I Am Come to Make Thee Understand…

…what shall befall thy people in the latter days…(DAN. 10:14) is the rest of the sentence said by Gabriel the archangel to Daniel, a man greatly beloved of the Almighty and permitted by Him to understand deep mysteries and revelation. Before we make our foray into the Book of REVELATION therefore, the book of DANIEL must first be put to rest.

The visions of Daniel are widely assumed to be for the last days of our era or end-times and yet to happen. This is not so. Apart from a few Scriptures about Yahshua and Christianity in general, DANIEL is exclusively a history for the Jewish nation, falling within the time zone of the captivity and the second destruction of Yerushalem by the Romans, about 500 BC to AD 70. The Church has, on the other hand, and erroneously, the prophecies of DANIEL figuring prominently in our last days scenario.

However, I reiterate, almost the entire book of DANIEL was for, about, and prophesied events to come upon the people of ancient Israel. Yet there are patterns in their history that will be repeated on a worldwide scale. It is imperative therefore that we recognize these patterns and be prepared to flee from the wrath to come, to enter into our chambers and hide ourselves until the indignation be overpast, for…YHWH cometh out of His place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity (IS. 26:21).

I cannot take credit for the following revelations. They came to me via a book titled The Seventy Weeks and the Great Tribulation written in the 1920s by a Christian lawyer and author named Philip Mauro. Blessedly, this and other books by him are on the Internet in their entirety at the site www.preteristarchive.com/StudyArchive/m/mauro-philip.html  . In my book, this section I called Daniel’s Histories takes up seventeen A4 pages. Of course I cannot rewrite them here, so I strongly suggest to those like Daniel who didst set his heart to understand, you take a look at the site and especially that particular book if you are like many in the Church who think parts of DANIEL are for our day. It is more just a matter of history than revelation.

Starting from the beginning, here is a summary of the chapters of DANIEL:

CHAPTER ONE: Nebuchadnezzar conquers Yudah. Daniel and the others are taken to Babylon where he and his three friends are chosen to be educated and serve the king.

CHAPTER TWO: Nebuchadnezzar has a dream of the great image. Daniel interprets it.

CHAPTER THREE: The dream makes Nebuchadnezzar’s head swell, so he makes an image of gold. The three Israelites are cast into the fire for refusing to worship the image.

CHAPTER FOUR: Nebuchadnezzar dreams of the great tree, and is sent into the wilderness to live like a beast in order to deflate his once again swollen head.

CHAPTER FIVE: Belshazzar sees the writing on the wall. Darius the Mede overthrows Babylon.

CHAPTER SIX: Daniel is thrown to the lions.

CHAPTER SEVEN: Daniel has a dream of the four beasts and a little horn.

CHAPTER EIGHT: Daniel’s visions of the ram and the goat.

CHAPTER NINE: Daniel repents for Israel. The 70 weeks and 490 years prophecy is given.

CHAPTER TEN: Daniel fasts. Angels are sent to him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: The revelation of the king of the north and the king of the south.

CHAPTER TWELVE: The previous revelation continues, now concerning a time of trouble to come. The prophecy is sealed.

Only a few of these chapters concern us here. Going to the second chapter at verse 28, we find that YHWH reveals mysteries. Others He keeps secret. We all know that, because when we are in a trial it is especially frustrating that often we do not know how it will end. But Father does. He knows the end from the beginning, and His purposes, He says in ISAYAH 46:10, will stand. It is helpful to keep in mind that the Most High often conceals things so Satan does not know the end either. For our enemy is good at messing up plans.

Again in verse 28, Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzer the events revealed by his dream will take place in the latter days. This is not the latter or end of OUR days but the latter or end of the Jewish nation.

Most Christians who study the Bible will know the interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream statue. The gold head was Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, the chest of silver Medo-Persia which conquered Babylon in chapter five, Greece was the belly and thighs of bronze, and we have Rome’s iron legs. The iron and clay feet were the Roman Empire, which eventually fell due to their unfavourable practices. The ten toes were divisions of that empire. It spread over North Africa, Britain, much of Europe, and the Middle East. Each kingdom gave way to the next, until Yahshua came and destroyed them all, starting with the feet of Rome, the ruling authority at the time He was on the earth.

But there is a question here. How could Yahshua have destroyed all of those kingdoms at once, as depicted in the dream, if three of them had ceased to exist centuries before? In fact, all these kingdoms continued to endure in some form up to the time the Church and His Kingdom were established. The demonic principalities remained in the spiritual realm after the earthly kingdoms ceased to be. This is necessary to know in order to understand the books of DANIEL and REVELATION. They remain even to this day, because demons don’t die. Until they go to the lake of fire, they simply regroup when they are demolished and start again somewhere else or in another era. For instance, the ten horns of REVELATION 13, which are ten world divisions, will be a confederacy of a revived Roman Empire like the ten toes.

Now we come to chapter seven. Here we have another pattern like the toes that is to be repeated in our day. Daniel sees beasts remarkably similar to those described in REVELATION 13:2. In DANIEL however, are four beasts, but in REVELATION 13 there is just one beast with features of DANIEL’s four. We know what the four beasts of DANIEL 7 are. First, the four winds of Heaven (v.2) stir up the sea. These winds are Heavenly spirits or angels stirring up the nations of the world. The beasts that rise up from the nations are demonic principalities dominant at a certain time. Beasts in Scripture are always either spirits, that is, demons or angels, or wild animals. They are NEVER men. This is extremely important to remember.

The lion with eagle’s wings represents Babylon whose empire was powerful as symbolized by the wings. But the wings were plucked when the empire lost its aggression and became weak. The last king, Belshazzar, as depicted in chapter five, was like a common drunk on the night of his demise. Shaking in his boots, it would not surprise me if he wet himself when he saw that disembodied hand start writing on the wall.

The second beast, a bear, was Medo-Persia. It had three ribs between its teeth: the three kingdoms of Lydia, Babylonia, and Egypt which were conquered by Cyrus the Great and his successors. Raised on one side signifies the fact that the Persian ‘side’ became the dominant power in the duopoly.

The leopard was the Grecian Empire with its four wings or parts ruled by the four heads, which were the four generals of Alexander following his death: Cassander who ruled Greece, Lychmachus who ruled Asia Minor, Seleucus who had Syria and Babylon, with Ptolemy ruling Egypt.

The last and most dreadful beast was the Roman Empire with its iron teeth: a devouring, trampling, crushing killer unparalleled in history. It is said Julius Caesar killed over a million Celts in its conquest of Gaul alone. Numberless Christian martyrs fed Rome’s passionate thirst for blood and gore. (And this beastly kingdom is coming back upon us!) So far as I can understand, the ten kingdoms of verse 7 are those of Europe such as the Saxons, Franks, Visigoths, and Lombards. Three were plucked up by the roots (v.8)–the Heruli, Vandals, and Ostrogoths–which disappeared or were incorporated into Rome’s citizenry.

The little horn of verse 8 I am not sure about, but suggest it may be the eventually debauched Roman Church and its Papacy which hid the Saviour from the Jewish people through the practice of pagan rituals (see post Coca Cola and the Santa Claus Suit). Today it is a little more humble and subdued but remains a major stumbling block to YHWH’s ancient people of His Book. The demon responsible for this–is it the one in REVELATION 13:11?–is given to the burning flame (DAN. 7:11). It is cast into the lake of fire (REV. 19:20).

The demon principalities that ruled Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome lost their dominions when those empires fell. But YHWH grants them an extension of life at a future date, in the last days as illuminated in REVELATION 13 (DAN. 7:12). Let us briefly go there to THAT beast. It is my understanding that the beast from the sea of REVELATION 13:1 is Leviathan, a known demon principality who is king over all the children of pride (JOB 41). This demon from the sea (IS. 27:1) of mankind will rule over ten divisions of the earth through the New World Order or One World Government, whose as yet clandestine dominion is over our Earth even now as I write this.

Three other demonic principalities will give this beast power (REV. 13:2): the leopard or oil-producing Islamic nations, the bear or Communist countries, and the lion which are the nations that once composed the British Empire but are now the Commonwealth and former colonies such as the USA. The seven heads are, I believe, either seven men who control the world in secret, or perhaps seven areas or sectors owned by them such as: the oil industry, health industry, food, education, media, manufacturing, and banking.

Returning to DANIEL, he is told the four beasts of HIS time arise out of the earth, which tells us they are demons coming OUT of Hell. In verse 23 the fourth beast devours the whole earth, meaning the Roman Empire.

Chapter eight of DANIEL simply talks about Medo-Persia again–the ram with two horns–and Greece with its conspicuous horn being Alexander the Great, who moved quickly to conquer Persia: he touched not the ground. Alexander defeated Darius at the Battle of Granicus about 336 BC, and Persia therefore was gone. Alexander’s great horn broke in 323 BC–he died–leaving the Grecian Empire to be divided into the four kingdoms ruled by his generals, as already mentioned (v.8).

Then we have a little horn out of one of these generals, Antiochus IV Epiphanes it is believed to be, who sacked the Pleasant Land of Palestine and profaned the temple by sacrificing therein a pig! Gabriel the archangel explains to Daniel in verses 17-19 that these events pertain to the time of the end of the Jewish nation. This includes the final period of indignation of Israel at the hands of the Romans.

Moving on to verse 23, we enter the latter time of their kingdom, ‘their’ being the successors to the four Alexandrian generals. We are still in the time of the Grecian Empire, before the Roman.

Not to go into so much detail as I have in my book, after 130 years of rule by the Maccabees in Israel, we come to a very interesting character described to Daniel as the king of fierce countenance, and understanding dark sentences. Sounds like an uncommonly evil man.  With him I leave this post, for he is a star of my next one.