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So let us notice now, as we come to more detailed study, the differences between chapter seven and eight. In chapter seven that we studied last week, there were four beasts: Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. In chapter eight, there are simply two beasts. They turn out to be Medo-Persia and then the Grecian e- uh, empire. There are other differences, aren't there? In chapter seven, we saw last week the wonderful vision of the Ancient of Days, and the thrones being set, and the books being opened, and all the rationality of God over against the irrationality of the beast. Nothing about that here in this vision. In chapter seven, we saw the vision of the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven to take the kingdom from the hand of God and to set up his reign with his saints. Nothing about that in chapter eight. We are told that the beast rises up against the prince of princes. He's destroyed without hand. Nothing is then said about the setting up of the messianic kingdom, simply that he is destroyed by superhuman divine power, and that's left there. Differences then, and what we're at is to follow them and see what the special emphases, therefore, of chapter eight are. We come to Greece and no longer to Rome, and that is Greece, the empire as founded by Alexander the Great, the special horn on the second animal, which horn being broken, four came up, representing the successors of Alexander the Great. And in my mercy, I shall not trouble you with all the successors of Alexander and the Great and what they got up to. For our purposes in Daniel, two of these successors are particularly interesting. The Ptolemies, who bagged Egypt for themselves, and in some centuries, some years, a great part of Palestine. And on the other hand, the Seleucids that had a very, very large empire based on Syria and elsewhere. And then chapter eight is going to come quickly down to one of the kings in the succession of the Seleucids named Antiochus IV, Antiochus Epiphanes. And Epiphanes very probably means God manifest. This is the unfortunate fellow who may well, as far as we can tell, have claimed some kind of, uh, divine honors or said he was a God incarnate or something of the sort. Sorry for the vagueness of this slide, but if you can see that this is, uh, Palestine, and here is Jerusalem, and here is Syria, then, as you'll see, the Ptolemies took over in Egypt. Here is Alexandria. They took over the south here, and in early days they controlled Palestine, and therefore the Jews. The Seleucids bagged this enormous territory over here, Caria, Pamphylia, here Syria, here, uh, Babylonia, and so forth and so on, an enormous bit of territory for those days. They eventually took control. They won Palestine for from the, uh, Israelites, uh, from the Ptolemies. And normally in Daniel, when you read of the king of the north, the king of the south doing battle, as you will in chapter eleven in vast detail, the king of the north is this man. You can see they are north, the Seleucids are north of Palestine, and the king of the south are the Ptolemies in Egypt. They are south of Palestine. And as you see, they too having constant battles over the centuries with one another, every time they tried to fight each other, or nearly every time, their armies would sweep through Israel, leaving behind a terrible wreck, like armies do when they come, and posing an enormous threat to Jerusalem City and its treasuries in the temple. King of the South then, kings of the South, kings of the North, and very often Palestine, a battleground between the two of them. As I say, Daniel chapter eight comes very quickly to, uh, Antiochus Epiphanes. I'm sure you'd like to see him. If you can, there he is. Sorry, it's faint again. Eh, it's not modern art, it's ancient art, this. This is taken from a coin issued by Antiochus Epiphanes. Here is the great monster who persecuted the Jews, set up the abomination of desolation in Jerusalem, and therefore did things that become a type and a foreshadowing of what shall be in the final days. Antiochus IV, Epiphanes. He comes to his fame, as I say, because, according to the prophecy in Daniel eight in the first part, he captured Jerusalem. Banned the worship of Jehovah. Put an idol to his own god, Baal Shamayim, possibly, or Zeus, on the altar of the Lord's house in Jerusalem. Had pigs sacrificed on the altar. Brought in the temple prostitutes, as was the custom in many a Greek temple. Banned the possession of Holy Scripture. Banned the practice of circumcision. Any Jewish mother that had her son circumcised, if they were caught by Antiochus's orders, mother and child were flung from the top of the rocks, from the mountains, to dash their brains out on the rocks beneath. Set up shrines to idolatrous gods all throughout the streets of Jerusalem. Then was a time of unparalleled persecution. And the terrible and shocking thing for many a Jew was this, that when Antiochus came and he desecrated the temple, nothing happened. No great voice came. No thunderbolt to strike him dead. Doubtless people laughed and said, there you are, there's your Bible for you. All these years you've been telling the people that you've got the word of God and the Old Testament, the word of the Almighty Creator, and in some sense the Creator himself lives in that temple. Now we've, um, exploded your bluff, haven't we? See, it's nothing happens. You desecrate the temple, nothing happens. It was a time of exceeding severe testing for the faithful in Israel. There were at that stage many in Israel who quite apostatized, and some of the high priests helped on Antiochus and said, yes, that Bible, you know, we don't any longer believe it's inerrant or inspired or anything like that. It's only one holy book among many holy books anyway. They agreed to the Hellenization of the city and to what, uh, Antiochus did in the temple. And they said, well, what does it matter whether you call him Zeus or Baal or Jehovah? What does it matter anyway? All religions are the same, and they're all seeking the same end, aren't they? So not only Antiochus Epiphanes persecuted the faithful, but the apostate Jewish high priests joined in, and they persecuted the faithful as well. The great debate between liberals who will not accept the inspiration of scripture or the specis- specificity of divine revelation to Jew and church. That debate is not a modern one, really. It is a very ancient debate. In those days, then the Jews, some of them the faithful in Israel, decided to fight it out with arms. Now, of course, we in Ulster know better, don't we, because we're Christians. And we follow a Messiah who forbade us to get out our swords, either to protect him or to promote the Christian faith. But these were Jews. And they rose up and fought Antiochus Epiphanes by force of arms, and in particular he started it, and this one here, Judas the Maccabee, bore the brunt of it, and eventually the temple was vindicated and the worship of Jehovah reestablished. We call them Maccabees. The account of it will be found in the first and second book of Maccabees, valid historical works, though not to be believed in all their details. If you want to find them, you'll find them in the Apocrypha. Now let us come to Daniel chapter eight and, uh, attempt to get at the heart of the matter, and in particular to the spiritual principles involved. And if you have followed what I was trying to say this morning in the first session, then it is this, that there are four major visions at the end of the book of Daniel, and that they all deal with the time of the end, hence the various figures that are given us, uh, relating to the time just before the coming of the Messiah in power and great glory. We noticed in particular that the vision in chapter eight is in two parts. The first of the referring to what Antiochus Epiphanes did to the Jewish people and to the temple in BC hundred and sixty to one hundred and sixty four. And then, basing itself on that, the vision looks forward to the time of the end and explicitly says so. From that we learn now, uh, uh, again, a very important thing. In these chapters, God takes history and uses it as a kind of a projecting lens to look at the future. In the vision of chapter seven, God follows the Gentile governments from Babylon, then to Medo-Persia, then to Greece and to Rome. And with that Roman government, he then projects on into the future to conditions that shall be when the Lord Jesus comes again. But in so doing, God does not only use the Roman Empire as a lens through which to project the future. He also, here in chapter eight uses the Grecian Empire, or part of it, as a lens through which then to project the future. And that is because the end time will be more complicated than simply a revival of the Roman Empire. It will have all sorts of elements in it, all sorts of issues will arise, and at that time of the end, there shall come a kind of a persecution that the Romans never did. The Romans in history, while they did destroy the temple in Jerusalem and eventually turned Jerusalem city into a Gentile city. They never did to the Jews what Antiochus of Bithynes did to the Jews. The Romans destroyed the temple, like Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple. They didn't, uh, come along to that temple, take it over, and install a pagan religion in the temple. Rome never banished the Old Testament. Rome never forbade circumcision. Even after AD seventy and the destruction of the, of the temple, even after AD one hundred and thirty to one hundred and thirty three, after the second revolt, when they razed Jerusalem to the ground and turned it into a Gentile city, the Roman emperors persisted in their policy that they had adopted ever since Julius Caesar of protecting the Jewish people. Julius Caesar, you will remember, passed special laws to protect the Jews throughout the empire and give them certain special privileges. All the emperors thereafter either maintained that legislation or even added to it to maintain protection of the Jews. Occasionally, an oddity like Claudius lost his temper and banished the Jews from Rome, we are told, for a period. But even then, the laws protecting the Jews obtained through the rest of the empire. It was, alas, Christendom, having joined up with the Roman state, that eventually introduced anti-Semitic legislation and began that terrible process of persecuting the Jew. But, uh, whereas the Romans in that sense did not persecute the Jewish religion, Antiochus did. Banned it. And as we shall see now in our study, it is on the basis of that in history that the Holy Spirit projects what will be one very serious element at the end time. And it is that that we should be trying to study this morning. So now, just, uh, because you love him so much, there is once more Antiochus Epiphanes. Is he the right way around? There he is, you'll see. There is the man that introduced the desolating abomination into the temple in Jerusalem. He, as you may remember, was eventually, uh, resisted, though not personally, it was his generals that were resisted and defeated, and the temple was restored, largely owing to the efforts of the Maccabees. And I was suggesting this morning that the great issue at stake with, um, Antiochus Epiphanes, therefore the issue, one of the issues that will be at stake at the end time, is this question of the truth as distinct from the lie. Now, how that comes to be, let us now notice by coming to our chapter eight, and if you care to look at the text of scripture itself, and notice how the thing is set. I saw in the vision, says, uh, Daniel eight, chapter uh eight, verse two, Now it was so that when I saw, I was in Shushan, the palace, which is in the province of Elam, and I saw in the vision, and I was by the river Uli. What he calls here the palace, at least in our English translations, is more likely to have been a fortress. In that part of the world, an enormous amount of the wealth of the Persian Empire was stored up. There were a lot of inland waterways, heart of the economic system of that empire. And therefore, it is natural that when Daniel was given to see the Persian, uh, Medo-Persian Empire at this stage, he saw it as a ram, verse three. A ram which had two horns. It was an amalgam of the Medes and the Persians. He says in verse four, I saw the ram pushing westward and northward and southward, and no beast could stand before him, neither was there any that could deliver out of his hand. And I ask you now to notice that phrase, because we're going to meet it again lower down the chapter in verse seven. None could deliver out of his hand. Hebrew simple way of saying that Persia at one stage became so powerful that her power approached the absolute. If Persia attacked you, there was nothing that any other body under the face of the sun could possibly do about it. No other empire able to resist the might of Persia. None could deliver out of his hand. We're now going to be introduced to a study of what can happen when one great political authority on the earth attains to almost absolute power. It used to be a dictum when I was at school amongst political historians. They talked about the desirability of the balance of power, say, in Europe. Because if there were two or three big empires, more or less equally balanced in power, the peace was liable to be preserved. But if it should happen that one of those empires got to itself almost absolute power, and there was nothing anybody else could do to stop them or frustrate them, then terrible things were liable to happen. Those of us who are older will remember what happened when Master Hitler at one stage seemed almost to have done that in Europe. So, first of all, Persia attained to such power that none could deliver out of her hand. Now look what is note- what Daniel sees next. He saw an he goat, says verse five, came from the west over the face of the whole earth and touched not the ground. A vivid description of the lightning process of Alexander's armies. That terrible young man, with all his enormous zeal, talk about faster than light, faster than sound, and all that kind of thing. Alexander staggered the ancient world with the speed of his conquests, the lightning-like strikes that he made. And I saw, says Daniel, though it was all in the future to him, I saw this he-goat come with his notable horn, and he hit the old ram amidships and absolutely destroyed him. And once more, at the end of verse seven, and there was none that could deliver the ram out of his hand. Now, for a while, the Greeks attained to almost universal power, almost absolute power. With that, the story comes quickly to down the generations through Alexander's successors to Antiochus Epiphanes. Sure, he wasn't, by our modern standards, anywhere near possessing absolute power. And what may have provoked his, uh, attack on the temple at Jerusalem is that he saw that the power of Rome was growing. And at one stage, when Antiochus Epiphanes was in Egypt, Rome came in and stopped him winning the fruit of his victory, stopped him from taking over Egypt. And Antiochus saw that if he didn't deal with this, his days were numbered, maybe, and he fought to retain his power and his empire. It was in those circumstances that he determined to make religion regular throughout the whole of his empire, and came to Judaism, to make Judaism conform to Antiochus's idea of religion. Antiochus, of course, was an old, uh, idolater. That is, he believed a polytheist. He believed in many gods. He had a favorite god. In addition, it seems he went a little bit soft in the head and thought of himself as a manifestation of the god and had himself named Epiphanes. The rascally Greeks said they didn't mind. He could call himself Epimenes if he liked, which instead of mean- meaning Antiochus God manifest, meant Antiochus gone a little bit bonkers. But for the Jew, it was no laughing matter, for when Antiochus came to Jerusalem, determining now to impose a universal religion on his empire, the Jews, of course, responded, that is the faithful in Judea, with the objection that you couldn't change their religion. They didn't make it up. This was received truth. They worshipped not one god amongst many. They worshipped the creator, the transcendent Lord. They did not recognize all these other gods. These other gods were but the creation of men's minds. They were the deification of the powers of nature, the sun god, the moon god, what we now call atoms and germs and viruses and all those nasty things as well. The ancients, not understanding them, deified them. They deified the force of fertility, they deified the storm god, the great physical powers of the universe, the biological powers of the universe. They deified the lot. And Israel stood as a protest against it, that this was demeaning to man, for man himself a creature of the Creator, made to have dominion over the earth, for him to bow down and worship the forces of nature. This was to demean mankind and eventually to bring him into slavery. And anyway, they weren't, uh, they weren't at liberty to change it, for this was the truth of God revealed through Moses and his inspired prophets. They were not prepared to cede on the matter that there is only one God and one Savior. That their Old Testament was God's inspired word, and that in that temple at Jerusalem, God himself in some sense was pleased to dwell. The Jews were not idolaters. They knew in another sense that the temple, why the heaven of heavens couldn't contain God. Yet they believed that they were chosen of God to be his witnesses in the earth, witnesses to the true God against the lie of idolatry. And they believed that there in the temple of Jerusalem, the true God in some sense manifested his presence. It's marked out Israel distinct amongst all the other nations, for without exception, they were all of them polytheists and idolaters. When Antiochus Epiphanes and his lieutenants and co. heard about these things, then the battle was joined. You say your God is the only God? Nonsense. You say the Old Testament, who wrote it, did you say Moses or somebody? You say the Old Testament is the word of the Creator, the one God, it's inspired truth. Absolutely nonsense. Our holy books are as good as yours. Our philosophers are as good as yours. Your religion is only one way, and anyway, it isn't as good as ours. The issue, therefore, was the. We are told in the first half of chapter eight that Antiochus, he cast down the truth to the ground. As we said in our earlier study, that raises an enormous issue. Not merely whether there is a God, the true God against all idolatry, the truth of God as distinct from the lie of idolatry. But it also raises the question, has God revealed himself in history? What is this Old Testament? Is this the word of God? Or is it merely on the level of all other religions thought up by some religiously minded people, on the level of other philosophies, one amongst many? What about that temple at Jerusalem? Did the Almighty God uniquely dwell in that temple? Was that temple any different from all the other temples? This was the issue at stake. And the loyal believing Jews stood fast. And as we saw, the Maccabees fought over this issue. Antiochus officers, they came to the temple, they took away the daily burnt sacrifice, Israel's offering to God the Creator. Because, uh, Antioch- Antiochus was determined to break this part of Judaism, you'll see if a nation believes that it is in touch with the living God and that the Bible is his word, then there'll come a point when they will turn round and defy a government and say, no, no, no, now you're trespassing on what doesn't belong to you. He was determined to break it. He banned the Bible, banned possession of it. The holy books in the temple were destroyed, many of them. Banned circumcision, persecuted those who, who practiced it, for circumcision was the mark in Israel of their unique relationship with God and God's historical revelation in history, and the purposes of God eventually to bring in the Messiah. He banned it, persecuted it, set up the abomination of desolation in the temple. That was Antiochus Epiphanes. And the terrible thing was, that when he did that for three years and more, there came no voice from heaven protesting. No miracle, no lightning thunderbolt to strike the blasphemer dead. And as a result, there must have been many among the faithful whose faith was sorely tried, who began to wonder whether, after all, the apostates in the nation were true, who said that the idea that the living God, Jehovah, was different from all others was, after all, false. For three and a half years, I say, Israel were thus distressed. But there were some, as I have mentioned, called the Maccabees, who led the faithful of the nation to engage in guerrilla warfare and oppose Antiochus and oppose the apostates among Israel itself, and eventually they succeeded in beating Antiochus's forces for the time being, at any rate. They delivered Jerusalem, they delivered the temple, the temple was restored, or as the, uh, book of Daniel puts it, the temple was vindicated, and once more the worship of God was restored in its place. But now, for a moment, let us leave the first half of chapter eight of Daniel and consider the larger canvas of history. And in particular, let us come to what is for us and will be for all eternity the center point of history, in those fateful hours when Jesus Christ, our Lord, stood before Pontius Pilate. You will remember how in the gospel by John, the evangelist records that tense conversation which Pilate had with the Lord Jesus. And it turns on this very matter, the debate between power and truth, and between truth and power. Jesus said, are you a king? Our Lord indicated he was. And then he said, to this end have I been born, and to this end am I come into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And we already notice the contrast from the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, who had cast down the truth to the pow- to the ground, because for the moment he had political power in his hand. Now the idea recurs again. Pilate has power. Knowest thou not he said to the Lord Jesus, I have power to crucify thee, and I have power to release thee. And therefore he considered himself a very superior kind of person to Jesus of Nazareth that stood before him. Indeed, Pilate found it very difficult to understand a king who seemed at the moment not to be interested in power, but announced that he had come to bear witness to the truth. Whether it was in sarcasm or whether it is in bewilderment, we know not, but said Pilate, what is Is truth? truth? It's a question that has re-echoed down the centuries. Is there such a thing as absolute truth? Is there divine revelation? The Bible tells us that the truth about everything is God himself. And our Lord Jesus repeated, and we have it recorded in John chapter fourteen, that ultimately truth is a person. Said he, I am the truth. If you want to know the truth about a flower in your garden, you may ask the biologist and the botanist, and they will tell you all sorts of wonderful things about its intricate mechanism. But if you want to know the ultimate truth about that flower, you will find it in God. The truth about flowers is the God who made them and what he made them for. And similarly, if you want to know the truth about man, you can ask the medics and the biologists and the biochemists, and they will analyze man into all his chemical parts and the electrical currents that buzz around his head. But ultimately, if you will know what the truth about man is, what is man, what is the truth? The truth about man is God. For man is not a self-made, uh, person. He is the creature of God. And if you want to understand the truth about man, I repeat, you must know God. The truth about everything, then, is ultimately God. But of course, that is not a view that is everywhere accepted. Our good friends the Russians have a very, uh, different idea of truth. With them, there is no such thing as absolute truth. Truth is what the party decides is. So, for instance, if you look at Russian encyclopedias, and you should perhaps consult a certain article upon a certain politician, one year you'll read one thing, because at that moment this particular politician happens to be in favor with the ruling, uh, politicians of his day. Should it perchance that another ruler gets to the top of the Russian Empire, and he is, uh, uh, not in, not in favor of the former politician, then the whole article in the encyclopedia has to be rewritten, and it will be rewritten, and a new piece of paper is printed and sent round to everybody so they can stick the new truth in, in place of the old truth. So the truth, according to the Russians, is not any absolute truth. It's whatever the reigning power decrees is true. And when we think about that, we think of what the final years of our present age will be like, when, according to two Thessalonians two, the great man of sin shall erect himself and sit in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God and exalting himself above all that is called God. He shall come, says the Bible, with all power, and we notice the term, and with that power, signs and lying wonders, with all deceit of unrighteousness for them that are perishing. When that happens, this man with his own invented kind of truth that God calls the lie, when that happens, God will send people a strong delusion that they believe the lie. Why? Because they knew the truth, but would not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. And because they would not receive the love of the truth, which is God and God's revealed truth. In poetic justice, they will receive the lie. When this age comes to its end, this will be its major contest, its major battle, the battle between the truth on the one hand, God's revealed truth, and Satan and man's concocted truth, in other words, the lie. How should we know, how should we decide the difference between the lie and the truth? Let's, for the moment, come back to the cross of our Lord Jesus and listen again to the conversation that took place between our Lord and Pilate. During that investigation, our Lord had remained for a long while silent before Pilate, so much so that the governor marveled, he was amazed that this young man would not speak to him. And presently, perhaps growing a little impatient, Pilate said, don't you realize, young man, that I have power? Man does love to feel that he has power in his hand. I have power to release you, and I have power to crucify you. You must really start talking to me, young man. You must begin to realize that as far as you are concerned, I have absolute power over you. I can do what I like with you because I have power. That's the kind of person I am. That's the kind that my government is. And our Lord, first of all, pricked his little bubble. Said he calmly, you would have had no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above. How small, after all, is man's little power compared with the infinite power of omnipotent God. The amazing thing is that God allows evil men to have such a long, apparently long hold upon power. Then our Lord said an amazing thing. He said, yes, Pilate, I am a king, and you wouldn't be able to do anything at all against me except it were given thee by God. But now you see, Pilate, I'm not so much interested in power, I am instret- interested in truth. There before Pontius Pilate, our blessed Lord witnessed the good confession. And if we want to know the truth about our world and the truth about ourselves, and the truth about history, then it is to Jesus Christ and to his cross that we need to look. For as we look upon that cross, and we see Jesus Christ the Savior dying there, we shall see what God is like, what the truth is like about God, and the truth about ourselves. It will tell us there is a God, a God of infinite power, but a God who is true, not merely in that he says things that are true, but a God that is true and loyal. If he makes any promise, he will be loyal to his promise. If he makes a creature, he will be loyal to that creature. And here is truth expressed, that God has made man. Man is his creature. When puny little man goes his own way and wanders from God and rebels against God and gets a little power in his hands, so much so that he imagines that he can crucify the Son of God and kick him in the shins and nail him to a cross and see the end of him. Then, wonder of wonders, there comes no thunderbolt. There comes no lightning stroke to destroy Pilate and to destroy the Jews. The truth is that the God who made them, though they are his enemies, is loyal to them, and he loves them. Rather than that they perish, he would suffer for their sins. It is then when we look at that cross that we learn what the difference is, not only between truth and power, but between truth and a lie. You will remember that on one occasion, Solomon was called upon to make a very difficult decision. There were brought before him one morning two women, they were two harlots. What had happened was that during the night, one woman had accidentally smothered her child in bed. And waking up and finding it was dead, she quietly slipped out of bed and she took her dead infant, and she went to the bed of the other woman. She took the other woman's live baby back into her own bed, and she put her dead child in beside the other mother. And of course, when the other mother woke up in the morning and found the child was dead, she was horrified. And then when she looked at it a bit more closely, she found it wasn't her child at all, it was the other woman's w- child, and the other woman had stolen her live baby. And eventually they brought the two women before Solomon. This woman says the live child is her child, the other woman says, no, it's my child. How on earth would you decide who was telling the truth about these babies? What was the truth about this poor little infant? When Solomon had listened to both sides, he pretended he despaired to know how to settle it. So he said to his officer, bring me a sword. And the sword was brought. Now, says Solomon, what I want you to do, officer, is when I give you the word, I want you to raise your sword and cut the infant in two. We'll settle it fairly. Give half to one woman and half to the other woman. And one of the women said, yes, that's right, you do that. I'm all for justice. The other woman said, oh, don't do that. That's my child, give it to the other woman. I'd rather the other woman had it, if it lives, than to see anything o- anything terrible happen to my child. That's the mother, said Solomon. That's the truth about the question. That's the child's mother, because of her love for the child and her loyalty to it. Where is the truth in all this world, in all its philosophies, in all its political systems? The truth is to be found and seen at the cross of Jesus Christ, our Lord. There is a God, and the truth about him is this, that he made us, and because he made us, he will be loyal to us. And even though we are rebellious, rather than that we suffer the penalty of sin, he would suffer our penalty for us. But with that, we must come back to the second half of our chapter eight of the prophecy of Daniel. And you may remember from our first study that what we saw was this, that the first half of the chapter is a prophecy that was fulfilled in what to now for us is history, in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes. But in the second half of chapter eight, the Holy Spirit of God takes those historical events that were shown in advance to Daniel, and he uses them as a kind of a color slide through which, when his light is projected, it produces on the screen not merely the situation in Antiochus' day, but the situation as it shall be at the end of this age. Notice, if you will, therefore, in Daniel chapter eight the explicit phrase, and when the transgressors are come to the full. It is verse twenty three. and in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors are come to the full, a king of fierce countenance and understanding dark sentences shall stand up. So here now, in the second half of Daniel eight, we have a prophecy of the remote future. Future that now for us, after the centuries, is perhaps not so remote, for we move very speedily towards the end of this age. It will help us, therefore, to understand one of the major battles that will take place at the end of our age, if we recall another detail of what happened under Antiochus IV. It wasn't merely, you'll see, that this Gentile king came up and desecrated the temple of God at Jerusalem. It was that in that nefarious, uh, uh, effort, he was assisted, indeed he was provoked by the apostate high priests in Judaism. For at that time, sad to say, the high priests in Judaism were anything but loyal to God. They had given up belief in that the Old Testament was God's unique self-revelation to men. They had given up the idea that Jehovah was unique, the transcendental Lord. They were quite happy to think that it didn't matter what you called him, Jehovah or Zeus, like the Greeks called him, or Baal, that the Baal of the Gentiles and the Zeus of the Greeks and the Jehovah of the Jews was really all one and the same thing, and they didn't have to make any fuss or distinguish them at all. And then they had abandoned the idea that Israel had a special mission in history, God's unique people, that God was revealing himself in a special way to the nations through Israel, through their law, through Moses, through their temple, and so forth. And finally, Jerusalem, that had been the city of the great king, the city in which God was believed by the faithful to present himself, that city, these apostate high priests and their fellows wanted to turn into a Hellenistic city, to destroy its Jewish culture and to substitute Greek education, Greek, uh, uh, athletics, and a gymnasium down there by the city in which the young men would, uh, wrestle and engage in their games naked, like the Greeks engaged in them naked. And for that reason, these apostate high priests who wanted to Hellenize Judaism were all for scrapping the distinctive marks of Judaism. They wanted to do away with circumcision because circumcision was such a horrible thing in the estimate of Greeks. It spoiled the body they held, that beautiful, aesthetic human body that was so admired in the person of their athletes. And so it was, as I say, that not merely did a foreign Gentile king who knew not the Lord come up and desecrate the temple of the Lord at Jerusalem. The sad thing was that when the battle came, many of Israel themselves joined on the side of that Gentile king. Many of the leading clerics of the day, many of the leading theologians of the day, the high priests that were meant to lead the worship of Jehovah agreed with the Gentile and abandoned true Judaism and became apostate and were utterly disloyal to the Lord and his truth. We pause here to let the Holy Spirit remind us of what it will be at the end of this age. Alas, what is already now. For Christendom has seen the same sad story repeat itself. It is not merely that full-blown atheists attack the truth of God's word from the outside and refuse to believe that there is a God or that he has revealed himself to men through Holy Scripture, through the Jew, through Preemley, through his son Jesus Christ. It is that nowadays there are many clerics in Christendom itself. In the name of God and Christ, they will deny inspiration of Holy Scripture. They will deny the literal resurrection of our Lord. They will deny the virgin birth of Christ. And there are some to be found, much publicized on BBC, who, being supposed theologians, deny the very existence of a personal God. They have joined the other side. They do not any longer believe that there is such a thing as absolute truth or revealed truth. Let the New Testament once more combine with Daniel chapter eight to remind us where this kind of thing will end. Daniel chapter eight says that there shall arise up, uh, a king of fierce countenance, countenance. Verse twenty four, and his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power, and he shall destroy wonderfully and shall prosper and do his pleasure, and he shall destroy the mighty ones and the holy people. So now we notice again this emphasis on power. And two Thessalonians two, the passage to which we have already referred, explains what these cryptic sentences mean. He shall be powerful, but not by his own power. Yes, his coming shall be after the power of Satan, says the New Testament. And how tremendously he will deceive men, for men worship power still. And at this moment, man is getting into his hand powers that a few decades ago would have been thought to be impossible. Man worships power. The race is on to see which is the most powerful people who can get to the moon and beyond and control space and do all these wonders with their power. And do you know if one of these days, as one of these scientists is looking through his com- computer and down his telescope, some power from outer space materializes and announces itself as an inhabitant of some distant world that now has got in touch with our world, an intelligent being from another world, millions would believe him just because of his tremendous power, and he can do miracles, and he can do signs. Power would be the final arbiter as to whether it was right or wrong. And the great final dictator will come with many lying signs and wonders, and with power and with energies. And many will be deceived. It says in Daniel eight, he shall cause deceit to prosper. And two Thessalonians two picks that phrase up and amplifies it. He shall come with all deceivableness in them that perish. It says here too in Daniel chapter eight, he shall stand up against the prince of princes, but he shall be broken without hand, that is, he shall be broken by supernatural power. So says two Thessalonians two, This final dictator will exalt himself above all that is called God, but he shall be summarily destroyed by the Lord Jesus when he comes. He shall destroy him with the breath of his mouth and consign him to eternal perdition. And now let us, in closing, think of the seriousness of this. Why will many people be deceived in the end? There are two reasons. They will be deceived by this tremendous display of power. Because in man's estimation, the final thing in the world is power. And when he exhibits his tremendous displays of power, they shall not pause to think about the morality of it. The fact of power will be enough to convince them. But to base one's decisions, one's life, and one's eternity simply on exhibitions of power would be disastrous. We have noticed wherein God's appeal to men lies, not in God's almighty power. He is almighty. He's not afraid to use his power. One day he will use his power and put down all opposition, but his appeal to our hearts is not by his power, but by his truth. Proved at Calvary. A God who made us and is loyal to us, whose son died for us, that we might be redeemed. And it is said of these people that shall be destroyed when this terrible tyrant comes, they shall share his fate, they shall be destroyed under the judgments of God. It tells us why at length. They not only were deceived by the power of Satan, they refused the love of the truth. When they said their final no to God's truth as revealed in Christ, and God gave them up to have their own way and sends them a strong delusion that they believe the lie. Before we leave this long session, we should perhaps allow one more scripture to have its weight with us. In one Timothy chapter six, as Paul urges Timothy to fight the good fight of faith and to lay hold on eternal life, whereunto he was called and did confess the good confession in the sight of many witnesses. He appeals to him and charges him thus, I charge thee in the sight of God, who quickeneth all things, and of Christ Jesus, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed the good confession, that thou keep the commandment without spot, without reproach, unto the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ. In his own times, the one who is the blessed and only potentate, the King of kings, the Lord of lords, who only hath immortality, dwells in light unapproachable. In its own times, that blessed and only potentate will stage the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ. How different that will be then from the time when our blessed Lord stood before Pilate. A king come to witness for the truth. And Pilate crucified him, and the world hasn't seen him since. One day they shall see him. Meanwhile, we are charged to follow his example. Before Pontius Pilate, when he was asked, he confessed the good confession and bore witness to the truth, and humanly speaking, it cost him his life. We, his servants, are now charged to witness the good confession ourselves and to stand for the truth in the light of his cross and in the light of his coming appearing. The Lord fill our hearts with the wonder of God's truth, so that we in our day shall be faithful and uncompromisingly stand for the truth, that we may be ready to welcome the Lord when at last he appears.