The Reign of Rebellion, Part 1 A

The details of this prophecy, particularly from verse 2 to 35, are so accurate, they are so remarkable, they are so verifiable, that it is this section of Scripture that has been the cause of all the attacks on the book of Daniel. In this detail and symbolic language, the prophecies of Daniel can seem a bit daunting to interpret at first glance. But when you dig into the historical context and identify, for example, the nameless kings that are referred to in Daniel chapter 11, understanding the prophecies becomes easier. Today, John MacArthur takes you to Daniel 11 and reveals those kings in particular, five of them who contribute vital pieces to the prophecy puzzle.

So follow along with John as he continues his compelling study called The Future of Israel. We are living in an age of rebellion. In fact, the first 35 verses in even the whole chapter chronicles for us the reign of rebellion upon the earth. The time that man kicks against the traces, as it were, man defies God.

And the Scripture establishes for us that the time of man's rebellion will go on only until the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, within this larger picture of the world's rebellion against God, something else is going on, and that is the chastening of the nation Israel. Israel in the Old Testament clearly were called of God as a chosen people, and they disobeyed repeatedly. They were idolatrous. They went after false gods. They lived in immorality. They defied God. They spurned His love.

They turned their backs upon His loving kindness and grace. And as a result, God set about to chasten the nation Israel, to punish them for their idolatry and their sin and disobedience. Now, you have to understand this element of history or you cannot understand the vision and prophecy of Daniel 11. Jeremiah the prophet said that Israel would go into captivity for 70 years. Daniel had read that. The 70 years had come to an end. Daniel fully expected that all of the land of Israel would be restored and that the city of Jerusalem would be rebuilt, and the temple would be refurbished, and all of the people in captivity would return. But it didn't happen. Only a small remnant, 40,000, went back.

The city remained in ruins, and the nation was nothing significant at all. And Daniel was greatly disappointed. He thought the chastening only needed to last for 70 years. But you see, that was only the first phase. They never really responded to that chastening. That's why they never went back.

They were solidly entrenched in pagan lifestyle, and they really weren't interested in returning to the broken-down land they had left. And so this was not the end of their chastening. It was only the beginning. Now, when Daniel realizes that the 70 years are up, and when he realizes that only 40,000 have gone back, he does what he always did. He got on his knees and began to pray.

And his prayer is sort of along the line of, Why, God? Why hasn't it worked out like I thought it would? Why haven't all these people returned? Why isn't the city being rebuilt? The temple restored?

Why isn't the great and glorious land of God's people being what it used to be? And he's praying. And finally, after prayer for three weeks, the answer comes.

And you'll remember how it came. First of all, in chapter 10, Daniel had a vision of the Son of God. And he fell on the ground, and his legs trembled and shook beneath him, and he quivered and he couldn't speak. He was literally devastated in the presence of the Son of God. And then you'll remember that in verse 10, an angel touched him, and he got back up, and the angel said, I'm here to deliver the answer to your prayer.

It's taken me three weeks because I had to fight my way through a demon up in space that was holding me up, and Michael had to come to my rescue. But I'm here to give you the message of God. I'm going to tell you why it is that everybody didn't go back at the end of 70 years. I'm going to tell you why it is that Jerusalem has not been returned to its former glory.

I'm going to tell you why it is that the wall is not rebuilt, that the land is not what you thought it would be. And that is the message of chapter 11 and into chapter 12. And the message concisely is this, because the chastening of Israel is going to continue until the time of the refreshing, or until the time of the restoration, or until the time of the Messiah coming in His kingdom.

This was only the beginning. Now to begin in chapter 11, we have to look at verse 1 and really connect verse 1 back with chapter 10. Also I, says the angel, in the first year of Darius the Mede, even I stood to confirm and strengthen him.

That is Michael. So Daniel is alerted then to the fact that he's going to have information about what God has planned for His people. It's coming through this angel. And in addition to that, Daniel gets incredible insight into the whole issue of the fact that whatever happens in Israel's history is being attended to by mighty angelic beings. Now this is a wonderful confirmation to Daniel, because Daniel is about to hear that God's people Israel are going to be in a kind of punishment, a kind of suffering, clear until the Messiah comes, clear until the last days, the end of time.

And if they are to be under all of this for all that time, it is comforting to know that the holy angels are going to be their protectors. And that is the reason I believe that God gave to Daniel that insight, as a comfort to his own heart, when he was made fully aware that his people were going to have to suffer for millennia of time until the coming of Christ. Now having given us this picture of the protective working of the angels, the angel now beginning in verse 2 begins to unfold the revelation. This is the last revelation in the book of Daniel, and it reveals the history of the suffering of the people of Israel, clear up until the tribulation.

Chapter 12 verse 1 starts with the tribulation, and chapter 12 verse 2 and 3, you have what follows the tribulation, the resurrection into the kingdom. So we see then, and this is remarkable, from chapter 11 verse 2 to the end of the chapter, the sweep of history from the time of Daniel to the time of the kingdom. Now this has happened a couple of other times, hasn't it, in the book of Daniel, where we get the whole flow of history. And we get it again here, only this time, rather than focusing on the Gentile powers particularly, although they will be alluded to here, it focuses on the nation of Israel and the suffering that Israel will endure.

Now I'm going to give you a footnote that I want you to remember. The details of this prophecy, particularly from verse 2 to 35, are so accurate, they are so remarkable, they are so verifiable, that it is this section of Scripture that has been the cause of all the attacks on the book of Daniel. There are two main books in the Old Testament that are attacked by the critics, Isaiah and Daniel, and they want to deny the prophecies that are there. And in the case of Daniel, from verses 2 through 35, Daniel prophesies specific events about the Persian and Greek empires.

Now mark this. We know they came to pass because we know Persian and Greek history. There's no question about it. We have many, many sources for that. And the critics have found that the prophecies are so absolutely accurate that they therefore have concluded that they must have been written after these events happen. Therefore, they take the whole book of Daniel and they shove it up past the fulfillment because they say it's impossible that anyone should be so accurate. Now of course their basic supposition is that God didn't write the Bible. And their secondary supposition is that Daniel was a liar because Daniel said he was receiving these revelations from God before the time. So they've got two problems. Number one, they've got a God who doesn't know the future. And number two, they've got a man like Daniel who has impeccable character of whom the other prophet said he was one of the three most honorable men that ever lived, and they're making him into a first-rate liar. But isn't it interesting what the critics will do to try to explain away reality?

These are incredible, accurate prophecies. I'm going to try my best to help you to understand what they're saying. There's so much here that, in fact, I couldn't even figure out an outline. And usually that comes real easy. And I worked and worked and finally it all came to me.

There are five major kings mentioned and all of their names begin with A. And I went into immediate paradise. I couldn't believe it.

It was so wonderful. I mean, I have this alliterative problem. Why do you think our family is Matthew, Mark, Marcy, Melinda, Mom, and me?

And our dog is Mutt. No. But anyway, I want to take you through this and show you the amazing, remarkable prophecy that is predicted here. By the way, there are multitudinous reasons why we know this couldn't have been written at the later date. All kinds of reasons. Linguistic reasons. Historical reasons.

Many, many reasons. Most of all because Daniel is not a liar. He has too great a character for that. And because God can predict the future as well as He can tell us about the past. All right, let's begin and we'll flow through this period of history. From Daniel's day, we'll go up to the time of the Antichrist. Number one king, Ahasuerus, Ahasuerus, A-H-A-S-U-E-R-U-S, Ahasuerus, verse 2. And now, will I show thee the truth?

Here comes the revelation. Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia, and the fourth shall be far richer than they all, and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Greece. Now the angel says, look, there are going to be three kings, and then following those three there's going to be a fourth. He'll be stronger and richer than the others, and he is going to try to stand up against the nation of Greece. Now the prophecy then centers on the fourth king.

Let me just say this as a note. There were more than four kings in Persia, but the angel picks out the key right here. There were three who ruled just before a fourth, and that fourth one was the one who led a major attack on Greece.

And that's the thing we want to see. The first of that line of four was a man named Cambyses, who was the son, by the way, of Cyrus, who was king at this time. The second, history tells us, is a man named Pseudo-Smerdis. He was, by the way, a usurper and an imposter. He looked so much like Cambyses that he claimed to be Cambyses, and through all kinds of deception he got himself into the throne. The third king was a man named Darius Hystaspas, and the fourth one was named Xerxes, but he had another name. And his other name was Ahasuerus. He is the king mentioned in the book of Esther.

He is one of the greatest oriental rulers of all time. He had fabulous wealth. He commanded the largest army in the ancient world. In fact, he commanded the largest army that we know about in ancient history. And he decided that he wanted to attack Greece. The mood with the other three kings was moving that way, and in fact, that third king, Hystaspas, made a sort of a small, piddly little attack on Greece.

But this fourth one really stirred up all he had against the realm of Greece. By the way, he was totally and utterly in a devastating way defeated by the power of Greece, and the Greeks never forgot about it. After that, 150 years went by and a lot of other little nondescript kings came along, but they never forgot what Ahasuerus did. And 150 years later, the Greeks finally got their act together and decided to retaliate based upon what this guy had done 150 years before, and they came. And when they came, they came led by another king whose name is Alexander, and he's the second king, Alexander. Verse 3, of course, you know that following the Persian Empire came the Greeks. And a mighty king shall stand up that shall rule with great dominion and do according to his will. A mighty king, none other than Alexander the Great of Greece.

All Bible commentators agree that that is who is in mind. He retaliated for what had happened earlier to Greece. He seized the entire Persian Empire. It says he had great dominion. I'm telling you, the man was a man who stands out in history as perhaps the most remarkable military leader ever. By the age of 33, he had conquered the world. His army wouldn't go any further.

They were literally worn out. They had conquered everything from Europe to India, and he was weeping because there were no more worlds that he could conquer. He changed the course of history more than any other ruler. He was the son of Philip of Macedon, and it says in verse 3 that he did according to his will. He was an absolute monarch, an absolute sovereign who had not only the power of personality and the power of leadership, but the power of military might. And of course, both the Persian Empire and Alexander overran the nation Israel. The Persians possessed it and controlled it.

The Greeks under Alexander possessed it and controlled it. But you remember that he died at 33, and what happened in verse 4? And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken. It seems no sooner does he stand up and get his kingdom than it is shattered. And watch, it'll be divided toward the four winds of heaven. Now remember, this is all before the man is even born.

I mean, this is a couple of hundred years before he's even born. And it will not go to his posterity, nor according to his dominion which he ruled. In other words, it won't go to his children and it won't be to the extent that it was when he was ruling. It'll be plucked up and given to others.

Now look carefully at that verse. It'll not go to his posterity. Alexander had a half-brother who was mentally retarded. He had an illegitimate son, and he had a baby born posthumously. In other words, the mother of the child was already pregnant when he died, and the child was born after he died. All three, his mentally retarded illegitimate son, or rather his mentally retarded half-brother, his illegitimate son, and his newborn baby, all three were murdered. And he had no posterity.

The angel was exactly right. The kingdom did not go to his posterity. It was thrown to the four winds.

What does that mean? A great battle ensued for who was going to rule, and the battle was won by four generals, and the kingdom was divided into four parts. Cassandra took Macedonia, Lysimachus took Thrace and Asia Minor, Ptolemy, remember that, took Egypt, and Seleucus took Syria. Egypt is south of Israel, Syria is where? North of Israel. Those two become the ones we focus on, the remaining of the chapter, because they are the ones that are right around the nation Israel. And in Egypt, a Ptolemaic line of kings was established, and in Syria, a Seleucid dynasty was established. And through the centuries, those two dynasties warred with each other, and they fought most of their wars on the soil of Israel. So Israel became the pawn in this. From here on to the 20th verse, we cover about 200 years when these wars raged on the borders and throughout the land of Israel.

Now let's find out how it went. By the way, each one had a diminished dominion, therefore what he said about it will be not according to his dominion, did come to pass. Each of the four had a diminished dominion. All right, now we come to 5, and the king of the south, who would that be? That would be the Ptolemies in Egypt, because everything geographically is indicated in reference to Israel. You'll notice down in verse 6, in the middle of the verse, the king of the north, that's Syria.

Now mark this in your mind. You're going to see for many verses now, the king of the south, the king of the north. That doesn't necessarily mean one king. We'll go through a lot of different kings in the Seleucid dynasty and a lot of different kings in the Ptolemaic dynasty. The point is, the king of the south, the king of the north is simply whoever's reigning in that area at the time.

But I want you to watch how fabulously this unfolds. And the king of the south, that would be the Ptolemaic dynasty, shall be strong and of his princes, that is of the princes of Alexander. And he shall be strong above him and have dominion. His dominion shall be a great dominion. And in the end of years, they shall join themselves together, for the king's daughter of the south shall come to the king of the north to make an agreement.

Now let me fill you in. The Seleucid dynasty is built in the north. The Ptolemaic dynasty is built in the south. The Ptolemaic dynasty starts out a little more powerful, but it doesn't take very long until the north becomes more powerful as the expansion of the north develops. Finally, the two realize the tension that's existing, and so in verse 6 it says they're going to make an alliance.

And how do they do it? This was the old way to make an alliance. The king's daughter of the south comes to the king of the north to make an agreement.

You give your daughter to the nation you want to make a treaty with, she marries the guy, and you hope that makes the right kind of relationship. And that's exactly what happened. The angel was right on. Antiochus Theos. Can you imagine taking the name Antiochus Theos?

Theos means God. I'll show you the kind of problem he had. Antiochus Theos, who was the third king of Syria, needed to make a treaty with Egypt. The king of Egypt was a man named Ptolemy Philadelphus, and so he decided that what he wanted to do was marry the daughter of the king of Egypt, or the king of the south. Unfortunately, he was already married, but that was no problem. He divorced his wife.

He divorced his wife, and he married this daughter of the southern king. Well, his wife wasn't real thrilled about it, so she murdered his new wife. She not only murdered his new wife, but she murdered all her attendants too. Then she poisoned him to death. It says in the middle of verse 6, she shall not retain the power of the arm, neither shall he stand nor his arm. In other words, the power of both of them, the whole thing fell apart. But she shall be given up, and they that brought her, and he that begot her, and he that strengthened her in these times.

In other words, everybody involved is going to go, and that is exactly what happened. Now this brought to the throne in the north because now the Seleucid king Antiochus Theas is dead, so this brought to the throne a man named Callinicus. Look at verse 7, but out of a branch of her roots, that is out of the roots of the murdered wife, Baroness. There was a man named Ptolemy Uergates, and it says, I think it's in verse 8, no it's in verse 7, that one shall stand in his estate.

I don't know if you're following me too good, but stay with me. Out of a branch of the roots of the murdered wife comes a brother from the south, and he comes with an army. And he comes against Callinicus, and he defeats him. And verse 8 says, this is what I want you to note, he carried away captives into Egypt, took their gods, their princes, their precious vessels, silver, gold, and so forth and so on.

Now history tells us all about this. It tells us he took 40,000 talents of silver, 2,500 idol statues, and it goes on and on. And even Callinicus died because he fell off his horse. And there's an interesting note there.

I'm just trying to think where it is. Yeah, at the end of verse 8 it says, the king of the south shall continue more years than the king of the north. And that is exactly what happened.

Callinicus fell off his horse, died, and the one in the south continued four more years. Now the reason I just point this out is because you need to know how accurate the Word of God is. But the point behind it all is that in the middle of this sits Israel.

And all these wars are going on raging across their land. You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur, chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. His current study is called The Future of Israel. John, I think of two main books of scripture that deal with the end times. One is Daniel, that's the focus of your current study. The other, of course, is Revelation. I took a course in Bible college that covered both books at the same time because of their interwoven themes. You spent years studying and teaching through Revelation. And in fact, you've been revisiting that book over the past couple of years at Grace Church. I appreciate the fresh insight you've brought to that book.

What's it like to study that book for, what is it, the second or third time now? Well, the last time I went through the book of Revelation was, I think, 1993. And so we've had multiple generations of people at Grace Church since that time.

And sort of post-COVID, we've had thousands and thousands of new people coming into our church. And I've always felt that it's important to know how the story ends. I know there are people who think you can punt on Revelation. You can pay little or no attention to it. Or it's too confusing, or there's too many opinions, too many viewpoints, and nobody can be dogmatic.

I reject all of that. I think it is intended for us to read, understand, and in understanding be blessed. And I think that the end of the story is the point of the story. It's the whole point of the story. You can't give Christ the glory that He deserves unless you understand how the story ends.

So it's vital. And I would just encourage folks, if you have any interest in the book of Revelation, let me suggest this. I've written New Testament commentaries, commentaries on every book of the New Testament. I've done two volumes on the book of Revelation. Those two volumes will take you down into the depth of that book, and you'll see things that are so incredible.

And you'll find out that it is understandable, and it is life-transforming. And it'll be a motivation for your godliness and your virtue just to understand what God has planned for this world and especially for those who love Him. The commentaries cover everything in the book of Revelation in detail, and they're available through Grace To You. Two volumes cover chapters 1 through 22, verse by verse. Readable, designed to make you a complete student of God's plan for the future.

Thanks, John. And, friend, these commentaries clear up confusing passages. They explain the book's main themes and much more. To pick up John's two-volume commentary on the book of Revelation, contact us today. Each volume of the Revelation commentary costs $19, and shipping is free. You can also buy John's entire New Testament commentary series all at once.

You'll pay a lower price per volume, and shipping is still free. To get John's commentaries on Revelation or the complete New Testament commentary series, call 800-55-GRACE, or you can order from our website, gty.org. Our number again, 800-55-GRACE, and the website, gty.org. Keep in mind, if you'd like to download all eight messages from John's current study, The Future of Israel, they're there and they're free of charge at gty.org. That's true of all of John's sermons, 3,600 titles available for free. And that includes any message you hear on the radio and plenty of verse-by-verse teaching that we don't have time to air. So to listen to or download or even read the transcripts of any of John's sermons, go to gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson with a question for you. With all the tension between Israel and the nations that surround it, are the Bible's prophecies about Israel's future being fulfilled in today's headlines? Consider that when we return with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Tomorrow's Grace to You.