Pray to our only hope—an awesome loving God to Save us from our Sins
Many of you know that I’m a fan of spectator sports. Each morning I generally have my devotions in two different places, in the Bible, and the sports page.
As a sports fan, I’m familiar with mismatches—like when the #1 College Football Team in the nation finds itself playing a game against a Division II patsy. An example., for instance is when Alabama plays Alabama A & M. The favorite, Alabama, will be favored by something like 52 points. The score will typically end up being 35-0 in the Second Quarter. And the sports pundits will say about Alabama A&M chances that Alabama A&M “doesn’t have a prayer” of winning the game.
Of course, the statement is ultimately an insult to God, because it gives the impression that not even Almighty God could not help this hapless, helpless team win.
But I refer to it this morning because the truth of the matter is, with regard to the human race, when we consider our sin, Satan and his demonic horde, and the history of mankind, all we have is a prayer. The only possible solution is to pray for mankind’s only hope—an awesome, loving God to save us from the consequences of our own sins.
You might think it odd that that should be the main idea of today’s passage—the incredible prophecy of the future of Jewish people under the control of sinful Gentile nations in answer to Daniel’s great prayers. But that is precisely my conclusion, after considering the ugly history of mankind as portrayed in this incredible prophecy, and it now having been fulfilled in history.
What we have before us this morning is perhaps the most detailed prophecy in all of the Bible in plain language that has been fulfilled in detail.
And we need to remember how it came about—it all began with a prayer, the humble, grieving, intense and persistent prayer of a godly old man named Daniel in 536 B.C.
85-year old Daniel is in his 70th year of captivity in Babylon, all the while longing for both his and his people’s restoration to their promised land, Israel. 50,000 Jews have finally just returned to Jerusalem. Daniel is in the midst of a modified 21-day period of fasting and mourning over the fate of his people, Israel, when a mighty angel showed up in answer to his prayers and revealed the future history of Israel for the next about 400 years, and then in the end times.
As we saw last week, in Daniel 10, this powerful angel describes a spiritual battle between him, Michael the archangel and the very powerful world forces of this darkness, demonic princes who apparently wield great power and influence over the nations, and in particular the great Gentile powers who had dominion over the Jews during Daniel’s lifetime, and going forward. The angel had been sent with this message to Daniel at the outset of Daniel’s 21 days of prayer and fasting but was delayed until the 21st day by the demonic princes. He has just told Daniel that he must return to the battle immediately, after sharing this incredible prophecy with him, and then he makes one concluding statement about his previous actions in the heavenly places in the course of the spiritual battle. It’s found in Daniel 11:1: “In the first year of Darius the Mede, I arose to be an encouragement and a protection for him.”
Now it’s a very short statement of his recent activity. It’s now the third year of Darius the Mede, the third year of the reign also of his co-regent and fellow king Cyrus the Persian. So it’s now two years later, 536 B.C. But it is a profound statement of the effect his actions had in 539 and 538 B.C. on the career of Darius, the King of the Medes and Persians, and upon the nations. This is because 539 B.C. was an incredibly eventful year in world and Jewish history. What this very powerful angel did in 539-538 B.C. had a huge impact on world and Jewish history.
Now my first thought upon reading this statement was what in the world was a powerful angel of God doing being an encouragement and a protection to a pagan, idolatrous king. Then I realized that it was likely during that first year of Darius the Mede that Darius was converted to the worship of the Jewish God, Daniel’s God. You might remember from our series, or from Daniel itself, that two major events occurred with respect to Darius in his first year as king in Babylon. First, Darius had conquered Babylon. He had killed Belshazzar, the Babylonian king, and now the Kingdom of the Medes and the Persians became the single greatest kingdom on earth, and the kingdom that humanly speaking, controlled the fate of the Jews. Second, it was likely in that first year of Darius that Darius also was converted to faith in Daniel’s God. If you’ll remember, from Daniel 6, Darius was tricked and forced to place Daniel in the lion’s den, and then spent the night fasting for Daniel’s deliverance. When Daniel was delivered, Darius proclaimed his faith in Daniel’s God in a proclamation delivered to all of the nations that had become part of the Kingdom of Babylon, now the Kingdom of the Medes and Persians, issuing a decree that all men were to fear the God of Daniel—a pretty evangelistic statement from a King. And so you better believe that the angel’s actions to come alongside Darius in that first year of his rule had a huge impact on Darius personally and the whole Kingdom generally. The spiritual battle engaged on behalf of Daniel rocked and rolled human history at that point.
And that’s not all that happened in the first year of Darius. It was also the first year of Cyrus, the other king of the Medes and the Persians. Ezra chapter one tells us that Cyrus, citing the fact that he had been directed by the God of the Jews, the great God of heaven, issued a decree permitting the Jews, even encouraging the Jews, to return from their exile in Babylon. So this angel’s impact, along with others, had a monumental effect on the history of the Jewish people as well.
And then there’s something else that happened in the Book of Daniel in the first year of Darius. It’s found in Daniel 9. Daniel prayed his great prayer confessing the sins of his people and asking God to relent in light of his repentance on their behalf and restore Israel and Jerusalem and the Temple as a result. Now what I’m suggesting is that much of what happened in 539 and 538 B.C., the conversion of Darius, his decree for all to fear the God of Daniel, Cyrus’ decree to permit and encourage Israel to return, and the angel’s mission to encourage and protect Darius probably all occurred because of Daniel’s great prayer of confession in Daniel 9.
Wow, Daniel’s prayers changed the world. It changed what was happening in the spiritual battle. Daniel’s prayers, for the moment, won the spiritual battle and changed, in a sense, the course of history, in favor of Darius, in favor of people coming to fear the God of Daniel, in favor of the Jews returning to the Promised Land. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about prayer from the late great Haddon Robinson, “For Jesus, prayer won the spiritual battle. His ministry was just taking the spoils.” For Daniel, prayer won the spiritual battle. Not only were there monumental changes taking places among angels and demons in the heavenly places, but there were, as a result, monumental changes that took place in human history and the history of God’s people, the Jews.
And it tells me that the humble, repentant prayers of godly people can save the people you care about. Because that was the object of Daniel’s prayer. He was concerned about the fate of his people, the Jews. And his godly repentant, reconciling prayers moved spiritual mountains.
You’ve got people you care about. All they have eternally and ultimately is your prayer. Thank God they have a prayer. And if they’re sinners who are lost, who don’t know Christ, all they have is a prayer, your prayer, and you can make all the difference in saving them, by your persistent, humble prayers on their behalf. That was the greatest gift Daniel could give his people and it’s the greatest gift you can give for those you love.
Do you pray for them? Do you pray for them persistently and humbly and repentantly as Daniel prayed here? You can move spiritual mountains as Daniel did if you pray as Daniel prayed.
Now, God begins to answer Daniel’s prayers with regard to exactly what would take place in Israel’s future. Though Daniel’s people had begun to return to the Promised Land, and the temple and Jerusalem would be rebuilt, as had been revealed to Daniel in Daniel 9, the Jews would continue to have a very rough go of it. Life would not yet be easy for the Jews, in large part because they would never fulfill the requirements of the Old Covenant. They would fail; they would disobey; thus they would suffer. From verse 2 through 35 we find 135 specific prophecies about the history of Jews over the next approximately 400 years that would be fulfilled in detail. The Jews, once back in the land, but in subjection to various Gentile powers during the times of the Gentiles, would experience great conflict and tumult. But they would survive.
Now this is an amazing prophecy, so amazing in its detailed fulfillment that unbelievers for 1800 years have proposed the idea that it was all written down after the historic facts had been fulfilled. But no, scholarship has proven Daniel wrote these things down prophetically as a Jew in Babylon before these things happened, in the 6th century B.C.
Now the prophecy is so detailed that we don’t have the time, and you don’t have the interest to review all the detail. It could end up only being a history lesson, so we won’t take the time to review all the details, but we will give you a taste this morning, so you get a sense of how great our God is in His knowledge of the future, and sadly, how sinful man is in his relationship to other men.
Verse 2, the angel tells Daniel, “And now I will tell you the truth. Behold, three more kings are going to arise in Persia. Then a fourth will gain far more riches than all of them; as soon as he becomes strong through his riches, he will arouse the whole empire against the realm of Greece. And a mighty king will rise, and he will rule with great authority and do as he pleases.”
This was fulfilled in detail. The fourth Persian king after Cyrus was Xerxes, a.k.a. the Ahasuerus of the Book of Esther, and he rules from 486-465 B.C. He was indeed richer than all of his predecessors and he aroused the whole kingdom against the Kingdom of Greece. He took an army of 3 million men against the Kingdom of Greece, with the help of those in Carthage, and 200 ships, and incredibly was defeated and humiliated. There were four or five other Persian kings who followed him, but they weren’t as powerful, and they were not significant. Xerxes is mentioned because his campaign against Greece ultimately resulted in a great king arising in Greece, the famous Alexander the Great. The great destruction brought upon Greece by Xerxes’ invasion 150 years earlier had so embittered Greece that even then in 335 B.C., the young Alexander the Great, when asked why he had invaded Persia, said that he was returning the favor bestowed upon Greece by Xerxes and Persia 150 years before. Alexander the Great was the mighty king of verse 3 that arose from Greece and took revenge upon Persia so completely that he conquered the entire vast Kingdom of the Medes and the Persians from Greece all the way east to the Indus River in India, and all the way south to Egypt and North Africa. “He will do as he pleases” indicates that no other king or kingdom could withstand him.
Verse 4 tells us what then happened with Alexander the Great. “But as soon as he has arisen, his kingdom will be broken up and parceled out toward the four points of the compass, though not to his own descendants, nor according to his authority which he wielded, for his sovereignty will be uprooted and given to others besides them.
As is well known, as soon as Alexander had finished conquering the kingdom of the Medes and the Persians, he died before reaching the age of 33. His descendants were all murdered within 15 years. His kingdom was parceled up to his four generals—“to the four points of the compass.” All of this is vital to the future of the Jews, because their fortunes would be tied to the history of two of those four kingdoms. One of those kingdoms would be represented by the various Kings of the North in this prophecy, and one of those Kingdoms would be represented by the various Kings of the South. They are called Kings of the North and Kings of the South because of their locations in relationship to Israel, or “The Beautiful Land” as it is referred to in this prophecy. The Kings of the North were the Seleucids, descended from Alexander’s General Seleucis, who had their headquarters in Syria, or Antioch of Syria, just north of Israel, and eventually ruled a vast kingdom to the east which included Babylon and everything to the Indus River. The King of the South was initially Alexander’s General Ptolemy, and he and his descendants ruled over the realm of Egypt.
Now these two Kingdoms didn’t get along. They were like the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s, on a much larger scale. They had a running conflict, war after war, invasion after invasion of one another’s realm, and it just so happened Israel was in the middle of all of this. Ever been between two feuding friends or relatives. It’s a very difficult situation. You will suffer because of it. And Israel was the buffer state between these two warring kingdoms, and suffered terribly because of it, at times under the dominion of the Kings of the South, at times under the dominion of the Kings of the North.
Now I’ll just give you a taste of how detailed these prophecies about the Kings of the North and the Kings of the South are, and their amazing fulfillment. Verse 5: “Then the King of the South, (the King of Egypt, General Ptolemy), along with one of his princes who will gain ascendancy over him and obtain dominion, his domain will be a great dominion indeed. After some years they will form an alliance and the daughter of the king of the South will come to the King of the North to carry out a peaceful arrangement. But she will not retain her position of power, nor will he remain with his power, but she will be given up, along with those who brought her in and the one who sired her as well as he who supported her in those times. But one of the descendants of her line will arise in his place, and he will come against their army and enter the fortress of the King of the North and he will deal with them and display great strength. Also their gods with their metal images and their precious vessels of silver and gold he will take into captivity to Egypt.
A ton of history was predicted and fulfilled her. One of the royal descendants of Ptolemy in Egypt was Ptolemy III. He gave his daughter Berenice in marriage to the King of the North as a means of establishing a peace treaty. There was one problem. The King of the North was married at the time, and had to divorce his wife, Laodice, to marry Berenice. And when Berenice’s Father, the King of the South died, he repudiated his marriage to Berenice, and remarried Laodice.
Laodice, embittered by the whole deal, poisoned her husband, the King of the North, and had Berenice and all of her Egyptian attendants—those who brought her—murdered, along with her infant son, and installed her own son as the new King of the North.
Of course, this didn’t over too well in Egypt. Berenice’s brother, now ascended to King of the South, takes revenge, successfully invades Syria, executes Laodice, and plunders the Kingdom all the way to Babylon, taking with him vast riches, and the idols of metal, silver and gold that had been stolen from Egypt hundreds of years earlier by the Babylonians.
And of course there are endless cycles of reprisals and revenge between the two kingdoms, with Israel in the middle for the next 100 or so years, and Israel suffers greatly, as we shall see next week.
Now what lessons can be learned from all of this. Well, there are at least two. The great sinfulness and wickedness of man. The wars and rumors of wars that come about because of selfish ambition and greed, and then continue because of a desire for revenge—one cycle of destruction after another cycle of destruction. What does sinful man do to other sinful men when unrestrained by the fear and knowledge of God? Rape, kill, pillage, destroy. It’s awful. It’s ugly. And it’s been going on through all of human history. The very things that we experience to this day in wars and rumors of wars, now turning into world wars with the threat of thermonuclear warfare are the sorts of things that have characterized all of human history.
Mankind left to his own imaginations and ambitions, is an absolute disaster, destined to destroy himself, unless God intervenes, as Jesus Himself predicted.
What hope is there for mankind? Do we have a prayer? Yes, we do. The only hope for sinful mankind is a prayer. The kind of prayers Daniel prayed for God’s mercy.
And that’s the other observation about this passage. We do not have a God who does not care. We have an awesome God who obviously knows and can even foretell from eternity past what will happen in human history. He has cared enough to predict what would happen in advance in exacting detail to a godly man who cared intensely about the fate of his people.
And more than that, He’s a righteous, merciful and loving God who so desires to rescue us from the consequences of His own sin, that as Daniel predicted, He would send a Messiah, a deliverer, the God-Man, to save us from our sins. And He did so shortly after the events described in verses 2-20—when Jesus, the God-man, was crucified at the hands of the very sinful men he came to save, and proved it be being resurrected from the dead.
And so the prayer we have for the world, and for those we love is the prayer that can be and will be heard by a loving and merciful God, now when we pray in the name of Jesus.
Yes, mankind, and those whom you love, have a prayer. It’s all we have, but it’s an effective prayer than can save those whom we love from the very sins that destroy the world.
And today, when they’re uttered in the name of Jesus Christ, with the same intensity and persistence and humility that Daniel prayed with, they can move spiritual mountains. They can save, even deliver, the people we love, as they did in Daniel’s day.
Won’t you pray as Daniel prayed?
Let’s pray.
