The Vision of the Ram and the Male Goat
Open your Bibles with me, if you would, please, to Daniel chapter 8. We’ll continue today, despite it being Palm Sunday; we’ll continue with our series through Daniel. Today we come to chapter 8, a troubling vision: the ram, the male goat, and the little horn. Remember, this is apocalyptic literature, highly symbol-laden, and we’ll try to give both the vision and we’ll get into the interpretation of it this week, and then we’ll hopefully finish that up next time.
Daniel chapter 8:
In the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar, a vision appeared to me, Daniel, after that which appeared to me at the first. And I saw in the vision, and when I saw, I was in Susa, the capital, which is in the province of Elam. And I saw in the vision, and I was at the Ulai Canal. And I raised my eyes and saw, and behold, a ram standing on the bank of the canal, and it had two horns. And both horns were high, but one was higher than the other, and the higher one came up last. I saw the ram charging westward and northward and southward. No beast could stand before him and there was no one who could rescue from his power. He did as he pleased and became great.
As I was considering, behold, a male goat came from the west across the face of the whole earth without touching the ground. The goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes. And he came to the ram with the two horns which I had seen standing on the bank of the canal and he ran at him with his powerful wrath. I saw him come close to the ram and he was enraged against him and struck the ram and broke his two horns. The ram had no power to stand before him, but he cast him down to the ground and trampled on him. There was no one who could rescue the ram from his power.
Then the goat became exceedingly great, but when he was strong, the great horn was broken. Instead of it, there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven. Out of one of them came a little horn, which grew exceedingly great toward the south, toward the east, and toward the glorious land. It grew great, even to the host of heaven. And some of the stars it threw down to the ground and trampled on them. It became great, even as great as the prince of the host. And the regular burnt offering was taken away from him, and the place of his sanctuary was overthrown. And a host will be given over to it together with the regular burnt offering because of transgression and it will throw truth to the ground and it will act and prosper.
Then I heard a holy one speaking and another holy one said to the one who spoke, “For how long is the vision concerning the regular burnt offering, the transgression that makes desolate and the giving over of the sanctuary and host to be trampled underfoot?” And he said to me, “For 2,300 evenings and mornings, then the sanctuary shall be restored to its rightful state.”
When I, Daniel, had seen the vision, I sought to understand it. And behold, there stood before me one having the appearance of a man. And I heard a man’s voice between the banks of the Ulai, and it called, “Gabriel, make this man understand the vision.” So he came near where I stood, and when he came, I was frightened and fell on my face. But he said to me, “Understand, O son of man, that the vision is for the time of the end.” And when he had spoken to me, I fell into a deep sleep with my face to the ground. But he touched me and made me stand up and said, “Behold, I will make known to you what shall be at the latter end of the indignation, for it refers to the appointed time of the end.
As for the ram that you saw with the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia. And the goat is the king of Greece. And the great horn between his eyes is the first king. As for the horn that was broken in place of which four others arose, four kingdoms shall arise from his nation, but not with his power. At the latter end of their kingdom, when the transgressors have reached their limit, a king of bold face, one who understands riddles, shall arise. His power shall be great, but not by his own power. He shall cause fearful destruction and shall succeed in what he does and destroy mighty men and the people who are the saints. By his cunning, he shall make deceit prosper under his hand, and in his own mind, he shall become great. Without warning, he shall destroy many, and he shall even rise up against the Prince of Princes, and he shall be broken, but by no human hand. The vision of the evenings and mornings that has been told is true. Seal up the vision, for it refers to many days from now.”
I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days. Then I rose and went about the king’s business, but I was appalled by the vision and did not understand it.
Let’s bow together for prayer. Our Father, we come to another fascinating portion of your word, strange in many ways to our ears, but fascinating in its message and fascinating in what it tells us about our great God and his purpose. We pray that you’ll give us clear understanding of it in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Before we begin in chapter 8, I’d like you to look back at chapter 7 for a moment and recall there the vision that he had two years previously. This was in the first year of Belshazzar in chapter 7. You remember he had the vision that we’ve worked through, the vision of the four beasts. There’s the lion, there’s the bear, there’s the leopard, and then there’s that nondescript beast. And these were the succeeding kingdoms of Babylon (the lion), and then the bear (Medo-Persia), and Greece (the leopard), and then the nondescript beast is Rome. The fourth beast then is the kingdom of Rome, which was the kingdom in power at the time of Jesus’ earthly life. And eventually, I think, as we’ve seen, it symbolizes a coming world kingdom itself in opposition to God.
But note especially the second and the third beasts in chapter 7, the bear and the leopard. In verse 5 you have the vision; in the vision we have this bear rising up. And this, we are told, is Medo-Persia. And notice it’s raised up on one side. That is the Persian dominance of the Medo-Persian Empire. It has three ribs in its mouth. That’s the three great kingdoms that were conquered by Persia: the Lydian Kingdom, the Babylonian Kingdom, and the Egyptian Kingdom. The three ribs in the bear’s mouth. And it says it devoured much flesh. The Persian kingdom was just a ravenous kingdom. It had an appetite for conquering other lands that it just couldn’t satisfy. It overtook vast amounts of territory. In the words of one historian, he mentioned that to follow this analogy here, Medo-Persia ate until it belched. It just couldn’t get enough land, and so it devoured much flesh.
And then we have verse 6 in chapter 7, and there’s the leopard, the next kingdom, and that is Greece—Alexander the Great and his successors. The leopard is known for its speed and agility, and you’ll notice also in verse 6 as well, it has four wings on its back. Leopards don’t have wings. He’s mixing his metaphors here in the apocalyptic symbolism, but I think the idea there is the swiftness of the Greek Empire. By contrast to the lumbering strength of the Persian Empire, which took a generation to conquer all of its territory, the Greek Empire moved swiftly under Alexander the Great, and in a matter of three years, conquered the whole known world, including the Persian Empire. So we have the bear in chapter 7, then we have the leopard, and then we have the four heads on the leopard, and that was the fourfold division of the succeeding Greek Empire after Alexander the Great. All right, keep all of that in mind from chapter 7.
And now we come to chapter 8, and Daniel’s vision here. Daniel’s vision in chapter 8 zooms in now on those two beasts of chapter 7, the bear and the leopard, or Medo-Persia and Greece. He zooms in now on those in chapter 8, and really the whole of chapter 8 is devoted to those two kingdoms: the second and third beast of chapter 7, the Medo-Persian Empire and the Grecian Empire.
Now again, this is apocalyptic literature, highly symbolic. I think it’s helpful to remember this as something like a political cartoon. Political cartoons are drawn to say a lot without words. You see the picture, you see what’s symbolized in the picture, and it tells you the message of what the artist is intending to give. Well, apocalyptic literature is something like that, only it’s verbal cartoons that are drawn in our minds for us. And we have this highly symbolic language drawn up about this ram and then the goat and the horns and so on.
You might also recall, and we pointed out long ago, that chapters 2 through 7 of Daniel are written in Aramaic, and the purpose of that evidently is that these visions and these accounts have to do with the Gentile nations. And now, when we come to chapter 8, we return to the Hebrew language in the original, and the point there, I think, is to say that we are focusing now on the experience of the Jewish people themselves in Jerusalem, and the Temple, and the sacrifices, and all of this—and all of this at the hands of the coming Gentile powers that will rule over them. Well, that is a broad picture, then, of where we’ll go in chapter 8 today and then next time. Next week is Easter, and so we’ll take a break from Daniel again. Lord willing, we’ll be back to this the following Sunday.
The Vision
In verses 1 to 14 of chapter 8, then, we have the vision of the ram and the male goat. Verse 1 states the time of this vision. It is the third year of the reign of Belshazzar. You remember in chapter 5, we saw Belshazzar comes to his end, the end of chapter 5? Well, this is back before that in the third year of Belshazzar’s reign. Chapter 7 was the vision before that, and so if you’re wanting the chronology of things, chapter 5 of Daniel comes sometime after the events or the visions of chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 5 describes the fall of Belshazzar. Chapter 7 is the first vision in the first year of Belshazzar, and now the third year.
The place of this vision, in his vision, is verse 2; Daniel sees himself in Susa, Shushan, the palace. It’s an important city in the Persian Empire. It’s a capital of the province of Elam. It’s about 200 miles north of Babylon. It is down above the Persian Gulf, about a couple hundred miles above modern-day Kuwait. And Persia is a rising military power now at this time. This is still prophetic, it is still to come, and Daniel is telling about it.
Now we come to verse 3, and verses 3 to 14 we have the vision itself. If you’d like to mark verses 15 to the end, then, are the interpretation of the vision. So verses 1 to 14, the vision; verses 1 and 2, the setup for it; the vision proper, verses 3 to 14; and then the interpretation in verses 15 and following.
All right, the vision itself, verses 3 and 4: we have the ram with two horns, who did as he pleased. And it says he charged west and north and south with violent advance and no one could resist him. That expression there, “he did as he pleased,” you’ll see that a few times in the book of Daniel. It’s never a happy expression for the people of Israel. This king does as he pleased, and that doesn’t bode well for the Jews. It says he charged west and north and south. You wouldn’t normally speak of a ram going west, north, south, and those kinds of directions. You’d say he turns to the right, to the left, or straight ahead, or something like that. But clearly there’s a clue already now that we’re talking about something more than just the ram. This ram is symbolizing something more than that. And verse 4, no one could rescue from the ram’s power.
Then verses 5 and following, a male goat shows up, comes angrily from the west with such speed that it doesn’t even touch the ground. And there’s one horn that the goat has; the ram has two horns. The goat now has one horn, but this goat with one horn comes and the ram is just powerless before the goat, and the goat comes, breaks the ram’s two horns, and stomps on the ram himself and stomps him into the ground.
Verses 8 and following now, we have the goat becomes increasingly powerful, but then suddenly, the goat’s great horn breaks. And instead of that big horn, that one great horn on the goat, in its place come four horns. And out of one of these horns, verse 9, comes another horn, a little one. And then verses 10 and following describe the strength of this little horn and his successes. And he seems to have such success that he goes wherever he wants and his success is just unchecked. And then finally, verses 13 and 14, two angels show up in the vision, and one of them asks, “How long is this going to be?” And the answer comes back, “For 2,300 mornings and evenings,” that’s something over six years.
The Interpretation
Now then, we come to the interpretation in verses 15 and following, and Daniel is puzzling over this vision that he’s given. He wants to understand it. And the angel Gabriel shows up. This is the first mention of Gabriel in the scriptures. He will show up again, for instance, in Luke chapter 1. In fact, this is the first time in the Bible that we have any angel with a name. We’ll see more of that when we come to chapter 10 with Michael and so on. But this voice from heaven then comes and directs Gabriel to interpret the dream for Daniel. And Gabriel says to Daniel, in essence, “You know the situation that you’re in in Babylon. You’ve been defeated. You’ve been enslaved. Yeah, there’s more of that to come. And in fact, it’s going to be worse.” That’s the short version.
Verses 20 to 27 then, to the end of the chapter, Gabriel interprets the vision and provides some detail. We have these two animals and we are told that they are two successive kingdoms. The ram with two horns is Medo-Persia. The goat with the one horn, that’s the kingdom of Greece. So verse 20, the ram, he says, is Medo-Persia. The ram has two horns and we’re told in verse 3, both horns were high, big horns, but one was higher than the other, and the higher one came up last. That is the Medo-Persian Empire, just as in the previous vision in chapter 7, the bear raised up on one side: the Persian dominance of the Medo-Persian Empire. So now this ram has two big horns. Medo-Persia. Medes and the Persians. But it’s the Persians who came later and actually dominated in the relationship. And so we have one horn that came up later, and that’s actually the bigger horn. That’s Persia.
And then verse 4: “I saw this ram charging westward and northward and southward.” That’s the military campaigns of the Medo-Persian Empire. He goes west all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, goes north all the way to Asia Minor, south all the way to the Arabian Desert, eventually to Babylon, of course, that we see in chapter 5. And it tells us here, by the way, it doesn’t say he goes eastward. The Persians did very little to the east, unlike Alexander who comes later. And it tells us in verse 4, no beast could stand before him and there was no one who could rescue from his power. He did as he pleased and became great. The powerful Persian, Medo-Persian kingdom.
Then verse 5, now again, the angry male goat appears on the scene. “As I was considering, behold, a male goat came from the west across the face of the whole earth without touching the ground, and the goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes.” And then verse 21 now interprets that for us. The goat is the king of Greece, and the great horn—that’s the first king of the nation of Greece, or the Grecian Empire. Well, of course, here he’s talking about Alexander the Great, the greatest military mind to that date.
Many years ago, in God’s good providence, I had two years to study under an ancient historian. He wasn’t ancient; he specialized in ancient history. His undergraduate work, his graduate work, his postgraduate work, all of it was in ancient history and from the University of Minnesota, which has a strong ancient history department. His specialization was 18th Dynasty Egypt. He’s one of these few guys that you’ll ever meet that can actually read hieroglyphics, Egyptian hieroglyphics. He used to tell stories about going to visit the pyramids and taking the tours, the official tours of the thing, and you have the tour guide pointing out the hieroglyphics and telling you what it says, and it’s all just made-up yarns, and he’s just snickering up his sleeve because he knows what it really says.
Fascinating guy, and it was a fascinating couple of years studying with him. One large section of one of the courses that I took with him focused on Alexander the Great and his military campaigns, and tracing out his campaigns and tracing out the military strategy of it all and things like that. Each time after class, I’d come home and tell Kim what Alexander the Great was doing that day. But it was a fascinating time of study, and to see what a brilliant military strategist that Alexander the Great was. He had a well-disciplined army, tough, loyal. He had masterful use of the cavalry. They would enter the battle at just the critical moment, from just the right angle, and they would just thoroughly rout every enemy in front of them, sometimes against just insurmountable odds, just ridiculous odds, and yet he would go away with few casualties and wiping out the army in front of him against all odds.
And all of that comes into view in verse 5, where it says, “he came from the West across the face of the whole earth without touching the ground.” That’s the remarkable speed with which Alexander the Great then comes and conquers all of these successive kingdoms. We saw in chapter 7 in verse 6 that he was a leopard with wings on its back. Again, talking about the swift defeat of all of his enemies. So the Persian kingdom takes a whole generation to conquer all of its territories. Alexander comes along and in three years conquers not only the whole of the Persian empire, but much more, and virtually all of the known world at that time; he makes his way even east into Afghanistan and even into the Indus Valley itself. Magnificent campaigns in an evil, brutal kind of way, but magnificent campaigns and brilliant military strategists, and so he comes, this goat comes from the West, comes from Greece, without even touching the ground, he’s so swift. Or in the language of chapter 7’s vision, it’s a leopard which is already agile and swift, but it’s a leopard with four wings on his back. It is said that Alexander the Great conquered everything so fast that in three years when he’s done, he actually sat down and cried because there was nothing left to conquer. I feel so bad for the man.
Verses 6 and 7, we find Alexander the Great’s overthrow of the Medo-Persian Empire. “He came to the ram with two horns, which I had seen standing on the banks of the canal, and he ran at him with his powerful wrath. I saw him come close to the ram and he was enraged against him and struck the ram and broke his two horns. And the ram had no power to stand before him, but he cast him down to the ground and trampled on him. And there was no one who could rescue the ram from his power.” History tells us that it was just three quick battles and Alexander’s armies toppled the entire Medo-Persian Empire.
Verse 8, then the goat became exceedingly great. This is Alexander’s continued exploits that came. Keep in mind all of this is 400 years later that is prophesied here. Alexander’s continued exploits there in verse 8 go beyond Medo-Persia, as I say, all the way into even to the Indus Valley. All of this is prophesied for us, fascinating history in advance that’s told, and we have then Alexander the Great and his successes foretold now in the 6th century BC. With the arrival of Alexander and all of his successors that we’ll see in a moment, the map changes very quickly—a different culture, a different language, different political alliances, and this is what we call the Hellenistic period. It comes from the Greek word for Greek, Hellene. Anybody named Helen? Greek. Helene. Greek is what the word is. So the Hellenistic age is the Greek age when Alexander and his successors now are spreading the Greek language, the Greek culture, and so on. To all of us, this is ancient history. To Daniel, this is 400 years still in the future.
Verse 8: we have a major turn in the story. “The goat became exceedingly great, but when he was strong, the great horn was broken. And instead of it, there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven.” And then now, dropping down to verse 22, we have the interpretation of that. “As for the horn that was broken, in place of which four others arose, four kingdoms shall arise from his nation, but not with his power.” So we have then the horn of the goat is broken. The horn, Alexander the Great, the first king. Alexander is at the height of his power. He’s just 30 years, in his 30s, and he dies of malaria. And he’s done. He didn’t anticipate a death that young, and so no provision was made for any successors. And there’s this jockeying for position between his generals and the kingdom broke up into several different kinds of fragments. But here it specifies four of the primary ones; four conspicuous horns inherit his kingdom. And these are his successors, the most powerful generals who are squabbling for power over these areas, and it finally settles down. This is the same as the leopard in chapter 7, the leopard with four heads. And so Alexander’s kingdom now is divided up, and the most prominent of them are these four horns on this goat: “great horn is broken, in its place come four horns.”
And these are the four kingdoms. One, the Ptolemies in the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt. You’ve heard of them. The most famous of the Ptolemaic rulers, of course, is Cleopatra. And then we have the Seleucid dynasty. Seleucus, one of the generals, takes that, and that is in Syria in the north, capital there in Antioch. All of the important rulers, kings in the Seleucid dynasty are named Seleucus or Antiochus, one of the two. We’ll see that name Antiochus quite a bit in the rest of Daniel. There’s the Antigonid dynasty in Macedonia. Some have suggested—in fact it’s very popularly suggested—that the fourth kingdom is Lysimachus in Thrace in Asia Minor, but he was sort of a nobody and it never developed into much, didn’t last that long. It’s doubtful that he would be the conspicuous, the fourth conspicuous horn, and it’s probably Attalus, the Attalid dynasty in Pergamum in Eastern Asia Minor. So these four, the four horns that grow up in the place of the great horn, Alexander, that grow in his kingdom now in large measures shared among these four.
Verse 22 then says these four kingdoms arise from Alexander’s empire, but not with his power. That is, they don’t have the power that Alexander the Great had. But of those four, it is the Ptolemaic and the Seleucid dynasties that are most important, and that’s what we focus on now for the rest of the chapter. Now, we have the Seleucid dynasty in the north, in Syria, capital in Antioch. Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, capital in Alexandria, down to the south. What lies between? Palestine. And so we have this continued squabbling between the King of the North and the King of the South. We’ll see this in detail in chapter 11, where prophecy with magnificent detail is given ahead of time. But the squabbling, and what they’re squabbling over, is who controls what land. And if you’re Palestine in the middle, that’s not a good thing. Palestine remained under the Ptolemaic control for a long time, but finally by 198 BC, it fell into the control of the Seleucid dynasty in the north and was a province now of Syria.
Well, this begins the period of trouble now that Daniel hears about in his vision. Back to verse 9. Verse 9 skips forward about 150 years and we have this little horn rising up among the four horns—one particular ruler that rises out of the Syrian kingdom. So, “out of one of them comes a little horn which grew up exceedingly great toward the south, toward the east, toward the glorious land. It grew great even to the host of heaven, and some of the host and some of the stars it threw down to the ground and trampled on them. It became great, even as great as the prince of the host. And the regular burnt offering was taken away from him, place of his sanctuary was overthrown and a host will be given over to it together with the regular burnt offering because of transgression and it will throw truth to the ground and it will act and prosper.”
Well, you don’t have to know the exact reference point of each of those statements to know this doesn’t sound good for Israel. In fact, verse 10, it grew exceedingly great toward the south, to the east, toward the glorious land. It took the hosts and trampled on them and even the prince of the host and trampled on that. Verse 11, that is, he became as great as God himself. Yeah, it’s a hyperbole, it’s an overstatement, but it’s reflecting how it seemed both to the little horn and to everybody else, and particularly to those in Israel who are being stomped on by it. And it says, verse 11, he overthrows the sanctuary. Verse 12, he throws truth to the ground, a complete disregard, complete contempt for divine revelation. We’ll have none of it. Eventually, as we’ll see in chapter 11, he outlaws the Jews’ religion entirely. So he prospers for, with just unchecked power, that’s the power of this little horn that arises among these four horns. One of the kings of Syria, the Seleucid dynasty, rises to great power.
Now all of that, along with verse 23 and following, we have then the rise of the most sinister figure in the Hellenistic age and in all of Jewish history, and that is Antiochus IV. I told you the kings of this kingdom are all named Seleucus or Antiochus. This is Antiochus IV. His father was Antiochus the Great, but this is Antiochus IV. He named himself Epiphanes: “Manifest,” or “appearing,” as in God manifest, God appearing. A man rather full of himself, of course, but he’s a tyrant king, and he’s the fearsome, most notorious arch enemy of the Jewish people.
Verse 23, he’s called a king of bold face, one who understands riddles. If you have the New International Version, it’s a fierce-looking king, a master of intrigue. Or if you have the New American Standard, he’s insolent and skilled in intrigue. Or if you have the old King James Version, a king of fierce countenance and understands dark sentences. Well, whichever translation you take, however you read that, you get the point that here we have a fierce, violent king, a man who is brilliant in an evil kind of way, and he’s a master deceiver.
And then verse 24: “His power shall be great, but not by his own power.” That is, the power he has is derived from Alexander the Great. And then again, verse 24, his unchecked defeat of Israel: “He shall cause fearful destruction and shall succeed in what he does and destroy mighty men and the people who are the saints. By his cunning he shall make deceit prosper under his hand, and in his own mind he shall become great. Without warning he shall destroy many. He shall even rise up against the prince of princes, and he shall be broken, but by no human hand.”
Antiochus Epiphanes had this great ambition to unify all of the people of his kingdom. That actually was the ambition of Alexander the Great as well, to bring them all under one culture and one language, to unify his people. It’s a brilliant strategy. It helps to quell the possibility of rebellion when you share the same culture and the same language and try to unify the same religion as well. This is the Hellenistic policy of Alexander and now of Antiochus himself—spreading the Greek religion, the Greek language, Greek culture, and this is of course what gives us the Greek world of the New Testament when we come there.
Well, as you can imagine, that attempt to unify all of his peoples under Greek culture and Greek religion and Greek language and all, that’s going to be a problem for the Jews. We’ll find that there were many that did go along with him, as you can imagine, but many also could only rebel against that. They are not going to worship Antiochus as he demanded. They are not going to participate in the Olympic Games in the nude as they were done in those days by the Greeks. They’re not going to participate in the false worship. They’re not going to be happy when he puts a statue of Zeus in the altar. They’re not going to be happy when Antiochus takes the highest bid for the high priesthood in Jerusalem and deposes one king, or a high priest, so they can install the one that bribed him and bought him off. And then when the next guy comes along and buys him off again, and so he deposes that high priest and brings in another. This just isn’t going well for the people of Israel, and they’re not happy.
At one point, finally, there was this rumor that while Antiochus was down battling against the king of the south in Egypt, there’s this rumor that Antiochus had been killed and so there’s a revolt in Jerusalem and one of the high priests is leading in a revolt against it and shuts up the current high priest in hiding and all of that. Antiochus meanwhile has not died in Egypt and he hears about this revolt and he comes back to Jerusalem. That wasn’t a happy time for the Jews either. This is just a time of slaughter and a time of great fierce opposition against the Jews. And we’ll see more of that next time. We can’t get any further than that today.
God Tells The Future
A couple of observations just taking us this far. Number one, which I think is just fascinating that every believing heart has to just love: and that is that God tells the future. He does it in fascinating detail and in fascinating accuracy. Now it’s apocalyptic symbolism, of course, but he gives us names, names of the kingdoms. He gives us chronology and successions. 400 years ahead of time. It’s just a marvelous kind of thing. And in fact, Daniel’s prophecies, both here in chapter 8 and, as again, even more details we’ll see in chapter 7, are so precise, with so many precise details, that the critics look at it and said, it just can’t be. It has to have been written after the fact. Antiochus will have his place in history, his role, just as God predicts through Daniel in this vision here. And Daniel will take that up, as I say, at length in chapter 11. We’ll see more of it next week in chapter 8, and then again when we get to chapter 11.
God Can Tell The Future
Number one, God tells the future. Number two, God can tell the future. He can do this because it’s all just an outworking of his own purpose. In fact, we’ve pointed out many times through the book of Daniel what Old Testament students like to call divine passives. The passive voice that’s used—”this was done,” “this was done to him,” and “this was taken from him,” and “he was broken.” The passive voice that’s used, we have that here in chapter 8 as well. Verse 8: at the height of his power, the horn was broken. We’re left to think, well, who broke that? Well, it was God who broke it. He’s carrying out his purpose. Verse 12: because of transgression, they were given over. Verse 25: Antiochus, this king of fierce countenance, shall be broken, but not by human hand.
Antiochus only seemed to continue unchecked. All of that is outward appearance, and it’s what we’ve seen so many times through the book of Daniel: that God is still God even when it appears to be otherwise. That God ruled over Antiochus as well, and when his time was up, his time was up. God brings about and brings to an end the rage of evil rulers like Antiochus, but only according to his own purpose. And so, in chapter 8, we are back to Daniel’s theme that we have seen all through the book of Daniel, and that is: God is king. God is king over all.
We’ve said that probably the key verse to understanding Daniel’s prophecy as a whole is in Daniel chapter 2 and verse 21: that God removes kings and God sets up kings. And all of this that we see on the international scene in Daniel’s day, 400 years later according to prophecy, and ever since—all of it is the outworking of God’s own purpose.
Of course, Reformed folks have often gloried in this doctrine of divine sovereignty. Reformed theologians have often felt the pressure to say, “Don’t overstate it, that God has control of so much. What we ought to be content with saying is that God’s eye is over history,” or something like that. And it’s just never been satisfactory for us. We don’t want to say, “Oh, we’ll say his eye is over history,” of course. We don’t want to say just that. We want to say his hand is on history; he is directing things according to his own purpose. And Daniel is given to us in large measure just to tell us that again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Even in the advance of evil, even at a time of Israel’s suffering, it is God carrying out his purpose. We will be told in verse 12 that this comes as punishment for Israel’s unbelief. We have that little phrase stuck in the middle there, “because of transgression.” But yet even so, it is God’s purpose being carried out.
And that is to say—and this is really, I suppose, the better way to say Daniel’s theme—not just that God is king, but because God is king, the kingdom of God will prevail. This is the God who does all his will, and not Nebuchadnezzar and not Belshazzar, not Antiochus and not anyone else will ever frustrate the purpose of this God. He has sent his son, the promised Davidic king. He’s been announced and he’s gone to the cross and established his rule. God raised him from the dead in glory. He is ascended to heaven where he’s seated at the right hand of the Father. And there he has assumed the throne of the universe. And in God’s good time, God will bring his kingdom to its full consummation until no one, no one will ever rebel again.
We’ll see more of this then in chapter 8 next time. Let’s bow for prayer. Our Father, what a fascinating thing to see that our God reigns over all of history. What seems so impossible to us—telling the future, telling the future with such precise detail, such graphic accuracy—is easy for our God who reigns over all. We take great confidence in that, all things are in your hands and that your purpose will be accomplished. Encourage us, your people, we pray in that, in Jesus’ name, amen.