Daniel 10:20-21

 

Daniel 10

Vision of Jesus

The vision - Reasons of the vision

Daniel 10:20-21

 

What do you think "truth" is?

In John 8:32 our Lord Jesus Christ said, "then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free". The "then" that this verse begins with implies that to know the truth - and therefore to be free - depends on something. On what? It is in the previous verse, "if you hold to my teaching". Not holding to Jesus' teaching would keep us in slavery because of our sins. 

Our Lord has the truth in great regard. He calls Himself "the truth" in John 14:6, "I am the way and the truth and the life", and equals the Word of God with "the truth" in John 17:17, "sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth". This verse leave us with a clear path: there is no sanctification outside the truth. Because the opposite of truth is lie, and Satan is the father of lies. 

On Monday 2020 / 12 / 14 The Christian Post published an article with this title: "Democrat Tulsi Gabbard introduces bill to ban men from women’s sports". You can read it here:

https://www.christianpost.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-bill-to-ban-men-from-womens-sports.html

If you do a search about this bill in the Internet, most titles speak about "transgenders" or even "anti-transgender" bill, a "controversial" one. Thanks God The Christian Post calls it as it is: men trying to compete in women's sports. Because some surgical operations, a little make up and long hair don't make a man to a woman. The more you can become is an enhanced transvestite. A human being born as a male can't become a female, and vice versa. Every person on earth, from analphabets to Albert Einstein, have known this truth for millennia. The satanical lie which lies behind "transgenderism" has caused this surreal thing, which could ban women from some sports forever. Because if men are permitted to compete with women in those sports, all medals will go to them, and women will never be able to beat their records. 

To follow lies and to deny the truth can have even worse outcomes. More than 30 countries still deny - after 72 years - the existence of the State of Israel. This denial has caused several wars, uncountable terror acts and thousands of human deaths. Thanks God we are experiencing the re-establishment of political relationships between Israel and several Arab countries, that could lead to peace in the Middle East in some degree. This peace could be the path to alliances between Israel and its Arab neighbors that would be a strong deterrent to the expansionist dreams of the terrorist regime of Teheran. 

There is a truth about Israel. The Torah tells us about Abraham, Israel's children in Egypt, the exodus to the promised land and the first conquered territories in Moses' times. From Joshua to Chronicles we can read about how Israel was formed, the period of the Judges, the kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon, the splittring between northern Israel and southern Judah, and how both were conquered by Assyria and Babylonia, respectively. That biblical account is no "myth" but history, corroborated by archaeological sources not only in Israel but from the Empires that fought against it, and also corroborated by secular historians.  

On the other side, the lies are so many that we will not deal with them. Some truths about "Palestine" and the "palestinian people" are to be said in order to understand the problem in its right perspective. 

The people that lived in Canaan are named in several Bible verses. Genesis 15:19-21 for instance is a passage in the context of God's covenant with Abraham, and Abraham is promised the land of "Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites and Jebusites". If you observe this list, the Arabs are nowhere here. In the first place because they descend from Ishmael, Abraham's son, and in the second, because the Arab's land was not to be taken from them. God promised an inheritance, lands and great nations both to Isaac and to Ishmael. 

Which Arab lands are we talking about?

In the times of the Bible there was no Islam, and the Arabs were to be found only in the Arabian Peninsula. Egyptians were not Arabs, not even a Semitic people, but the country of Pharaos, pyramids and mummies, whose people wrote the most known "hieroglyphs" in their own Egyptian language, and is considered one of the oldest civilizations in the world. Lebanon was Phoenicia, another great civilization of Antiquity, where they spoke Phoenician, an extinct Semitic language. Syria was called Aram, and they spoke Aramaic, another Semitic language. The nowadays called Arab Maghreb (all of north Africa west of Egypt) was not "Arab" at all; it was the land of the Berbers who spoke a non-Semitic language called Amazigh. Iraq was Babylonia, and Iran was Media, and after the 6th century BC, Persia. There was no "Arab World" or "Muslim World", but Arabia (which is pretty much the Arabian Peninsula)

The appearance of Islam changed the Middle East and North Africa considerably. During Mohammed's life, all of the Arabian peninsula became Muslim and unified. His successors would establish the Rashidun Caliphate (conquering most of Egypt, Lybia and most of the Middle East) followed by the Umayyad Caliphate (which conquered more lands, including parts of India, all of the Maghreb and most of the Iberian peninsula) The Holy Land had been a part of the Roman Empire, which lost it to the Persians 603 AD, and retook it again, but only to lose it to the Arabs in 638 AD. By 651 AD, the Sasanian Empire (Persia) had been conquered by the Arabs, which established the Rashidun Caliphate including the Holy Land. Arab dominion in the Middle East wouldn't last because of the rise of other empires, as the Mamluk Sultanate in the XIII century, and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, which conquered the Holy Land 1517 and kept it until the end of WW I. The Ottoman Turks conquered most of the Balkans also, large territories in the Middle East and in North Africa, and replaced the Arabs as the superpower in the Muslim world for centuries. Only in WW I they were finally defeated and retired back to Turkey. 

You might ask, where did the name "Palestine" come from? 

And the "palestinian people"?

Because the "palestinians" are Arabs who speak Arabic, and not at all any ancient special people with another language and culture, which would be conquered by the Muslim Arabs of the Rashidun Caliphate, there is no reason at all to link them to the ancient Canaanites or to some biblical people of the region (as the Phoenicians, Arameans, Babylonians, etc.) and all reasons to say that their ancestors were not in the Holy Land until the first Arab caliphate in the 6th century. 

When the British Empire defeated the Ottomans and conquered Ottoman Syria (the name the Ottomans had given to the Holy Land together with Syria, Lebanon and other territories) there were not Lebanese, Syrians, Israelis or Jordanians there, in the way we mean today (let alone "palestinians") That was just a province of the Ottoman Empire, under Turkish control, where part of the population were Arabs, mixed with indigenous peoples that existed there before of the Muslim conquests (Jews, Arameans, Assyrians, Kurds and others) 

The formation of Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Jordan caused to name the Arabs, Jews, Arameans, Assyrians, Kurds and others in Syria, "Syrians", those in Lebanon "Lebanese", those in Jordan "Jordanians", and those in Israel, "Israelis". A "palestinian" in Israel and an "Israeli Arab" belong in one and the same ethnic group of people (Arabs) with the single difference that the first one wants the dissappearance of Israel and the second one doesn't. And those Arabs are totally indistinguishable from the Arabs in Lebanon, Syria or Jordan, because they are part of the Arab population in that part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries. If you want to know the truth about the "ancient palestinian people" which appeared 1964 with its first "king", the Egyptian Yasser Arafat, this is it. 

But what about "Palestine"? Was it ever a country?

One of the most known and loved histories of the Bible is that of young David defeating the giant warrior Goliath. It is profusely used by both Jews and Christians as a subject of teachings and sermons. It has been the theme for songs of praise, hymns and even films. The fact that a young shepherd defeated an enormous warrior with a sling and a stone is a proof of God's power and what He can do with those who trust Him. 

Goliath was a Philistine, so called because he came from Philistia. It is a little strip of land roughly situated where the Gaza strip is nowadays. The Philistines are also called the "peoples of the sea" because they came from Crete. There are several histories in the OT about their wars against Israel, and how king David was an exile in their midst. They dissappeared mixed with others when king Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem - and the whole Judea and Philistia. "Palestine" was the Greek name for Philistia, and it was applied by the Romans to the Holy Land after the third Jewish revolt, in order to erase Jewish identity forever. They renamed Judea as "Syria-Palaestina" and Jerusalem as "Aelia Capitolina". As we can clearly see, there is nothing Arab about Philistia or Palestine ("P" doesn't even exist in Arabic) and all of these things happened in the second century AD, 400 years before the Muslim conquests of the Arabs in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. 

The Holy Land has been called Canaan, Israel, Judah, Judea, Syria-Palaestina by the Romans, Jund al-Urdunn ("The military district of Jordan" in Arabic) by the Muslim Arabs, Ottoman Syria by the Turks and British Mandate of Palestine by the British. With the exception of the names "Israel", "Judah" and "Judea", when it was the independent country of the Jews, it was never the country of other people, but a district or province of a greater Empire. This province has included different territories, sometimes Lebanon, Syria, Jordan or other ones. 

If the Lord allows, we will retake this history of Israel in a more detailed form. But for now, there is all we need to know about the difference between Israel and "Palestine" and about the Jews and the "palestinians". The verses we are about to read today belong to a more distant past, the last times of the Persian Empire and the rise of Alexander the Great. 

Daniel 10:20-21 (New International Version) 

"So he said, 'Do you know why I have come to you? Soon I will return to fight against the prince of Persia, and when I go, the prince of Greece will come;  but first I will tell you what is written in the Book of Truth. (No one supports me against them except Michael, your prince)' "

The original Hebrew text is this:

ויאמר הידעת למה באתי אליך ועתה אשוב להלחם עם שר פרס ואני יוצא והנה שר יון בא. אבל אגיד לך את הרשום בכתב אמת ואין אחד מתחזק עמי על אלה כי אם מיכאל שרכם.

And it is the pronunciation:

Vayómer: hayadáta láma báti eléxa? Veatá ashúv lehilaxém im sar Parás. Vaaní yotsé vehiné, sar Yaván ba. Aval agíd lexá et harashúm bixtáv émet. Veén exád mitxazék imí al éle, ki im Mixaél sarxém. 

Hebrew יוצא (yotsé) means to depart, to go out, to leave. Then the translation "when I go" is to be read as "when I leave", meaning that the prince of Greece comes when God has finished the work He is doing with the kings of Persia. Apart from this, the translation of NIV is a literal one. 

What is this "fight" against the kings of Persia?

In Ezra 1:1 we read, "In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation..." and the chapter continues with the decree of king Cyrus to allow the Jews to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple of God. Observe that "the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus". But it doesn't mean that Cyrus converted to Judaism and started reading the Bible, praying at the Wailing Wall and fasting on Yom Kippur (let alone his successors) The Lord had to work with other Persian kings (at least we know about Darius, Xerxes and Artaxerxes, which are mentioned in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther) in order to fight the opposition that the Jews found against Cyrus' decree, when they started. The temple was abandoned for more than 15 years because of that opposition, and only an order of king Darius - and the prophetic ministry of Haggai and Zechariah - made it possible to resume the construction. A similar decree by king Artaxerxes allowed Nehemiah to go to Jerusalem and rebuild the wall around the city. We can see that God's fight with the Persian kings didn't end with Cyrus. 

Why is it only Michael who helps God concerning Israel?

In the message corresponding to Daniel 10:11-14 we spoke about the existence and activity of angels and archangels - God's heavenly hosts - and fallen angels (demons, unclean spirits) with their fallen archangels, the "authorities, ... powers of this dark world and ... spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms" that the apostle Paul is referring to in Ephesians 6:12. The "prince of Persia" had been opposing God's will, and the "prince of Israel" - the archangel Michael - came to fight and defeat him. 

By those times, the only people in the world that knew and serve God was Israel; all the other ones worshiped false gods (Romans, Greeks, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians and everyone else) False gods are called "demons" in the Bible (1 Corinthians 10:20) and belong in the satanical realm Paul describes in Ephesians 6:12. All of these Empires fought against Israel or part of it, and held the Jews under their rule for long periods of time, meaning their "princes" defeated Michael many times. The partial victory of Israel's guardian angel in this chapter would not last very long, when the "prince of Greece" came. It is so because unlike the Persians, the succesors of Alexander the Great applied a policy of "hellenization" to the peoples they conquered - meaning the act of coercing them to adopt Greek culture and language, even Greek deities - and it didn't work well with the Jews, who wouldn't worship demons. Long passages in Daniel 8 and 11 are prophecies about the fight against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV.

What is this "book of truth", and which "truth" are we talking about?

At the time Daniel received this vision, he had received - and most probably written - the interpretation of king Nebuchadnezzar in chapter two, and different visions and prophecies in chapters 7, 8 and 9. Because chapters 11, 12 were not yet written, some ones believe that this "book of truth" can't be the Bible, since this particular chapters didn't exist at the time. And the "truth" the Lord is talking about here is certainly the prophecy contained in these chapters; Daniel 11:2 says clearly, "Now then, I tell you the truth" and then the whole prophecy is revealed. 

There are two powerful arguments against this line of thought:

⦁ Before even Genesis 1:1 was written, the whole Bible including every book and chapter was "written" in God's mind. For God is omniscient, which means He knows everything that is happening now, everything that took place in the past and everything that will take place in the future, even on eternity. So these two chapters were part of the Bible for God, at the time they were not yet known by Daniel.

⦁ Daniel chapters 11 & 12 are not a totally new revelation for Daniel. They are a most detailed explanation of all the visions and prophecies he had received - and written - before, as Genesis 2 is a most detailed explanation of Genesis 1:26-30 (the creation of man & woman) If you haven't read Genesis 2, only chapter 1, then you know already that God is our Creator and that he created male and female, and commanded them to "be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it". In the same way, Daniel knew already that several empires would rise and oppress Israel, but at the end God would send the Messiah with "everlasting dominion" to establish an eternal kingdom which "would never be destroyed" from his vision in chapter 7. 

The revelation of the truth contained in chapters 11-12 is the reason that the Lord came to Daniel. It is also the reason He has come to so many of us. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant, so that we through the Spirit are able to "speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words". It is vital that we pray to God for the anointing of the Holy Spirit so that we receive this truth. We will share more about this in the next chapter, if the Lord allows. 

We have spoken in the beginning of the outcome of lies. Not only that women sports could dissapear or Israel and the Arab world could live in constant wars. Lying doctors would kill the sick, not heal them. Lying engineers would make bridges and tunnels that would colapse and kill many people Lying lawyers would set criminals free, and send them back to hurt other ones. All that we know and expect to function technologically, socially, scientifically or whatever, rests on the shoulders of truth. 

There is a most precious thing that is the most important one to God: your eternal soul. So important is it that He sent to us His only begotten Son to shed His blood on a cross, to die for our sins. The Word of God, which doesn't lie, has said that we have all sinned and we have fallen short of the glory of God. That's why we allow lies to be a part of our life. But the Bible also says that Jesus is the way, and the truth, and the life. And that if we confess that Jesus is Lord, and if we believe that God has risen Him from the dead, we will be saved. 

If you have not yet received Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, today is the day! Don't wait any longer. Time will come when it is not going to be possible, when those who lived in the lie will go to hell and those who lived in the truth will meet Him in the air, and go to heaven with Him, to be forever with God. Repent and receive Jesus! He is the way to God, the Savior of our souls, the healer of our wounds, our Comforter in times of trouble, our Companion in times of loneliness, the One who promised us to be with us until the end of times. He will save your soul from eternal damnation and give you eternal life in righteousness, peace and joy.

In the love of Christ, your brother

Israel Leonard

PS. Jesus is coming soon!