The angel Gabriel's appearances in scripture are examined, beginning with his announcement to Mary that she would conceive Jesus. Gabriel's message included the prophecy that Jesus would reign on David's throne forever, a future kingdom that the sermon suggests is often misunderstood as only a thousand-year reign. The sermon then shifts to Gabriel's role in interpreting a vision for Daniel, where a ram and a goat represent the Medo-Persian and Grecian empires, respectively, and a "little horn" foreshadows a future fierce king who will oppose God and desecrate the temple. This future king is linked to the current geopolitical situation in the Middle East, particularly concerning Iraq and its threat to Israel, suggesting that the focus of biblical prophecy is indeed on this region.
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And Zacharias then was unable to speak. And he came out of the temple, and he could not talk to the people out there. And they perceived he had seen a vision in the temple, verse twenty-two, because he made signs to them, but he remained speechless. And he departed to his own house, and before long his wife Elizabeth was with child. She hid herself for the next five months, verse twenty-four. because she was surprised how the Lord had dealt with her when he looked on her to take away her reproach. In that society, as in many societies today, for a woman to be childless is a great reproach to her.
And this was a time of great rejoicing for her. And then in the sixth month of her pregnancy, verse twenty-six, the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Nazareth a city of Galilee named Nazareth. This is our second scene. Here is Gabriel, six months later, dispatched from heaven, from the throne room of God, to go to a little place in northern Galilee. His first appearance was in Jerusalem. Now he's up in Nazareth, up in the mountains of the hill country in northern Israel. Verse twenty-seven, to a virgin a spouse to a man whose name was Joseph.
of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her and said, Hail thou who art highly favored, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women. Quite an introduction here. He comes to Mary, who was legally married to Joseph, but the... Marriage had not yet been consummated. In the custom of that day, the legal part of it was all taken care of earlier, and then at the time of the traditional marriage ceremonies, the bride or the groom went to the house of the bride or however it was and so forth, and the marriage was consummated. But I don't like the modern translations when they describe Mary as being engaged to Joseph.
Or if that translation was correct, then you'd have to say that Jesus Christ was conceived out of wedlock. And I don't see that he was in the Bible. Mary and Joseph were legally married, and the old King James Version is quite right in calling her his wife. Legally, she was bound to him by the legal ties of marriage. But, of course, that marriage had not been consummated and was not consummated until after the baby was born. Jesus Christ was born to a virgin. A great miracle. as will be explained to her in a few minutes when she asked the angel why this was the case. But he starts out by saying that she is highly favored, blessed among women, and she was troubled at this saying and considered in her mind what this was all about and what it meant.
And then in verse thirty he says to her, fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God. And now his announcement to her. You will conceive in your womb, verse thirty one. You will bring forth a son and shall call his name Jesus. You might sometime want to ask somebody by way of a little quiz question. I don't like to call them Bible trivia because I don't think there are trivia in the Bible and certainly not this question, but to whom did the instructions come that the baby was to be named Jesus? Did they come to Mary or did they come to Joseph? Then you will find if you search that both Mary and Joseph we're given this same instruction.
In Joseph's case, it was after the pregnancy was discovered that an angel appeared to him. That's in Matthew one, and we're not told what angel that was that came to Joseph. It might have been Gabriel. Very interesting, though. I studied not too long ago the first chapter, second chapter of Matthew's Gospel, the Christmas story, as it appears in Matthew. He was rather struck by the fact that Matthew really ignores Mary. It concentrates on Joseph. Whereas Luke's Gospel focuses on Mary. She's the central character in the Christmas story. And Joseph in Matthew. I think in our own rendering of the Christmas story in the manger scenes and all that, Joseph sort of gets pushed into the background. I mean, he's sort of an accessory to the fact he wasn't really the father and all that.
He just sort of had to go along for legal purposes or whatever. And he doesn't get the importance that the Bible gives him. Joseph was the legal father of the of the Lord Jesus. And it was Joseph that gave Jesus the title, the right of royalty, the right to the throne. Mary was also descended from David, but by a much more roundabout way, and that wasn't the line of kings. So it was through Joseph that Jesus Christ had the descendancy, the right to take the throne of King David, as is going to be told to Mary here about him. So they're both very important. And there is that difference in the two stories.
You might meditate on that sometime and notice how that focus takes place. Now, how far did I get down here? Verse thirty-one, you shall call his name Jesus. He shall be great. He shall be called the Son of the Highest. And the Lord, God shall give unto him the throne of his Father David. My, what a message this is. Talk about an exalted message for an angel or a human to bring, anybody to bring, Jesus Christ will take the throne of David someday. He will be king on David's throne. You know, despite what some of the Bible writers say, I don't think the Jewish people were mistaken in expecting that the Messiah was going to rise to the throne of an earthly kingdom.
John the Baptist preached repent, for the kingdom of heaven is in hand, and they understood quite clearly that he was talking about an earthly kingdom in which the throne of David would be set up again. a Jewish monarchy with Jewish territory in the Holy Land. They understood that. And many people today say, oh, no, they misunderstood. It was a spiritual kingdom, not a physical kingdom. No, I don't think that was the trouble. The trouble was that John the Baptist attached the word repent to the message. He said, you've got to repent for the kingdom of evidence. And that was the offensive word in his message that caused the people to reject the Messiah. Then, too, they were not able to understand how, if he was the Messiah, he would be crucified by Roman soldiers.
The Jews require a sign, that is a sign of power, the Apostle Paul tells us, and for Jesus Christ to hang on a cross nailed there by Roman soldiers was an evidence of great weakness. How could he possibly be the Messiah? That they didn't understand either. But nevertheless, the prophecy is here. God was going to give him the throne of his father David. In the book of Romans tells us in chapter ten, I think it is, that the Lord, after the completion of the Gentile church, will set up once again the house of David, the family of David on the Jewish throne. And then verse thirty-three, he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
Now we make a little mistake, I believe, if we emphasize too much the thousand-year reign of Christ. It is true the book of Revelation identifies a thousand-year period that is commonly called the millennium and that Jesus Christ will reign on the throne of David during those thousand years. And then there will be a brief interruption, according to the book of Revelation, when Satan is released out of his prison and will go out and stir up the last great rebellion. And then the devil will be put into the lake of fire. where the beast and the false prophet will already have been, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth, and then the Lord Jesus will go on reigning in the new Jerusalem over that new earth and the universe. And so all the, virtually all the kingdom prophecies in the Old Testament emphasize not a thousand year period.
None of them say anything about a thousand years. He shall reign forever and ever, the words that are sung in the Messiah. And here it is again. He shall reign over the house of Jacob forever. and of his kingdom there shall be no end. That was the message that the angel Gabriel brought to Mary. And then she said in verse thirty-four, how can this be? I'm a virgin. And he said, the Holy Spirit will come on you. The holy thing that will be born of you shall be called the Son of God. And then he told her that her cousin Elizabeth had also conceived a son in her old age, and it was now the sixth month. He knew about that because he's the one who had gone and told Elizabeth that.
And Mary said in verse thirty-eight, behold, the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word, and the angel Gabriel departed from her. She arose and went to the hill country of Judea. She made a long trip at this point and went down into Judah, She was still, of course, free to go where she wanted to go without Joseph, because they were not together yet. And she went down to Judah, into the hill country, to the northwest of Jerusalem, and went to the house of Zacharias and greeted her relative, cousin, according to the King James in verse thirty-six. The new King James says relative. I think there may be some question as to how broad that word is, but they were certainly related.
She greeted Elizabeth and when Elizabeth heard her greeting, the six-month babe in the womb of Elizabeth moved. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke out and blessed the Virgin Mary. We'll leave the story at that point and go back to the Old Testament, to the book of Daniel, chapter eight. After the great lengthy prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, we come to a somewhat shorter one, Daniel, the great prophetic book of the Old Testament, and we come to Daniel chapter eight. Remember our topic here is not Mary but Gabriel.
We are meeting, we are getting acquainted with an angelic VIP of some prominence. And so we look at Daniel chapter eight, and in this chapter In the first verse of the chapter we find that King Belchazar, the Babylonian king, the last of them, was on the throne. The Babylonian empire was in its waning days. Daniel is now to receive a vision. And in his vision he sees himself not in Babylon but at Shushan in verse two, which is about two hundred miles to the east in the land of Persia, the land that is now Iran. Because the vision was going to have something to do with the land of Iran or Persia.
He sees himself on the banks of the river that flows through that city, the river Eulai. He lifts up his eyes in verse three in his vision and he sees a ram standing before the river. Now in Daniel and in Revelation when you read about these visions of animals, don't visualize something the size of a horse or cow, but to make it very large, large, large animals such as if they came walking through might step on the top of this building and crush it right down. I believe as I read these passages that that is the nature of the vision. I may be wrong about that, but you meditate on these various visions and think about the imagery of them, and you'll probably get that impression that these were huge animals that were seen.
This is a ram, male sheep. He had two horns, one higher than the other. And in verse four, Daniel sees the ram. extending his territory as an animal will do, staking out the dominion in which he is going to be supreme over his part of the animal kingdom, moving to the west and the north and the south. And no animals were able to stand before him. He drove them all away. And he did according to his will. He did what he wanted to do and he became great. Of course, you know enough of the book of Daniel to know that these are images that represent great empires that come on the scene. In this case, the Persian Empire that lasted so long, was so powerful in the Middle East.
And then while Daniel is watching this ram extend his territory, according to verse five, he sees a billy goat coming from far in the west, charging over the face of the land, hardly touching the ground, and the goat had a large notable horn, a single horn in the middle of his forehead, and he came charging into the ram, attacking him in the fury of his power, and there was a terrific battle. Oh, I would like to see that on videotape, frankly. I wish there was some way where we could see this battle take place because it must have been a great scene. But the ram was defeated. First his two horns were broken in the middle of verse seven.
Then he had no power to stand before the billy goat. And this animal that had been so triumphant is knocked down to the ground. Now the billy goat is stamping all over him, jumping on him, pounding on him until he's killed him. Now the billy goat reigns supreme. And out of his great horn in verse eight, somehow is broken. We're not told how in the vision, but it's broken. It's gone. And now four smaller horns grow up in its place. And after a while... One of those smaller horns spouts, a little horn comes out of the side of it and starts growing and growing and growing until it dominates everything.
And now this little horn has been a great horn on the head of the billy goat. And when the billy goat rears up on his hind legs, the horn scrapes the sky and scrapes the stars out of the sky. They begin falling down to the ground in the vision. Doesn't fit modern astronomy, of course, but it does fit the type of a scene that you'd get if you visualize a huge billy goat roaring up and his horn scraping across the sky. Rather vivid, a dream type of a thing. And what does it say about this horn then in verse ten? It grew great, even to the host of heaven, that's the stars, it cast some of the host and of the stars to the ground and stamped on them.
When these stars were scraped off the sky, they fell down and then the billy goats started jumping on them. Verse eleven, yea, he magnified himself. Now the imagery changes, as dreams will do. And now it's no longer a horn, it's a person, a man who magnifies himself, even to the prince of the host. And by him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of his sanctuary was cast down. And a host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason of the transgression and so forth. And it talks about the defilement now of the Jewish temple. We'll skip down to verse fifteen. When I had seen, when I Daniel had seen the vision and sought for the meaning, then behold, there stood before me one having the appearance of a man.
Daniel now has seen this vision and he's wondering, what in the world does this mean? I wish I could understand this vision. And he goes over to his mind and tries to figure it all out. What could it possibly mean? And then all of a sudden the vision continues, at least to the extent that there's a man standing before him. on the bank of the river there. And then he hears a voice, not the voice of this man, but out over the middle of the river, there's another voice that speaks from the middle of the river. He can't see anything out there, whether there's a cloud or fog or whatever, or just nothing to be seen, but a voice. He said, I heard a man's voice between the banks of the Uli, who called and said, Gabriel, make this man know, make this man understand the vision.
That's the last part of verse sixteen. That's the voice in the river, the voice of God, no doubt, calling out to Gabriel. Gabriel, make this man understand the vision. Now we have identified the man who is standing before Daniel, though it's the angel Gabriel, whom we have seen in Luke's Gospel, but this is a long time before the events in Luke's Gospel. So Gabriel comes near where Daniel stands. Daniel is afraid and he falls with his face to the ground and says, understand, O man. Gabriel says, at the time of the end the vision shall be. It has to do with the last days. And in verse eighteen, Daniel is in a deep sleep, face down in the ground, and Gabriel touches them and sets them upright and says again, now what I'm going to talk to you about has to do with the last days.
The ram that you saw with the two horns, those are the two kings of Medi and Persia. Not much detail there about the Persian Empire. You'll find that elsewhere in Daniel. And then the rough goat is the king of Greece. This is Alexander the Great who conquered the Persian Empire in the very short order. The great horn that is between his eyes is the first king, and this is a Grecian kingdom that was going to come along. And being broken, four other kings came up in its place, took the place of Alexander. His generals divided up his kingdom. When he died, I think it was the age of thirty-three, of alcoholic problems after conquering the whole civilized world. and these generals divided up the territory.
And verse twenty-three, in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king of fierce countenance will arise. A king of fierce countenance will arise. Verse twenty-four, his power shall be mighty. He shall destroy wonderfully and shall prosper and continue and destroy the mighty and holy people. He's going to cut off the sacrifices as we saw back in the vision in the Jewish temple he's going to stand up against the prince of princes in verse twenty five and he'll be broken without hand now the details of this vision and more about it I wrote about I wrote a course on the book of Daniel for Emmaus about thirty years ago it will be on sale in the bookstore this week it was my privilege to serve as the chairman of the board, the Board of Trustees correspondence committee that works with the correspondence director.
And during those years I served, Paul Sap was the director. And one of the things that we did together, working together, was make proposals to the board that made it possible to cut the price of Ameas courses virtually in half, bring them down considerably, taking the cost of grading out of them with a major factor there. And they had gotten way overpriced and out of line. So this little booklet's going to cost two dollars and sixty-five cents. And there are some things in it that I think you might find helpful if you're here during the week. You might like to pick up one in the bookstore. But let me read about a paragraph or two from it here that sort of summarizes this. There's a first interpretation of this passage, at least of verses nine to twelve there.
It has to do with a Syrian king ruled in Antioch. It was a Greek king, but ruled in Syria because the significance of the Greek kingdom was not Greece, but it was Babylon, that is Iraq and Iran, which is Persia and Syria, these powerful countries of the Middle East that have no use for us and no use for Israel. and there was a terrible king in the days gone by named Antiochus Epiphanes who destroyed thousands of Jews and tens of thousands and defiled the Jewish temple and broke off the sacrifices. It is generally agreed that the interpretation of the destructive horn is not to be limited to Antiochus Epiphanes but that it must also include a still future monarch foreshadowed by that earlier king.
Two factors lead to this conclusion. The first is the repeated mention of the time of the end, verses seventeen, nineteen, and twenty-three. When transgressors come to the full, verse twenty-three. The second is the reference to Christ and the breaking of the wicked king. The king who stands against the prince of princes is particularly in view in verses twenty-three to twenty-five. The focus of the prophecy has shifted to a more distant day. Antiochus prefigures a future king of fierce continents who will exalt himself as God and desecrate the Jewish temple and whom the Lord will destroy with the brightness of his coming. And of course this one who was Antiochus was in Syria and the one who comes in his place will probably arise up in Syria or Iraq or in Iran and be a terrible enemy of the Jewish people.
And that's coming. Now I want to change the subject. seemingly leave that altogether and talk about something else for just a couple of minutes. And when we get done with this sidetrack, we will be right back where we started, an enemy of the Jewish people in the Middle East. The Gulf War. Why are we there? I heard an elected member of the House of Representatives, a woman from I think one of the southern states, say on television a few weeks ago, I haven't the least idea what we're doing over there in the Persian Gulf. I thought to myself, this is terrible if a member of Congress has so little understanding of history and world events that she doesn't know what in the world we're doing over there.
Why are we there? Seven reasons. Three of them why we're not there and four of them why we are. First of all, we are not there because of oil. The protesters who wave these signs, no blood for oil, show an abysmal ignorance of history. They say if Kuwait's main export was olives, not oil, we wouldn't be there. Well, that's true, but not for the reason that they imply. We wouldn't be there because Iraq would not have bothered to seize that poor little land of olive trees. And there wouldn't be any crisis over there. But surely, preacher, we want to keep the price of oil down, don't we? And that's why we're there. No. That's not why we're there, because if Saddam Hussein took Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and controlled all of that oil, and he jacked the price up, we would do just what we did when OPEC jacked it up.
We would stop using the boom and stop, and we would drill our own oil, and we would find alternate sources of energy. So we can only get the price up so high, and if he drove it up too high, and then we'd develop the oil shale out west and all that. So it's demand that sets the price, not the dictators. Second, why are we there not... Democracy. Kuwait is not a democracy and neither is Saudi Arabia. Both of them are monarchies, but not dictatorships. They are governed by laws and not by the whims of a tyrant. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. If you count Turkey, if you get a little farther out from what's usually called the Middle East, then Turkey also is a democracy. We're not there for democracy. We're not protecting democracy over there, nor our own democracy because ours is not threatened.
Third, we're not there for religious freedom. Nobody claims this because religious freedom is not a concern to our modern liberals. There is no religious freedom in Saudi Arabia. Maybe there's some in Kuwait, and I've heard that there have been some assemblies there in Kuwait, at least for the foreign workers. Iraq, by contrast, has a fairly substantial Christian population. There are no Christians in the government of Saudi Arabia, none whatsoever. It wouldn't be allowed. But Tarik Asis, Iraq's foreign minister, is a Christian. Not an evangelical, but he's not a Muslim. He's a Christian. Orthodox or whatever branch of Christianity is over there. There is more religious freedom in Iraq than there is in Saudi Arabia, just as there is more in Jordan than there is in Israel.
It is not for oil. If not for oil, not for democracy or not for religious freedom, why do we send a half a million men to the Persian Gulf? What are our reasons for being there? Number one, autonomy. An independent nation, a member of the United Nations, has been swallowed by a big neighbor, If this goes down, all the small nations of the world have caused a fear. Singapore, next to Malaysia, Belgium, swallowed up once before, and that got us into war. Belize, on the borders of Guatemala and maybe Switzerland, Denmark, Uruguay, down there between two big South American giants. This is why the UN Security Council was so unanimous in supporting an involvement. The UN has to protect its members from arbitrary seizure of of the little ones by the big ones.
And that's a major reason for going. And anybody who has lived through the Second World War understands that completely. We didn't get in the Second World War because of the Holocaust. We didn't know anything about it at that time. We got into it because a big, powerful, military nation was overrunning smaller countries in Europe, two of them in Europe, and one of them in the Pacific doing the same thing. Second reason we're there is leadership. And this is not talked about. I have yet to hear one single commentator or politician say so, but I believe one of the major reasons we are there is because of American world leadership. This is foundational.
The role of a great power is to keep the peace and protect the weak. And Britain played that role for many years, and now it has become the role of the United States. So America has to put up or shut up. either go to the rescue of bad situations or withdraw behind our oceans, become isolationist, and let someone else lead the world. And this undoubtedly is a factor in the thinking of people like our president. He understands America's role in the world, and I think most of us do too, because we're not in danger from Iraq here in the homeland. But the question is, do we want to be a world power and it stand for somewhat of justice and righteousness in the world?
The third reason we're there is for security. This has to do with the future, keeping the balance of power in the Middle East, allowing no one to overwhelm the others. But Iraq, with the seventh largest army and massive air power, was like Nicaragua and Central America. So it was a matter of stop him now before it's too late, or have to fight him later on when it's too dangerous to fight him. Hence the Hitler comparison. Churchill called World War II the unnecessary war. If we had gone against Hitler when he was overrunning the Reich, the Ruhr there, or Austria, or even Czechoslovakia, we wouldn't have had to fight the Second World War.
By the time we got to Poland, it was too late. With Saddam Hussein, there's the complication of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, or as they say today, his NBC capacity, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. capacity, five or ten years from now would be so severe that we wouldn't dare put our troops over there where he could nuke them. So it was now or never to deal with this man. And security is probably a major factor. And fourth, and this is the only reason that is exclusively a U.S. motivation, I think, Israel. Why did Stephen Solars, representative from New York State, a Jewish man, and a band of Jewish Congressmen and Senators break ranks with the Democratic leadership and co-sponsor the war resolution with the Republicans in support of the President.
If they hadn't have done that, it would have gone down because the Democratic leadership was against it. Why did they do it? Because they knew, they understood that Israel would be the ultimate target of a victorious Iraq. Once in leadership of the Arabs, the animosity toward Israel would be displayed in a very substantial way. Now I want to go and talk about this a little bit more on Tuesday night. The significance of the rise of Middle Eastern power and the terrible animosity toward Israel that threatens Israel there and say to you that there is a coming world leader who will arise in Syria or in Babylon or in Iraq and threaten Israel.
The one perhaps that is called the Antichrist. There's some confusion about the use of that term and there's an extensive footnote in this Daniel course that talks about that, that it could be very valuable in understanding why that confusion exists in terminology. But there is coming a world dictator and I believe that we've made a mistake in recent years in putting the focus of prophecy on Western Europe. I know I did that myself when I wrote this course about thirty years ago, and I quoted Winston Churchill, and I said, Winston Churchill in his famous speech at Zurich in nineteen forty-six looked over the wreckage of Europe left by the Second World War and prescribed a remedy to transform the whole scene, is to recreate the European family or as much of it as we can and provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace and safety in freedom.
It is too early to try to identify the ten toes of Daniel's great image, but gradual progress in the direction proposed by Mr. Churchill suggests that the scenery on the stage is being arranged for the open curtain of the final act of the times of the Gentiles, the revived old Roman Empire. And, you know, for years people have been counting the toes, and that whole scenario began to break down when the European economic community reached ten and started heading for eleven. Now they're up around twelve or thirteen now. and we missed the boat somewhere and we missed it by assuming that Western Europe was the fulfillment when the focus of the prophecies of Daniel is on the Middle East and we forgot that is not Western Europe that the Roman Empire itself extended where all those other three kingdoms were Babylon Persia and Greece in the Middle East and the great enemy of the Jewish people will probably arrive in the Middle East is it Saddam Hussein not likely it seems that Saddam Hussein probably will be defeated in this situation.
He could become the great Antichrist, but it's likely someone else who will come along after him. But what he has succeeded in doing is helping us realize that the focus of the Bible prophecies is right on that area. His capital is about forty, fifty miles from old ancient Babylon, the great enemy of the people of God, and he seems well to be a preliminary, a predecessor of the king of fierce countenance, that Gabriel told Daniel about in those days. There is one more reference to Gabriel in the ninth chapter of Daniel, Lord willing. We'll start with that on Tuesday night and talk about it briefly, and then we'll go on to Michael, who has a very different role, but gives us a tremendous insight into what VIP angels do.
Shall we bow in prayer? come before you in troublesome times, knowing that great danger exists in the Middle East. Israel is threatened. Israel not even in the war is tried to be brought in by the dictator of Iraq or his own purposes. Our troops are there. We pray for them. We pray that our president will have great wisdom. It all looks so simple as long as Iran keeps out of it. as long as Syria keeps out of it. And even so, if they do keep out, it could be a terrible situation, Lord.
We pray, Heavenly Father, that we pray for peace in the Middle East. We pray for peace of Jerusalem. We realize, Father, that the enemy are going to target the Jewish people. And if not today, then terrible times still lie ahead for Israel. Pray for the leadership of Israel, Lord, that there'll be more understanding of the plight of the Palestinians, and they'll let those people go back to work and plant their crops and stop waging economic war against them while they have this opportunity to do it without the world paying much attention. Pray, Father, that the hatred that exists in both Jewish and Arab hearts will be moderated and the Prince of Peace will come into the lives of people on both sides of that thing and begin to influence folks that the warlike, hateful atmosphere will be cooled off, Lord, and peace will come back again.
We pray, Father, that we might be like Gabriel, giving out the message of the coming of Christ and telling the loss about the one who came to bring peace and to rule on David's throne. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.