Beasts of Daniel 2 and 7, Part 2

We'll go through a review of Daniel 7. And then, if we hopefully have some time, we can go through some questions here. Daniel 7 isn't quite as in-depth as, well, it can be, depending how much time we put into it, as Daniel 2. Understanding Daniel 2 as our template helps us understand Daniel 7. If you don't put them together, you will come up with all kinds of explanations for Daniel 7. And what we do is, since we start with this as our foundation, we build on top of that. And that's our viewpoint of the Scripture. We're always looking at how to build off of what is a foundational concept.

So if Daniel 2 is our foundational concept, then we will come to very specific conclusions about Daniel 7. So let's go to Daniel 7. So 50 years after the Democrat Institute's dream, we have a vision of our great beast from the sea in Daniel 7.

You have to realize, this means that when Daniel receives this vision, he's not a young man. When Daniel was thrown in the lines again, he was not a young man. The time period between the first part of Daniel and the last part of Daniel is a long time period that he spent living among the Babylonians and eventually the Persians.

And when we go through this, we'll see that there's a line with eagle springs, a bear, a leopard, and a terrifying, powerful beast. So here's where we begin with in Daniel 7. In the first year of Belshazzar, King of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions passed through his mind as he was lying in his bed. And he wrote down the substance of his dream. Daniel said, "... my vision at night I looked and beforming with four winds of heaven, turning up the sea for a great beast.

Each difference in the others came up out of the sea." Now, once again, if Daniel 2 is our template, then what we're going to be looking at is four kingdoms. Look at Daniel 7. Well, we just read 1-4 says, "...

the first was like a lion and eagle's wings. I'd watched as the wings were plucked off or plucked off. It was lifted up and the earth was made to stand on two feet like a man, and the answer was given to it." And it goes on and talks about the others. Let's look at verse 17. Remember, you know, I'm giving you an assumption here. Let's go back before I give you the assumption. Always look for the Bible to give its own interpretation, okay?

So to show you that I just haven't made an assumption here, let's look at verse 17. This is the middle of the explanation. Those great beasts, which are four, are four kings which rise out of the earth. Or four kingdoms that rise out of the earth. So once again, you know, when we look at these animals, we say, okay, what do these animals mean? They can mean anything. Except in the explanation itself, it says, okay, these are four kings or four kingdoms that we're going to look at.

And the first one is a lion. Okay, the first one is a lion. We're back to the concept. If we go through the four kingdoms of Daniel 2, and these are the same kingdoms, and we're looking at the head of gold, which is Babylon, which is now called a lion. So we have the four beasts, a lion with eagle's wings. Now what's very interesting is if you go to Jeremiah 4, verse 7, and Jeremiah 50, verse 44, Babylon is compared to Helion. And in Deuter 17, 3, and in verse 12, it's compared to an eagle.

So the Bible refers to Babylon both as a lion and an eagle, and here we have the description of this kingdom, which is a lion with eagle's wings. This tells us something a little bit about the Babylonian kingdom. It was the head of gold. It's known as a majestic kingdom.

And to live in Babylon at that time period, compared to the rest of the world, known world except for Egypt, it was outstanding. There was nothing like it. It'd be like going from a semi-primitive state into the most modern place. It'd be like someone living in a second world country or a third world country suddenly walking down the streets of Manhattan. So in comparison to the world that lived in, or that they lived in, it was just unbelievable. And of course we know that God was directly involved with those first stages of the Babylonian empire because of its interaction with Judah. What's very interesting, though, is how the Babylonians represented themselves.

The Babylonians, every country has symbols of itself. Ours is an eagle, right? Here's how the Babylonians represented themselves. The head of a man owned the body of a lion with eagle's wings. That's how they represented themselves. A lion with eagle's wings. So it's interesting that we have a description here of this first beast which perfectly fits not only a description of the empire of Babylon, but how they represented themselves. It's also very interesting when we go through Daniel 2, what we look at are these four empires and how they appear. What appears gold? What appears silver? What appears bronze? What appears strong? What appears gold? When we go through here, we're going to find out sort of the character of these empires.

So you have an empire that is majestic, and yet lions are brutal animals. Lions are brutal animals. There's a brutality to the Babylonians and how they rained over people and what they did. Now, Daniel 7, verse 5 says that there was before me a second beast, which looked like a bear, was raised up on its side and had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth, and it was told, Get up and eat your fill of flesh.

Now, I've seen attempts to take Daniel 7 and make that a modern prophecy. And in the modern prophecy, guess what country is the bear? Soviet Union. Because the Soviet Union was called the Russian bear until the Soviet Union collapsed and there was no longer a Russian bear. I remember reading a commentary years ago that said, Daniel 7 is all about the modern world and it's all about what's going on right now, and Russia is the bear.

I forget who the other was. I think the lion was the English empire. The British lion, it was called. But that's taking us way out of the context. Remember, we always talk about what did it mean originally to its original audience?

Then we have to figure out what it means throughout history. So, if we start with Babylon and we start with Daniel 2 as our template, it gets sort of hard to take this now and just make it a modern prophecy. It leads into the modern times, but it doesn't start there. Now, if we have the second empire that came along, of course, which was the Mediopeusian empire, we have the four beasts and we have the bear. Now, it's interesting this bear was raised on one side.

There is an attempt to, and I don't know how this is just taking the Scripture more than what it means or understanding something rather profound in the Scripture. This bear is actually sort of leading up on one side because it shows that there are two parts to it, and one part is dominant over the other.

Because Persia was dominant over media, whether that's the explanation, I don't know. What is important is it had three ribs in its mouth, which illustrates the three major empires. Remember, I talked about that when I talked about Daniel 2, that when we looked at the map of what Persia conquered, it conquered three great empires, the Babylonian empire, the Egyptian empire, and the Lydian empire, which was the North African empire. So, it conquered three empires. And so, it has three ribs in its mouth, three things that is devouring.

The bear was commanded to devour much flesh. Up until this time, the world had never seen an empire in sheer size and numbers of people and sheer territory as the Persian empire. It was absolutely enormous. I mean, the Greeks could put 50,000 men in the field, and that was the entire Greek empire. They could put together...some estimates are that there are times when they had as many as a million men in the field. They were a huge empire. It's interesting that the Romans never took them.

There's times they moved over that direction, and it always got to be such a bloodbath. It was like, oh, just leave them alone. And they made a pact with them, but they never cloaked them. So, here we have their conquering of these three major empires. Then we move into the next one, a beast, in Daniel 7-6. After that, I looked at another beast, and it looked like a leopard.

It had four wings like of a bird, a beast at four heads, and it was given authority to rule. So, once again, we're into the Greek empire. Now, someone asked me after services, why is this sometimes called the Macedonian Greek empire? Well, the reason why is the Macedonians were people related to the Greeks who lived north of Greece in Macedonia. King Philip, who ruled over Macedonia, got tired of the fact that they were always fighting wars with the Greeks. The Greeks were always fighting wars with each other.

The Greeks could never be unified. They just fought each other all the time. Sparta fought Thessalonica. Thessalonica fought Athens, and Athens fought Corinth, and they just fought each other all the time. So, they invaded and conquered Greece. And then said, okay, boys, we're all going to play together now. So, Alexander the Great was actually a Macedonian. He wasn't from Greek proper. He was a Macedonian. And some of the Greek city-states would not send troops with him. He was like, you're not full-blooded Greek, so we're not going to send troops with you. So, when he went to war, his army was a Macedonian Greek army. Some Greeks didn't go. But what happened over time, the Greek culture was so dominant that the Macedonian culture and Greek culture were the same thing.

So it became known as the Greek Empire. But to be exactly proper with it, it's the Macedonian Greek Empire. But we had the Greeks, of course. We looked how they followed. Well, if we look at this template and we follow that this prophecy is telling us the same thing, then what it's telling us is some of the character of the Greek Empire. Now, when we look at the Greek Empire, the leopard here has four heads, four wings, and of course it represents Greece. The leopard is what?

You remember the bear is so lumbering? We have this majesty of a lion with eagle's wings. Well, the one thing about Persia, it was lumbering. And the reason why is they set up a system to try to actually govern every little province directly from the capital. It was organized much like the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire took a lot of the way it did things actually from the Persian Empire. And so it tried to actually organize everything so that the king had his figure in everybody's pot.

Every province directly went back to the king. Nothing could get done except that the king did it by short decree. The law of the beings of the Persians. When the king said something, it became law. Absolute law. He spoke as a divine being. It was the only way they could get anything done. So it was a lumbering thing. It took forever to get their army someplace because it was so huge. And what they did is they organized their army by different nationalities.

So this division would be all people made up for one part of the empire. This division would be made up for a different part of the empire. So all these different divisions. So one division may be nothing but archers. The next division may be nothing but spearmint. The next division may be nothing but hoplites. Well, they didn't have hoplites like the Greeks, but infantrymen. Depending on where you came from. Now that gave them enormous strength because wherever they went, they had somebody who could fight any kind of battle you could think of.

The great weakness was, how do you govern this thing? How do you general this diverse army on the battlefield? That's why the Greeks beat them. Because the Greeks were a smaller fighting force, but they did everything as a unit. Plus they had armor plating that the Persians didn't have. So the Greeks did everything fast. Alexander the Great went to every opponent because of the phalanx. They simply locked their shields together. They all had heavy armor on.

Locked their shields together, had twenty foot spheres, and marched forward. Now I want you to think about, you're watching five thousand guys come at you. All you can see is legs underneath all this marching armor.

Marching armor. And the spears go out twenty feet in front. And they went three or four rows of these. So there would be spears at twenty feet, at seventeen feet, at fifteen feet, and twelve feet. Now how in the world are you going to get through that? And they literally would just run over. It was a bulldozer approach, and it was fast. They would run into battle. And they would just trample. More guys would get killed by trampling than anything else, and they would just run through. So the speed at which he conquered the world was so fast, no one had seen anything like it. Because of that, by the way, they did not set up governments. The Greeks never had enough people to set up governments wherever they went. So what they did was they set up cultural centers. We'll teach you how to have architecture and math, and we'll teach you how to do sculpture and how to read Greek. So their idea was, okay, we can't set up a government. We're not big enough. Greece was a small country. So what we'll do is we'll just convert you to our culture. So that's why every place they went, they tried to create a singular culture, which of course didn't work. But it did spread Greek culture throughout the world. There was somebody who knew Greek, who bought into Greek. And sometimes, whole little areas, towns, cities, by the Greek, Alexandria, Egypt, became a Greek city as Greek as Athens. Because when the Greeks conquered there, they became a Greek city. So the speed at which they did things, you have a leopard with wings, and you have four heads. Remember I talked about how the Greek Empire got divided into four parts. So now we have this animal with four different heads. So once again, this fits exactly into what we were looking at in terms of the Daniel 2. We simply put them together, and now we're getting more information that would historically prove out. Verse 7 of chapter 7 says, And after that, in my vision, at night I looked, and therefore before me was a fourth beast, terrifying and frightening and very powerful. He had large iron teeth, now iron, remember that statue had iron, iron teeth, it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. It was different from all of the former beasts that had ten horns.

I was thinking about the horns there before me was another horn, a little horn, which came up among them. And three of the first words were uprooted before it. The sword had eyes like the eyes of a human being and a mouth that spoke boastfully. So now we have a description of something that's nothing like the other three, and that this one is iron. It's like a machine. It just eats up its enemies and tramples underfoot what was left.

It's a perfect description of what the Roman Empire did. It was the most powerful military force for hundreds of years because of technology and training. They trained their soldiers like the other soldiers had been trained to fight as units. And when the battle broke up in the groups, they still fought as little groups, but they were also individually trained how to fight.

Plus, they had a technology that nobody else has ever done. They could fight very mobile war. They could fight siege war. They invented, you see, gatling guns. They had gatling guns. I mean, it didn't have gunpowder, but it had arrows in it. It would spin around and shoot arrows.

Or shoot an arrow that weighed maybe 60 pounds and three feet long. So it takes out three or four guys as it goes.

The machinery they came up with was amazing. And so for hundreds of years, they continued to conquer all through the Mediterranean and up into Europe.

And so here we have the Roman Empire.

Now, my wife always says when I do these things, I show beasts that are too scary for the kids.

I said, well, I thought he didn't. I found a beast that looks like a muppet.

It's just a muppet beast. You know, it's not too scary.

So we have the four beasts. Daniel had a vision of a terrifying beast with ten horns and iron teeth. Now, we're going to have to look at this a little more in detail in a minute.

The beast's ten horns are ten kings that would rise from this kingdom.

So, okay, let's look at where this is coming from. Okay, so let's go back to verse nine.

We've read verse eight, verse nine.

I watched... well, I tell you what, before we go there, let's go to verse 19.

I wish to know the truth about the fourth beast, which was different than the others. This is verse 19 of chapter seven.

Which was different than the others, exceedingly dreadful, had its teeth of iron and nails of bronze, which devoured broken pieces and traveled the residue with its feet.

And the ten horns were on its head.

And the other horn which came up before them, the three, fell, namely the horn which had the eyes and a mouth which spoke pompous words, whose appearance was greater than his fellow's.

So he says, I want to know about this beast. So we have a beast that's got ten horns and this iron, and its little horn comes up.

We know about in verse 21.

Well, before I go there, I'm trying to think of how to get through all this here. Three horns would be uprooted.

Eventually it's going to be thrown into the fire. Okay. And then we go to this everlasting kingdom again. So we're going to go through what we're going to end up with the great stone.

Just like Daniel chapter 2. So let's go to verse 13 now.

Now as watching the night visions, if you hold one like the son of man, come with the cause of heaven. He came to the ancient of days, and they brought him before him. And then to him was given the divinity and glory in a kingdom. And all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His divinity is an everlasting divinity which shall not pass away. And his kingdom, the one which shall not be destroyed. Now that's the exact description of what we saw, or very similar, to Daniel chapter 2.

So we have the exact same events being described.

We have Babylon, the lion with the eagle's wings. We have Persia, the giant lumbering bear.

We have the Macadoshian Greek empire that's very quick, very ferocious, ends up dividing into four.

Then we have the Roman Empire.

But the ten horns and the little bird really bothered him.

Because this ten horns come up, and then there's this little horn that has the eyes of a man and speaks pompous words, as we read in verse 8.

See, I don't understand that. I don't understand that.

So let's go down to verse 21 now.

We read verse 20 that has ten horns and the one horn that comes up.

Now I was watching, and the same horn was making war against the saints and prevailing against them. How long will this horn be making war against the saints?

Until the ancient of days came, and judgment was made in favor of the saints of the Most High, and the time came for the saints to possess the kingdom.

So we know that this little horn is doing something against the saints at the time of the return of Jesus Christ. That's very important. Now we know this fourth beast with this ten horns and little horn goes clear down to the time of the return of Jesus Christ, just like we know the Roman Empire does. So we're looking at a revival of the Roman Empire. Verse 23.

Thus he said, The fourth beast shall be a fourth kingdom on earth, which shall be different from all other kingdoms, and it shall devour the whole earth, trample it, and break it to pieces.

Now there's questions. Okay, does this resurrected empire at the end time conquer the whole world?

And we know by revelation that it doesn't. But it does conquer all the world that was known at that time. Plus more, as we get into Revelation, we'll see. The ten horns are ten kings.

He shall rise from this kingdom, and another shall rise after them, and shall be different from the first ones, and shall subdue three kings. And this little one, this one with eyes, and it speaks like a man. He shall speak pompous words against the most high, shall persecute the saints of the most high, and shall attend to change the times and the wall, and the saint shall be given to his hand for a time and times and half a time.

So now we have some specifics that are not in Daniel chapter 2 at all. The specifics of there are ten kings and a little king. The little king is persecuting the saints clear up to the time that Christ comes back, and that there's a specific prophecy about time and times and half a time. Time and times and half a time can be a Hebrew idiom that means year, two years, and half a year. It doesn't have to be that. It can be that. There's no way to actually pinpoint time and times and half a time until we get into Revelation. Revelation's pinpoint is, of course, the exact time. But at least we have a time now. We know that something happened specifically before the return of Jesus Christ, and we know that it's a time, a measurement of time, times, and then half of a time.

Who are the ten kings and who is the little horn? Now, that has been a huge area of speculation for a long, long time. So we know it's a revived Roman Empire, but who are the ten kings and who is the little horn? There are three basic explanations. The first one makes no sense at all. It tries to make this some kind of resurrected Greek Empire. So I just don't see even going into that because it doesn't fit the Bible. There's two other explanations that are for this. One is that we're looking at a progression of time from the time of the Roman Empire to its final restoration, and that there would be ten restorations along the way.

So if you go back through history, you can't put together—in fact, you can put together a number of different ways—ten different restorations of the Roman Empire.

In that explanation, this little horn comes along and is the papacy, the Catholic Church.

This explanation is the most common explanation of commentaries written during the 1800s. In fact, going even before that, during the whole Protestant Reformation of Ford, that was the most common explanation. This represents ten attempts, and of course, everybody would try to come up with ten. Of course, if you lived in the 1700s, you'd have a different ten than if you lived in the 1800s, and you'd have a different ten if you lived in the 1900s, and you'd have a different ten than if you lived now. Everybody tried to come up with ten resurrections.

I can tell you there's been at least ten attempts to resurrect the Roman Empire.

That explanation is a viable explanation.

The other explanation is that—and this is more common today—is that the ten horns correspond with the ten toes.

So, this prophecy is specifically about the very end time.

So, we have ten dacians that appear at the end, but that little horn is the antichrist, who specifically now takes over the ten dacians. He actually uproots three of them. He removes the kings from power. So, those are the two explanations.

There is some clarity. We'll have to come back to this.

Which explanation? Revelation supports either, depending on how you look at Revelation. So, I think when there's always a question, the important thing is to say, oh, there's two possible explanations. These are of the really change anything.

One is, there's ten attempts to resurrect the Roman Empire until the very last one, and the papacy is in charge, you know, is evolved in this all along the way.

Or, this simply is another way of saying the ten toes, or the ten nations, ten kingdoms of Daniel 2, and the papacy is evolved in that, or some religious leaders evolved in that.

It's not a whole lot of difference, but they are two possible different explanations of it.

Either way, it leads us to the fact that at the end time before Christ returns, there is a restored Roman Empire that is hired, but also with this empire is a religious leader who speaks pompous words and attempts against the Most High. Remember what it said in verse 25. Pompous words against the Most High, against God, persecutes the saints of the Most High, and shall intend to change times and laws. Now, changing the law of man doesn't mean anything. When he's attempting to change there's a law of God, which has been a problem inside of Christianity ever since the earliest church collapsed.

The attempt to change the Sabbath, the times of God, to Sunday has been going on ever since the beginning of the second century. So what we have here is a concentrated effort to absolutely destroy any concept of God's times and God's law.

What we have here is a religious leader, but I really want you to look at the end of verse 25.

And the saint shall be given into his hand for time, times, and half a time. What this means is, at the end time, there will be a very specific time of persecution on the people of God.

That time, times, and half a time is in the future, but the only way that I know that is because of Revelation. It's like I don't know certain things about Revelation, or unless I understand Daniel, I don't understand there are certain things about Daniel, let's understand Revelation. So we have to go back and forth.

So I'm just giving you now, I don't want to go to Revelation because I just want to say this is what we don't know. We know that this Kingdom goes down to the end, there's a religious leader involved, there's ten either resurrections of the Roman Empire or ten kings at the end. It may be both. Well, yeah, it may be both. If the ten kings, we know the ten kings of Daniel too, exist at the end. If this is talking about ten resurrections, then both happen. You said of me. And what we have though at the end is a restoration, and there's a religious leader that attempts to destroy the people of God, the Sabbath of God, Sabbath of God, and the laws of God.

And the saints are given to His hand. There is a great persecution on the people of God.

But what happens after that? Verse 26, But the court shall be seated, and they shall take His dominion away, the divinity of this beast, to consume and destroy it forever. That the kingdom and the divinity of the greatness of the kingdoms of the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High, if the kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all divinity shall serve and obey him. This is very important because He actually says here, when the Messiah comes to set up the kingdom of God, who is also ruling that kingdom? The saints. Wow, He introduced a whole new concept here.

The saints are ruling with the Messiah on earth, over this new kingdom. So we have the Everlasting Kingdom. I just read that part there. So here we have the Son of Man. After seeing the vision for a beast, he had just saw one of the Son of Man coming into the clouds of heaven. That's in verses 13 to 14. We read that. Let's read it again. He was watching in the night visions, if you hold one like the Son of Man coming into the clouds of heaven, he came to the ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. That the hip was given the divinity of the glory of the kingdom, and all people's languages, auditions and languages, to serve him. His divinity is an everlasting divinity, which shall not pass away. This kingdom, the one which shall not be destroyed. So in the middle of this prophecy, we see the Son of Man coming to set up this kingdom.

But at the end of the prophecy, it's told that the saints will rule him.

That's an interesting concept. That's not found much in the Old Testament.

The saints will rule with him. So we put these together. So we see the Son of Man, who we know as Jesus, approached the ancient of days, which is God the Father, who was led into his presence.

He's given authority over the earth, which is going to happen. And it's the divinity of this everlasting kingdom. And of course, that's coming, and the saints will rule with him. So now we have how these two templates fit together, in which we have Daniel 2 and Daniel 7.