found the ancient city of Babylon in Iraq, and they excavated some of the ruins of it. And it was the most powerful of all the kingdoms in the Middle East. It started out as a city-state, and then grew out and just kept conquering their neighbors until they conquered everybody. Oops, I went backwards here.

And of course, this is where Daniel was, and they were destroyed by Persia in 539. This is how big it was. You can see this is Egypt—don't want to get too far from this mic here—this is Egypt, Judah, Babylon. You can see these two lines—I don't know if you can in the back—that's the Tigris-Trufrates rivers. So this is a rock today. This is Turkey up here. So you start to see this area of Persia and media. That's Iran. So you start to get an outline of where this is today. That's a very large area. A population that wasn't near as dense as it is now, so it's not tens and tens of millions of people, but it's a very large area. And this was the Babylonian Empire, the head of gold.

Then you have the Persians take them, which is a fascinating story. I won't get into that, how the Persians actually—well, I'll just mention the walls of Babylon could not be breached. They were just too thick. The army was too good. They had enough provisions the last few years. The Persian army came up, tried to surround it, and they couldn't get into it. So they built a big canal, drained off the Euphrates River, so that there was a big party going on. Remember the big party where in the book of Daniel where the finger comes up and writes on the wall that you're being judged? Yeah, that was the night they drained the Euphrates. So in the middle of the night, the big bars that came down didn't go all the way down into the mud, so there was a space between the mud and the bottom of the bars. They just crawled under there, and the next morning they were being attacked by tens of thousands of soldiers, and they took it just like that. So that's how Babylon fell, the great country that could never fall. But this was Persia. Persia is a totally different type of administration of what they were doing. Babylon was, you pay us taxes and we're friends. You don't pay us taxes. We come in and we beat you up. The third time we come in and we move you out and make you slaves, so we can make money off of you. In other words, they were going to make money off of you no matter what. The Persians had a different idea. They set up this huge empire and actually administrate it. You had governors all over the place. You didn't let people just govern themselves. You had governors in charge. You had laws for all people. Now they all still got their own cultures and their own gods and goddesses, but basically they actually tried to create the first world's administrative empire.

So they also took Egypt and Libya. Libya in North Africa were two empires at the time. So Persia took three different empires. Babylon, Egypt, and Libya. Now you see how big Persia is. The problem is, it's real difficult to administrate. If you notice, Greece up here is not dark like the rest of this. That's because the Greeks just wouldn't give up. They kept fighting the Greeks. You've all heard of Thermopylae and Sparta and the 300. There was a lot more than 300. There were other Greeks there, too. The Spartans had good press. But this is Turkey. You see Egypt, Babylon, all of Mesopotamia, Persia, and Media, which is Iran. This was a huge... This goes clear over to India. This border here is the Indus River. So it goes clear over into India.

So this empire was huge, and nothing in the western half of the world had ever seen anything like this. King Cyrus comes along after a few decades, and they decided to do something different. Instead of taking all the peoples like the Babylonians did, taking them out of their country, mixing them up, and if you mix all the people up, they lose their identity, and now they become Babylonians, which is the idea. They decided, no, we've got a lot of people who have their own identity, and they started sending people back. And this is when the Jews, just like had been prophesied, began to go back, which is now fulfillment of the prophecies promised that they would be there for the Messiah. So what we've already covered, that template, is telling us what's happening when they send them back. So Cyrus sends them back. And it's interesting, because in Ezra 1, it mentions he sent out a decree. These scrolls, they're actually a stone. It's not a scroll. It's written on a round stone. There's numerous of these stones that they've found. And you know what it says? The gods have told us to send everybody back, so you're going back. Now what appears in Ezra—let's go to Ezra—is that God actually talked to him, scared him so much that he decided he was going to—just not the Jews—he's going to send everybody back. And so people went back to their homelands.

So see, we could go through—we did a series of Bible studies, remember, on Ezra and Nehemiah? Ezra and Nehemiah is all prophetic fulfillment about the coming Christ.

They're gone. They come back. They re-establish the temple. They re-establish Jerusalem, and they begin to recreate a nation, the nation of Judah.

That's all part of those first two templates we've gone through. It's also now part of the third template we're building is about these empires and what we see in Daniel 2. Let's look at verse 2 here. Thus says, Cyrus, king of Persia, all the kingdoms of the earth, the Lord God of heaven has given to me. Now notice what he said. The God of the Jews gave this to me. I mean, when God sent an angel to talk to him, it scared him. That God is not like all my other gods of stone. This God is real. And this God has told me to do this. And he has commanded me to build him a house in Jerusalem which is in Judah, who is among you of all his people. May his God be with him. He said, his God. It wasn't—it was their God, not his God. Cyrus didn't worship God. But you know what's interesting? We don't have time to go through it. Cyrus, it was predicted a man named Cyrus would come along and do this long before he was born. There's prophecy about that. Cyrus wasn't born yet. And there's a prophecy that he would come along in the Bible and he would then send the people home. That template. I think God's doing all these things. And now he's doing it through even these empires. He says, may his God be with him, let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel. He is God, which is in Jerusalem. And whoever is left in any place where he dwells, that the men of his place help him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, besides the free will offerings for the house of God, which is in Jerusalem. He says, so all of you that want to go back, go back now. Those who don't have to send money so that those people could rebuild Jerusalem and the temple.

And the temple, Solomon's temple had been just destroyed, torn down to the ground.

Once again, I'm not going to take the time to go through all the prophecies, like about Cyrus and so forth, but you can see these things. Yes, God is making sure no matter what... you know, Satan must have thought he won. I've taken them out of the land. The Messiah can't come. And then Cyrus says, I gotta send you back. Your God told me to and you're going back. And he sends it back. And that's the story of Ezra and the Amiah in the Scripture. So here we have what God's doing through even the Persian Empire.

So even the vessels... this is Ezra 6-8, which actually says basically what we just read here. The vessels taken by King Nebuchadnezzar Babylon were returned. All the things they needed to carry out the sacrifices in the temple were sent back with them.

So in 457, King Artaxerxes of Persia sent Ezra to Judah, as we've just seen the beginning of that here, to start building the tabernacle, Jerusalem in the tabernacle. The Amiah was actually the governor, and he was sent to do the same thing. He was there from 444 to 430. Built the walls of Jerusalem. So I don't want to get too much into this because I don't want to drag you into so much detail. You miss what's, you know, the importance of what we're talking about. So we know from what we read in Daniel that this dream represents four different kingdoms. First one is Babylon. The second one is Medo-Persia. They would conquer each other, but they would also each absorb some of what the other one was. You know, it's one statue because each one begins to form what the other one was. As you watch this, as you go through this, it's very interesting that you can historically begin to say Western civilization, the seeds of Western civilization were started in Babylon. Persia brought in all this Eastern, I mean, Eastern religions, Eastern thoughts, and so forth. So it was different, and it mixed together. Silver is lesser value than gold. So in some ways, Persia would not be as glorious, if you will, as Babylon was. They were much larger. They had a much better system of governance as far as they could actually have an administrative system, but they would less. They'd eventually be conquered by Greece. Greece lasted a little longer than Babylon did, from 332 to 63 BC. Now this is that bronze part of that statue. Alexander the Great conquers Persia. Understand, when I say he conquers Persia, he doesn't set up, he doesn't conquer it and rule over it the way we think he would. He didn't have enough men. He had a small army, and he took on this huge empire and destroyed army after army until he got to India. Every major city he would take, he would simply leave behind some generals or some officers and a few men that teach him how to be Greek.

We're going to teach you how to be civilized. We're going to teach you how to be Greek. So it's an empire through culture. We accept all cultures, but Greek has to be the dominant culture.

He actually got up to the Indus River and his army revolted. It's estimated they only had about 30,000 men. They were fighting armies, riding elephants. And they were like, we just want to go home. And so they headed back, and he died along the way. He was only his early 30s. He didn't live very long. So this is a whole different kind of empire. It's an empire based on a certain culture. Plato, Socrates, music, art. It's just totally different. So you can see how big it is, and yet it really isn't. It's little bits and pieces. Egypt would have great influence from the Greeks because he built a city there named after himself called Alexandria.

And Alexandria, Egypt, became the philosophical center of the Roman Empire at one time, bigger than Athens, teaching Greek philosophy. So the influence of Greece is in thought, in culture, over this huge area where it got scattered all over. In fact, most of here, what we call Turkey today, most of that was Greek. There was the Greeks that lived there until the Turks came in and took it over. It was a mixture of people, but the Greeks were dominant. So he spread this Greek culture. It's called Hellenization. The Greek word for themselves back then was Helenes. So the Hellenization culture, language, religion, was spread all over the place. This brought people together in a different way. They may have different governments, but they were brought together under a singular culture. Now, this is going to be important. It's something we're going to talk about in the Bible study. Like I said, I'm covering a huge amount of information I know. Don't try to memorize all of it. Just understand the story flow. You know, when I teach at ABC, sometimes I tell them, just understand the story flow. Because Daniel 2 is what? Just one chapter, and all this actually happened. We understand Daniel 2 because of this. This is why we make the decisions we do. He said there's four empires, and one will repeat right after the next one, until there's one that exists when the Messiah comes.

And we know that four empires have existed. History tells us this. If you were alive when that prophecy was told, it would mean nothing except, oh, Nebuchadnezzar is the first of four empires. That's all you would know. You wouldn't know the name of them. You wouldn't know who they were. You wouldn't know anything about their culture. Daniel didn't know anything about any of this except there's four empires. The Messiah comes at the time of the fourth one, and you're the first one. That's all Daniel knew until later, we'll see. A few other things were revealed to him. But that's all he knew when he told Nebuchadnezzar what was going on. See, you and I know so much, and this is why we come to our conclusions. This is why when people say, well, we'll get to that. I don't want to get ahead of myself here. So you have four generals that emerge after his death, and they divide his empire up into four parts. Egypt is the Ptolemies. They would rule for hundreds of years. The most famous of the Ptolemies was Cleopatra. So she was a Greek, and she ruled, and two Roman emperors were totally enamored by her. A brilliant woman. And she ruled over the Egyptians and was accepted by the Egyptians as a ruler, as her family had been for centuries. Syria was the Seleucids. Now, this is important in Jewish history and in some of the prophecies we're going to talk about later, because these two groups, led by Greek generals for a couple of generations, fought each other constantly. Now, if you're in Egypt and the others in Syria, just think of a map. What's between Egypt and Syria? Israel. So they fought across that land over and over. They still will find huge hordes of Greek coins and Greek artifacts all through Israel. You know, you can't dig any place without finding Greek stuff all over the place, because the two armies were marching back and forth across each other, fighting each other all the time. There was also Macedonia, which is northern Greece. Greece and northern Greece had a... because Greece would have been part of that... they had a Greek ruler. And Pergamum, which is modern-day Turkey. Pergamum is in the book of Revelation. There was a church there, right? Well, once again, what is now modern-day Turkey was ruled over by Greeks for a long, long time. So you look at this and you say, okay, so it divides into four. Well, that doesn't make it very strong. But these Ptolemies and Seleucids fighting each other. When we talk about the abomination of desolation, we actually have to come back to this. So I lay these little things. I'll pull these same slides up so we can remember what we're talking about. And from 175 to 163 BC, a Seleucid ruler, Antiochus Epiphanes IV, took over Judea and forced them to give up their religion. And he killed them by the thousands.

If you had a Torah, you would be killed. If you circumcised your son on the eighth day, they would murder the child and make the mother carry the dead baby around her neck on a rope.

It was just horrible as they tried to destroy the Jewish people. Why? Why would the Greeks hate them?

Well, remember, who has to be there for the Messiah to be born? And the Greeks aren't part of God's kingdom. They're part of what? Satan's kingdom. As we now go through these templates, you're going to see warfare between what God is doing and what Satan's doing. And so here we see a time when Satan tried to destroy those people. You wonder why sometimes the Jews are so paranoid? Because their whole history is people trying to kill them off. That's, you know, with the latest attack by Hamas, I saw an interview with one of the officers, and he said, at first we just thought, oh, it's another terrorist attack. They've come across, killed a couple people, and kidnapped a couple people. And then they saw what was happening. And he got there, and he, I think it was eight days, he was every day, all day and all night, he was in battle. He was in combat all this period of time. He said, because I realized something, if we didn't stop this now and Hezbollah crossed the border in probably six, eight days, we would be fighting in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Because it's not a big country. And he said, we realize we could be destroyed as a nation. We could. You think, who would think that way?

Thousands of years of being treated this way causes them to think that way. In other words, we'll bring down civilization if we have to, but we will never be wiped out again. That's their mindset. Here you see the battle between Satan and God, the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Satan is having a battle here so that the Messiah can won't show up. Now, you wouldn't know that if you didn't know all the covenants we went through that God's made to carry out his plan. So what he does is terrible. I have some Roman coins. I need to get a Greek coin. If I can find one with Antigua's epiphanies that I can afford, which I probably can't. I'll buy one someday just so I can show it.

So he desecrates the Jewish temple. He sacrifices a pig on the altar of the Greek God Zeus. And a Jewish priest named Judas Maccabeus leads a revolt, and they actually overthrow the Greeks. And Judah becomes an independent nation, which it hadn't been for a long, long time.

This is what Hanukkah is all about. Hanukkah is the celebration of them overthrowing the Greeks. So now we have this intersection between God's kingdom and the kingdom. I mean, Babylon, right, took the Jews. The Greeks tried—the Persians let them go back. The Greeks tried to kill them, destroy them as a people. This is the war between the two kingdoms.

Okay, so now we have the belly and the thigh, which represents the kingdom of Greece.

And bronze, lesser value than silver. But now we have a fourth beast that he described.

And Greece—now, as far as we're going to see here in the Bible study, Persia and Greece show up again in prophecies. We get all kinds of more information about Babylon, Persia, and Greece. But the information we get about the fourth one, it doesn't mention it by name. It just says it's iron. Iron. And it crushes nations. So this is Rome, 63 BC to 476. Now, I say 476. That's the Western Empire. We'll have to discuss a little bit about the Eastern Empire at some point, because Rome wasn't erased in 476. Not the Roman Empire, just the city of Rome. The Roman Empire actually continued.

Okay, I'm going to throw out a lot more history here, but just think about the overview.

63 BC.

Judah is now a free nation. The Ptolemies are basically over Egypt. The other kingdoms of Greece are beginning to disintegrate and fall apart. So the Greek Empire is just right for the picking. It really isn't even an empire anymore. It's just in pieces.

And the Roman General Pompey conquers Jerusalem. And suddenly the Jews find themselves under the control of another empire. It's the fourth in the list. Every one of them interact with, specifically, the Jews, because it was the Assyrians that took the ten tribes out into captivity, and they lost where they were and just scattered all over the place. But God had to make sure the senses of David were right there at that point. And on March 1544 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated by Brutus and Cassius, who fled to the east. As I always say at ABC, I just love Latin names. I mean, my name is Maximus Brutus. I mean, that's just great, you know. I just...

Pity means small. There's probably no Latin name that means small, okay?

Two years later, Octavian and Mark Anthony defeat Brutus and Cassius in the Battle of Philippi. Mark Anthony was another one seduced by Cleopatra. She had already seduced Julius Caesar, now Mark Anthony, and he ends up losing the empire because he won't give her up.

Fascinating woman. Because she knew power politics, I can tell you that, and she knew how to use Egypt. See, we don't understand. Egypt was the breadbasket of the Mediterranean. The Nile River could fertilize a lot bigger area that's fertilized now. They could feed the Roman Empire with wheat. That's why everybody wanted the Nile. It's because wheat.

And you look at the Nile now, and you look at the desert, you know, and it's like, why does everybody want Egypt? Then everybody wanted Egypt. And it's because they grew wheat. So, you know, topography changes, climate changes, and things that they just change over the years. But that's one of the reasons this was so important.

So, we're just going through this piece by piece. 37 BC here, the Great was appointed King of Judah, Judea by Octavian and Mark Anthony. So, now the Romans are chopping up the Middle East, and the Roman Empire is really now, really starting to get steam.

Octavian would become the first real emperor of the Roman Empire. He'd change his name to Augustus. So, they now pick Herod the Great and say, Judea is yours. Now, he's not a Jew.

He's a descendant of Esau. And he's really, he's brutal, and he's once again a genius. He did incredible architectural wonders. They still can't figure out entirely how he built the Caesarea. He built a dike there so that ships could come in, harbor. He built an artificial harbor, and the concrete still stand today. You can't make concrete today that would last 2,000 years. But he did. He built the fortress of Masada. He remodeled Zerubbabel's temple. The temple Jesus went in was really remodeled in the working of Herod.

So, now you have the Romans at play here, and they put their ruler over. They wanted to have a local ruler wherever they could. They ended up with Pontius Pilate because the Jews kept rioting.

They just didn't like the Romans, and they rioted all the time, so they sent in a legion with a governor. No governor wanted to go there. If you were sent to Judea as the governor, it meant your political career was over. Because that was the armpit of the Roman Empire. Not because it was a beautiful place, but because it was a beautiful place. But that's because the people just kept rioting. They just wouldn't accept Rome. So, Herod the Great began to refurbish the temple. I mentioned that. Now, Jesus comes along. The four empires are interacting with the Jews, and God keeps doing something with them, in spite of what the four empires are doing. And Jesus shows up, just like He's supposed to, just exactly what the people are doing. Jesus shows up, just like He's supposed to, just exactly when and where He's supposed to.

Of course, Jesus was crucified by the governor of Judea, upon Jesus' pilot. Three days and three nights later, He's resurrected. So, the two plans, Satan's plan isn't working exactly like he wanted it to, because each empire ended up collapsing in chaos. No matter what he does, it ends up in chaos. And God just kept doing His plan, in spite of everything He did. See, that's the prophecy we forget about. It's God's always doing something, and we get to be part of what He's doing.

So, in 70 AD, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.

Over time, the Roman Empire was weak, weakened, due to conflict within its borders. You read Civil War all the time. Plus, the Germanic tribes came across and began to take it. And the Western Empire fell in 476. Man, we just jumped through over a thousand years of history.

But if you can understand how these four empires existed, one eventually was taken over by the next, and each one eventually collapsed, Daniel 2 makes sense. Because, remember, though, the fourth empire exists when the Messiah comes the second time. Because the Messiah destroys it. So, we're not done with the story yet.

The legs were made of iron. The feet, a mixture of both iron and clay.

So, this is the strongest of the empires. This is the empire with the most power, the most strength.

And, as it said, as we read, they would smash tribes and nations, crush them with the power that they would have. And, of course, Rome was the greatest military power of the world had ever known until modern times.

Now, remember, notice that the fourth kingdom is divided into two legs. The Roman Empire split in two.

Constantine had two capitals, one in Rome, one in Constantinople, which is modern-day Istanbul. Two capitals. Because the Roman Empire got so big, it was really hard to administer all of it. So, they administered the East from one and the West from one, and they got it together. But, in 476, the Western Empire fell and was overrun by Germanic tribes. The Eastern Empire lasted until 1453, not long before Columbus stumbled upon, you know, the—what was it? What island did he land? I forget what it is. You know, just not long, just a few decades before he showed up, the Eastern Empire fell. And what's happened if you look at the history of Europe going clear back to Justinian, which is in the 500s, there have been attempt after attempt after attempt to reconstruct the Roman Empire. Because if they don't have the Roman Empire, guess what they all do? They all fight against each other.

They just have wars. Europe has been nothing but wars against each other. Under the Roman Empire, they all sort of got along.

So if they could reconstruct that and bring the East and West back together, the two legs. The West is Germany and France, Spain, Italy. East is like Poland, Hungary.

If we could—if they could just get together, those two halves. And of course, there's been an attempt to do that today in the European Union, in the NATO, right? Bring us all back together, and then we won't fight each other. And there has been a war in among the basic components of the old Roman Empire since 1945.

That's why there's such fear in Europe today. They're watching the chaos. The American Empire is falling, and they're alone. As the American Empire falls, they're alone. In a world that there's all kinds of powers—India, China, Russia—all these powers, huge nations.

I bring this out because it says that at the end time when the Messiah comes, He destroys what? The fourth empire.

So that fourth empire has always tried to re-come back together. It never has, but it's going to. And it says there'll be ten kings. Ten kings. Let's go back to Daniel and read that again.

He says, verse 41 of Daniel 2, Where as you saw the feet and toes partly of potters, clay, and partly of iron, The kingdom shall be divided, yet the strength of the iron shall be in it, Just as you saw the iron mixed with ceramic clay. And as the toes of the feet were partly iron and partly clay, So the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly fragile. Now verse 43. I stopped here. As you saw iron mixed with ceramic clay, They will mingle with the seed of men, but they will not adhere to one another, Just as iron does not mix with clay. I remember Charles de Gaulle was really insulted one time when someone said he was a Celtic. You know, the original French people were Celtic. And he is not. He's a Frank. Which is Germanic. So the French today still argue over who they are. Well, they're a mixture of the two, so you can't separate them. If they do genetic testing, they can't separate them. Well, you're Celtic and you're Frank. Okay? That's what you are. But they argue over that.

But you are European. The one thing that can unite them is we're European. We stand together as the remnants of the Roman Empire. They don't say that, but it's the only time they didn't kill each other.

Was Pax Roman, Roman peace.

And he says, And in the days of these kings, these ten kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, and the kingdom shall not be left to other people. And it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. And that's what that stone is that he cuts out. But there is coming a time, by putting these templates on top of each other, there's a coming a time when ten nations, ten groups of people, will come together based in the remnants of the Roman Empire. Remember, the Roman Empire wasn't just Europe. It stretched all the way down through the Middle East. I don't know how that's going to come together, but ten nations are coming together. Out of that! And you say, why can you say that? Obviously, it's China. No, it's not.

Obviously, it's this. No, it's not.

Why would you say that? Because of this.

This template is how we define it. What's going to happen. So, the Kingdom will be a mixture of people, and they'll never be totally united. Ever. In fact, when we get into the Beast of Revelation 13 in a couple of months, it can't last very long either because they all start arguing with each other. It ends up in chaos. It doesn't last but three and a half years. The everlasting Kingdom is God's part of the prophecies. Now we're back to all the... We're back to the new covenant, the Sinai covenant, we're back to the Abrahamic covenant, we're back to all the covenants, and we're back to Genesis 3.15.

Because this is what happens to the statue. The stone was cut out, not by human hands, struck the statue on the feet of iron and clay, and broke it in pieces. Now notice, it strikes these kingdoms, because they're all still sort of one. There's a oneness to all this. And yet they're quite different from each other and otherwise. But they're all sort of one. Each leads to the next, to the next, to the next. But it's in the days of this time when you have 10 kings, it's an extension of the Roman Empire, but it doesn't quite mix together.

He said, that's when God sends Christ back the second time. The rest of the statue broke into pieces, and what remained was carried away with the wind. Everything that was Babylon and Persia and Greece and Rome will be gone, because God's kingdom will be on the earth. Then the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain that fills the whole earth. That's the kingdom of God that we celebrate every year at the Feast of Tabernacles.

We celebrate this every year at the Feast of Tabernacles. And it's more powerful than any other kingdom.

And it will endure forever.

I'm going to stop there.

So, that's a lot of information. But this is the template we have used ever since I was a child.

And we get off all over the place. Well, the Beast powers Germany. No, it's not. It's ten nations. They may be one of the ten nations. The Beast powers this. No, it's not. It's ten nations. They come together, and yeah, these different nations may be part of it. I'm certain more and more Poland is really going to be an important part of it. But I don't know, because Poland may get wiped out next month by Russia. Who knows? But when you're on pace to be the fourth largest military with some of the best equipment in the world within the next five years, that's what they're trying to do. They're literally trying to become the fourth largest military with the best equipment in the whole world, Poland is.

Because they're that afraid of Russia. And they and other Eastern European nations that used to be part of the Roman Empire and Western European nations, and they can't even get along in religion. Remember, Eastern Europe is all Orthodox, and Western Europe is all Catholic. And they all think each other is really wrong. In fact, they had excommunicated each other for a thousand years over the definition of the Trinity, condemning each other to purgatory. And it's only been in the last 40, 50 years that they said, ah, it's not that big a deal. Well, what happened to all the other folks you put in purgatory? Did they all get out of purgatory now?

So they're both... They have their differences. They're big differences. But they all agree one thing. We're European. We're European. Because that's the only way we'll have peace, is when we all see each other as European. This is the template. Now, that doesn't answer all your questions, does it? No, but everything we build, you'll see, comes off of this in terms of the end time. And it always goes back to the end time. And it always goes back, also, what God's doing. Because whatever Satan does, God eventually messes it up. Well, whatever he does turns into chaos. Okay. Well, I just wanted to cover that much now. That's a lot, the digest. And then we'll take a break, about a 15-minute break. Then we'll get together, and I want to go through Daniel 7. And it's not as detailed. But we'll fill in details. Daniel 7 fills in all kinds of details from this. Which when we months from now get to Revelation 13, it all fits together because the templates are put on top of each other.