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Now, here's today's message from Pastor Skip. There's about that. made its way to a dock at a tiny Mexican village. And on the dock was an American tourist watching the boat come in. Off the boat stepped a fisherman.
With a small, modest catch of fish, but very nice fish. And the Torah said, How long did it take you to catch those fish? Fisherman said, not very long at all. I just went out, caught the fish, came back in. And uh He said, Well.
You could have stayed out longer and got more. He goes, This is sufficient to care for the needs of my family.
So the tourist, curious, said, So what do you do with the rest of your time? The fisherman said, Well, I sleep in late. I play with my kids. Later on, I take a siesta with my wife. In the evening, I go into the village and meet my friends and play guitar.
I live a full life. The tourist said, I have an MBA from Harvard University. I can help you. If you started your day earlier, you could go out and catch more fish. You could sell the extra fish, and in time, you'd have enough money to buy a bigger boat.
If you kept that up over time, you could buy a second boat, then a third, then a fourth, and eventually you'll have a whole fleet of fishing ships. And if you keep at it, you can even have your own processing plant. Right here in this area. And by that time, you will be bringing in so much money you could relocate to Mexico City or New York City or Los Angeles, and from there, you can control your vast operations. The fisherman said, How long do you think something like that would take?
The tourist said, probably a good 20, 25 years. But you'll make millions of dollars doing it. The fisherman said, after that, then what? And Tours said after that You can retire, can find a nice little village by a coast. You know?
You can sleep in late. Can play with your grandkids. Take a siesta with your wife, and in the evening, you can go play guitar with your friends in the village. You'll live a full life. I think the fishermen needed to school the MBA, don't you?
The title of today's message is I Dare You. Rest. Which sounds Strange to our ears. It sounds like an oxymoron. I dare you.
Rest. An oxymoron is simply words that you put together and they seem to contradict each other. Airline food. That's an oxymoron. You're lucky if you get four peanuts on an airplane.
Government organization, that's another one. I dare you rest. is an oxymoron. It sounds strange because a dare implies that you do something daring, that there's some element of danger or risk involved. I dare you rest?
But this would make sense as a dare to somebody who is. Stressed out.
Someone who's a warrior. or someone who's the overcommitted workaholic. Pedal to the metal manager type of person, or This would be a suitable dare to someone who is hearing bad news about their future. about pain and about conflict. And the exhortation Rest, that would make sense.
That would be quite a dare. Daniel the prophet is given Information about the future, conflicts about his people, the nation of Israel. From his time all the way into the future and then now beginning in this verse, verse 36. The final period of human history, which will be far worse than any other time. I believe, however.
That these verses have a particular application to us today, and that this message. Would be very apropos because we live in a day and age when people are probably more stressed than ever before. The average citizen is filled with anxiety and sort of living on the edge, agitated with present developments economically in this world.
Some of you struggle just to get by week by week. Then you hear of what's going on in the Middle East. And you add all of that together and What people long for today is someone to come along and fix all this. That can be a danger. Time magazine, in an article called Inflation: Who Hurts the Worst.
Discussed, among others, a 43-year-old steel worker in Chicago, Illinois, married with five children. on a very low wage. Who said, and I quote, you really want to revolt? But what can you do? I keep waiting for a miracle, for some guy who isn't born yet.
And when he comes, we'll follow him like he was John the Baptist. The Bible would say There is a guy coming. You don't want to follow him like you follow John the Baptist. A coming king, a coming world ruler before Jesus Christ comes. And he will come with a plan.
We call him most typically the Antichrist. We've already talked about him in the book of Daniel and seen his description. But he surfaces again here in chapter eleven.
So, I want to, with you, consider four attributes of this coming leader. Four attributes. And then, after the attributes, I want to give you a scripture. And then a reason to rest. A scripture and a reason to rest in the light of those four attributes.
The attributes are his arrogance. his aberration, his association, And finally, his annihilation. I was looking for all A's. Can you tell this week? Let's look at verse thirty-six of Daniel chapter eleven.
This is the first. characteristic. This coming leader's arrogance. Then the king shall do according to his own will. He shall exalt and magnify himself above every god.
He shall speak blasphemies against the god of gods, and shall prosper till the wrath has been accomplished. For what has been determined shall be done. Beginning in this verse, the angel who is giving to Daniel the revelation of the future. Skips. Sweeps.
Thousands of years from verse 35. To verse 36. He just sort of like stops, and there's this huge gap of time until now we're dealing with somebody. Not historic to us, but somebody who is yet future.
Now hold that thought. By now, you should get used to this, and I hope you are used to the fact that in the Bible you have gaps of time. There are sometimes a couple thousand year gaps. For example, in Daniel chapter 9, remember the prophecy? 70 weeks of years are determined for your people in your city.
And we saw how that the text shows there's a difference between the first 69 or 483 years. Then a gap. And then a final week or seven-year period that is coming at the end of days, the tribulation period. The Bible speaks a lot about it.
So we're used to the Bible showing us a gap. Another famous gap is, if you remember the message I gave in this series, but on Isaiah 61, called the world's most important comma. How Jesus one day stood up in the synagogue in Nazareth, quoting Isaiah chapter 61. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to set at liberty those who are captives, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and he closed the book. He didn't finish the sentence.
He closed it on a comma. If he would have finished the sentence, it would have said, and the year of vengeance. of our God. The reason he closed the book. Is because the year of vengeance of our God won't happen till the tribulation happens.
That's the final seven-year period.
So we're used to these gaps. And if you remember, I introduced a principle to you called prophetic foreshortening. Which is simply the principle that the prophets could see things happening in the future, future events, but they could not delineate between the sequence of those events nor the intervals of time that happened between one event and another.
So they saw the Messiah coming, they saw him suffering, they saw him dying. They saw him ruling and reigning, and they did not see the gap of time between Jesus' first coming and second coming. We have that here. We're introduced to that here. In fact, if you look back one verse at verse 35, you'll notice what it says.
Some of those. Of understanding will fall to refine them, purify them, make them white until. Here he introduces it the time of the end it is still for the appointed time. Then he says, Then the king shall do according to his own will.
So the scope Beginning in this verse is beyond the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes, and we're dealing with somebody else in the future. There's a few reasons I know that. not only because of the way the language is written, but Remember how I said last week that in the first 35 verses of this chapter, there's 135 well-documented fulfilled prophecies? In other words, we're able to plug in from history corroborating data in those first 35 verses and see that it has been fulfilled historically. The problem is, beginning in verse 36, we have no such history.
That corresponds to what we read in this description, in this final paragraph. That's where it sort of falls off the grid. Everything has been fulfilled. Nothing in this verse onward has been fulfilled. We're dealing with the time of the end.
And so he's introduced this king, this ruler, as simply the king. The king is not Antiochus IV, who was the king of the north, if you remember. Against the king of the south, here is the king who is in this text, you will see, differentiated from the king of the north and the king of the south. This is Connect with Skip Heitzig. Before Pastor Skip continues, check out this special resource for your family this Christmas.
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Something else I want to sh show you just so there's no doubt. If you continue reading and continue reading, and you get into chapter 12, verse 1, there were no chapter gaps back then, they were added later. It's all the same narrative. Daniel 12, verse 1, it says, At that time. The time we're dealing with, at that time, Michael shall stand up.
Remember, he was one of the archangels. the great prince who stands watch over the sons of your people, and there shall be a time of trouble such as never was since there was a nation. even to that time. And at that time your people shall be delivered, every one who is found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt.
So we're dealing with a period of time that is worse than any other period in history. And number two, It will end with a resurrection. of the just and the unjust. That hasn't happened yet.
So there's a gap, and we pick up. dealing with some future event. But here's a question. It's sort of an obvious question, but it sort of needs to be answered. Why is there a gap?
Why does this keep happening? Why is there a gap here? Why do we have, here's the history? Gap. And now here's the very end of his why is that?
Here's why. Because the prophecies are dealing not with every nation in the world, but one particular nation. What nation is that? Israel. These are prophecies that center on future conflicts.
For the nation of Israel. And the only reason other nations are mentioned is because the way they affect. The nation of Israel. That's why it says in Daniel 9: 70 weeks are determined for your people. Those are the Jewish people.
And for your holy city, that's the city of Jerusalem. That's why in Jeremiah chapter 30, describing the same period of future history, it says, For this is a time of Jacob's Trouble. That's a synonym for Israel, Jacob's trouble.
So these are dealing with the nation of Israel. Simply put, all of the conflicts that we read about last week from the past. Are simply a foreshadow of a greater conflict in a worse time that is coming. in the future. And it centers around this.
Person called the king. I sort of gave it away at the beginning. This is the Antichrist. That's his most famous name, or I should say most infamous name. Even though, did you know he's only referred to that one time in the Bible, and that's the book of 1 John.
He's given 25 titles about altogether. He's called the beast. He's called the beast. The lawless one, he's called the son of perdition. He is called the man of sin.
In chapter 7 of Daniel, he's called the little horn. Remember the little horn? In chapter 8 of Daniel, he's called the king of fierce countenance. old fierce face. In chapter 9, he's called the prince that shall come.
All speaks of the same person. A final ruler that will come to planet Earth just before Jesus Christ comes again. One of the notable characteristics of his personality is his pride. Again, verse 7, the king will do according to his own will, and he shall exalt and magnify himself above every God. We've already discussed this when we were in chapter 7.
He's called the little horn. But he has a big mouth. He speaks pompous words against the Most High.
So how can anyone rest? When a guy like this is promised to come onto the scene having this kind of power. A prideful, arrogant ruler with power. How can you rest? Let me ask a more personal question.
How do you handle prideful people in your life? You probably can think of maybe one, two, three, a dozen. I don't know. Maybe there's somebody you go, oh, that person, he's just so. You know how most people deal with prideful people?
They become prideful themselves. It's when they're around somebody who's sort of Heels dug in and arrogant, they sort of act the same way to one up the other person that they're confronting. Oh, you think you're so great?
Well, let me tell you this. It's the very opposite of the way it ought to be handled. There was a mom who was cooking pancakes for her two boys, a five-year-old and a three-year-old. Kevin was the oldest, five years. Ryan.
The three-year-old. They started arguing over who would get the first pancake. You know, kids do that. Adults do that. And so she saw this as a perfect opportunity to inject biblical truth in training her kids.
So she bent down and she said, Boys, if Jesus were here, I bet he would say, I'll let my brother have the first pancake. And Kevin, the five-year-old, the older one, said to Ryan, the three-year-old, hey, you be Jesus. But here's the scriptural promise. Proverbs 16, pride Goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. Though that is true generally, It is never more true than of this Antichrist.
He will puff himself up and be prideful. and a haughty spirit comes before a fall.
So you can rest in God's promise. Let's look at the second. Characteristic. This coming leader's aberration, verse thirty-seven. Says he shall regard neither the God of his fathers.
Nor the desire of women. nor regard any God for he shall exalt himself above them. This verse is put here because there are three areas of peculiarity. Aberration. That would be noteworthy to anyone living in Biblical times.
Three areas, first of all. The area of tradition, we're told he shall regard neither the God of his fathers. In other words, he will have some religious heritage. But at some point, he will turn from that tradition, from that heritage, and forsake it. Then it says concerning his affection.
Nor the desire of women. He won't regard the desire of women. There's all sorts of books. written about what this could possibly mean.
Some have conjectured that the Antichrist will be a homosexual. But it could simply mean he'll be celibate. He'll be so focused on his mission that he won't desire to marry. Then, third, in regards to religion, notice the same verse says: nor regard any God. for he will magnify himself above them all.
Now, this is an interesting characteristic. His pride is so. Up there, out there. That He would even exalt himself above God. Above any God.
That's an aberration. I mean, you know, there's arrogance, and then there's arrogance. And this is arrogance to an aberrational point. Paul says the same thing, 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 4. He opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshipped, so that he sits as God in the temple of God, showing himself.
that he is God.
Now, hold this thought because I want to tie something together. That if I just move on, there'll be too many loose threads. I mentioned something a couple weeks ago, a few weeks ago. I suggested a possibility, and again, it's only a possibility. I'm not here to say I know who the Antichrist is or from where they're from.
Enough books have been written that are wrong. But I suggested the possibility that the Antichrist may have Islamic origin. That the Antichrist might indeed be The one that the Muslims worldwide consider as coming soon, their Mahdi. Their deliverer. And I quote it from Islamic literature.
To show you that they are expecting universally somebody who is coming to this earth who is a messianic figure, an unparalleled leader, this is all in their literature. Who will take control of the world, who will destroy all who resist him, who will invade many nations, who will enact a seven-year peace treaty with the Jews, who will conquer Israel and massacre Jews, and then establish an Islamic world headquarters at Jerusalem. Which, when we discovered that, it sounds, boy, that sounds a whole lot like what the Bible describes as Antichrist. We have two problems. Problem number one, in most people's minds, is this problem of the revived Roman Empire.
Because the prophecy is that Rome Will in the end days have some sort of association and revive, and so we expect a leader from the revived Roman Empire.
So everybody looks to Europe as some white European guy who's going to come, and that's the Antichrist. What you need to understand, and if you know history, you remember this. And if you know biblical history, you remember that Nebuchadnezzar saw a vision of coming world empires, and the last one were the legs of iron. They represented Rome. It was the longest part of the statue.
It was divided into two legs. In 395 AD, Rome indeed split east and west. The Western leg of the Roman Empire fizzled out essentially. The Eastern leg continued for another thousand years, and it was headquartered at Constantinople, which is today modern day Istanbul, Turkey. If you were to take a map of the ancient Roman Empire, You would discover that 60% of the lands that occupied the Roman Empire are under today Islamic control.
So we can answer that. Part of the question. The other piece of the problem deals with what we're talking about here. You have a guy who's saying he's God. The Antichrist is demanding personal worship.
How could he be a Muslim? Any Muslim would never allow this.
Well, here's what you have to remember. The Antichrist, whoever this person is, will accomplish a great deal in the first three and a half years of his seven-year rule. He will not demand worship until three and a half years is up. And in the middle of that seven-year period comes this abomination of desolation, where he proclaims that he is God. That's once the world has given him.
Allegiance. Then he invades Israel, then he establishes authority in the temple. After the Islamic world, after all the Imams and all the mullahs and all the Ayatollahs and all the sheikhs have already said, this is the guy. At that point. To deny him at that point would be the ultimate shame.
In Islam, especially after a flush of vindication and satisfaction, we've made this much ground.
Something else. Add to all that I just said what it says in 2 Thessalonians 2 of this time period, where it says, God will send them strong delusion. that they will believe the lie. There will be a supernatural Confirmation of the already hardened hearts of those people on the earth. God will send them strong delusion and they will believe the lie.
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