History Written in Advance Text: Daniel 8:15-27
Introduction: God's Timetable
We live in an age that is simultaneously obsessed with and terrified of the future. Men spend billions of dollars trying to predict financial markets, election outcomes, and weather patterns, all in a desperate attempt to gain some measure of control over their own destiny. In the church, this same impulse has often led to a cottage industry of prophetic speculation, with elaborate charts and timelines attempting to map out the end times with the precision of a train schedule. But in all this flurry of activity, the main point is often lost. The reason God reveals the future is not to satisfy our idle curiosity or to give us an edge in the geopolitical betting pool. He reveals the future to demonstrate that He is the one who controls it.
Prophecy is not a puzzle for clever exegetes to solve; it is a declaration of God's absolute sovereignty over history. It is God telling us what He is going to do, so that when He does it, we will know that He is God and that we are not. This is the central theme of Daniel's visions. God is not reacting to the rise and fall of earthly empires; He is directing them. Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Alexander the Great, and Caesar Augustus are not the masters of their own fate; they are actors on a stage, reading from a script that was written by God before the foundation of the world.
In our text today, Daniel is given a vision that is so potent and disturbing that it leaves him physically ill. But he is not left in confusion. God, in His mercy, sends the angel Gabriel to give him the interpretation. And the interpretation is not a collection of vague spiritual platitudes. It is a detailed, specific, and historically verifiable account of the next several centuries of conflict between the empires of Medo-Persia and Greece. This is not allegory. This is history written in advance. And understanding this is crucial, because if God was this precise and this sovereign over the events leading up to the first coming of Christ, we can have absolute confidence that He is just as sovereign over the events leading to the final consummation of all things.
The Text
Now it happened when I, Daniel, had seen the vision, that I sought to understand it; and behold, standing before me was one who had the appearance of a man. And I heard the voice of a man between the banks of Ulai, and he called out and said, “Gabriel, give this man an understanding of what has appeared.” So he came near to where I was standing, and when he came I was terrified and fell on my face; but he said to me, “Son of man, understand that the vision pertains to the time of the end.” Now while he was talking with me, I sank into a deep sleep with my face to the ground; but he touched me and made me stand upright. Then he said, “Behold, I am going to let you know what will happen at the final period of the indignation, for it pertains to the appointed time of the end. The ram which you saw with the two horns is the kings of Media and Persia. Now the shaggy goat is the king of Greece, and the large horn that is between his eyes is the first king. And the broken horn and the four horns that stood in its place are four kingdoms which will take their stand from his nation, although not with his power. In the latter period of their reign, When the transgressors have run their course, A king will stand, Insolent and skilled in intrigue. His power will be mighty, but not by his own power, And he will destroy to an astonishing degree And succeed and do his will; He will destroy mighty men and the holy people. And through his insight He will cause deceit to succeed by his hand; And he will magnify himself in his heart, And he will destroy many while they are at ease. He will even stand against the Prince of princes, But he will be broken without hands. And what had appeared about the evenings and mornings Which has been told is true; But as for you, conceal the vision, For it pertains to many days in the future.” Then I, Daniel, was exhausted and sick for days. Then I rose up again and did the king’s work; but I was appalled at what had appeared, and there was none to make me understand it.
(Daniel 8:15-27 LSB)
The Terrifying Messenger (vv. 15-18)
We begin with Daniel's reaction to the vision and the arrival of the interpreter.
"Now it happened when I, Daniel, had seen the vision, that I sought to understand it; and behold, standing before me was one who had the appearance of a man. And I heard the voice of a man between the banks of Ulai, and he called out and said, 'Gabriel, give this man an understanding of what has appeared.' So he came near to where I was standing, and when he came I was terrified and fell on my face..." (vv. 15-17)
Daniel, having seen this dramatic vision of a ram and a goat, is not puffed up with spiritual pride. He is humbled and seeks to understand. This is the posture of every true saint when confronted with divine revelation. We do not approach Scripture as masters, but as students. And God honors this posture by sending help. A voice, likely a Christophany, the pre-incarnate Christ, commands the angel Gabriel by name to explain the vision. This is the same Gabriel who will later announce the birth of John the Baptist and of Jesus Himself. His role is to deliver messages of monumental historical importance.
Daniel's reaction to Gabriel's approach is telling. He was "terrified and fell on my face." In our sanitized, flannel-graph world, we tend to imagine angels as chubby babies with harps. The biblical reality is quite different. When a holy being from the immediate presence of God shows up, the appropriate human reaction is terror. It is the reaction of a sinful creature in the presence of unmitigated holiness. Isaiah, Ezekiel, and John all had the same reaction. This physical, overwhelming response continues as Gabriel speaks, and Daniel sinks into a deep sleep, face to the ground, until the angel touches him and sets him on his feet. This is a picture of our natural state before God. We are spiritually comatose, unable to stand, until God's messenger touches us and raises us up. We cannot receive God's word on our own terms; we must be enabled by Him to hear it.
The Plain Interpretation (vv. 19-22)
Gabriel does not speak in riddles. He gives a direct, one-to-one correlation for the symbols in the vision.
"The ram which you saw with the two horns is the kings of Media and Persia. Now the shaggy goat is the king of Greece, and the large horn that is between his eyes is the first king. And the broken horn and the four horns that stood in its place are four kingdoms which will take their stand from his nation, although not with his power." (vv. 20-22)
There is no ambiguity here. This is not open to a thousand different interpretations. The ram is Medo-Persia. The goat is Greece. The large horn on the goat is its first king, Alexander the Great. The vision Daniel saw earlier in the chapter depicted this goat moving with incredible speed and shattering the horns of the ram, a perfect picture of Alexander's lightning-fast conquest of the Persian Empire. The vision also showed the great horn being broken and replaced by four smaller horns. Gabriel confirms this means that after the first king, the Greek empire will be divided into four lesser kingdoms. This is precisely what happened after Alexander's death, when his empire was carved up by his four generals: Cassander, Lysimachus, Ptolemy, and Seleucus. God told Daniel the course of history centuries before it happened, with stunning accuracy. This is not a lucky guess. This is the declaration of a sovereign who works all things according to the counsel of His will.
The Insolent King (vv. 23-25)
The interpretation now focuses on a particularly nasty figure who will arise from one of these four Greek kingdoms.
"In the latter period of their reign, When the transgressors have run their course, A king will stand, Insolent and skilled in intrigue... He will destroy mighty men and the holy people... He will even stand against the Prince of princes, But he will be broken without hands." (vv. 23-25)
History again provides the key. Out of the Seleucid kingdom, one of the four divisions of Alexander's empire, arose a king named Antiochus IV Epiphanes. He reigned from 175 to 164 B.C. The description here fits him like a glove. He was "insolent," taking the name Epiphanes, meaning "God Manifest," a staggering display of arrogance. He was "skilled in intrigue," seizing power through cunning and deceit.
His power was "mighty, but not by his own power." This is a crucial theological point. Tyrants do not rise by their own strength. They are raised up by God to accomplish His purposes, even if their own intent is pure evil (Romans 9:17). God gave Antiochus his power for a season to chastise a disobedient Israel, "when the transgressors have run their course." Antiochus did "destroy to an astonishing degree," slaughtering thousands of Jews, the "holy people." He did "magnify himself in his heart," and he did "stand against the Prince of princes." This phrase refers to God Himself, and Antiochus did this in the most direct way imaginable. He marched into Jerusalem, outlawed the worship of Yahweh, and desecrated the Temple by sacrificing a pig on the altar, an act that became known as the Abomination of Desolation. He set himself up in direct opposition to the God of Israel and His worship.
But notice the end of the story. "He will be broken without hands." Antiochus was not defeated by a human army. He died suddenly and ignominiously of a disease while on a campaign in the east. God raised him up, and God struck him down. His end was a divine judgment, a breaking "without hands," which anticipates the stone "cut out without hands" in Daniel 2, which is the kingdom of Christ that crushes all earthly kingdoms.
Seal It Up (vv. 26-27)
The message concludes with a command and a description of its profound effect on Daniel.
"And what had appeared about the evenings and mornings Which has been told is true; But as for you, conceal the vision, For it pertains to many days in the future.” Then I, Daniel, was exhausted and sick for days... I was appalled at what had appeared, and there was none to make me understand it." (vv. 26-27)
Gabriel confirms that the vision is true and then tells Daniel to "conceal the vision." Why? Because its fulfillment was still far off, "many days in the future." From Daniel's perspective in the 6th century B.C., the rise of Antiochus in the 2nd century B.C. was a long way off. This stands in stark contrast to the command given to the apostle John in Revelation, where he is told, "Do not seal the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand" (Rev. 22:10). This is one of the clearest indicators that the prophecies of Revelation were intended for an imminent, first-century fulfillment, while Daniel's prophecies pointed to a more distant future, a future that is now our distant past.
Daniel's reaction is not relief or intellectual satisfaction. He is "exhausted and sick for days." He is "appalled." Why? Because he has just been given a glimpse into the severity of God's judgments. He has seen the terrifying reality of God using a wicked, blasphemous king to discipline His own covenant people. To truly understand God's sovereignty is not a cozy, academic exercise. It is a weighty, terrifying, and ultimately worshipful reality. It sickened Daniel to see what sin costs and how holy God is. Even with Gabriel's explanation, the full weight of it was more than he could bear.
The Pattern of the Tyrant
So what does this ancient history have to do with us? Everything. Antiochus Epiphanes is a type, a pattern, of a certain kind of rebellion against God. He is not the final Antichrist, a figure of much dispensationalist speculation for which there is little scriptural warrant. Rather, he is one of many antichrists. He is a forerunner, a preview of the kind of arrogant, God-hating ruler that will appear throughout history.
The spirit of Antiochus is the spirit of the insolent king who magnifies himself in his heart. It is the spirit of Nero, who set himself against the saints of the first century. It is the spirit of every totalitarian regime that seeks to supplant the worship of God with the worship of the state. It is the spirit of our own secular age, which is skilled in the intrigue of deceitful language, which seeks to destroy the "holy people" through cultural and legal pressure, and which stands against the Prince of princes by denying His lordship and rewriting His laws.
But the pattern holds to the very end. Every ruler, every system, and every individual who magnifies himself against the Prince of princes will share the same fate as Antiochus. They will be broken, and it will be "without hands." They will not be broken by political action committees, or by military force, or by clever human strategy. They will be broken by the sovereign decree of God and the irresistible advance of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. That kingdom, the stone cut without hands, has already struck the kingdoms of this world at the cross and resurrection. It is now growing into a mountain that will fill the whole earth.
The vision that made Daniel sick should give us sober confidence. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God, and we should be appalled at the wickedness of a world that sets itself against Him. But our ultimate trust is not in our ability to outmaneuver the insolent kings of our day. Our trust is in the Prince of princes, who has already won the decisive victory. He was broken for us, so that all who stand against Him might be broken by Him. History is His story, and He has already told us how it ends.