Daniel 11:39 –
Claiming this foreign god’s help, he will attack the strongest fortresses. He will honor those who submit to him, appointing them to positions of authority and dividing the land among them as their reward.
This is one of those long chapters that I got very little from. The one cool thing was in reading footnotes and other documents you quickly see that these prophecies have been fulfilled already, for the most part. They “fit” almost perfectly between 300-100BC, which is some 200 years after the writings. So one has to imagine if these are from God, or just a lucky call by Daniel after looking at the landscape of his day.
Honestly, if you look at many of the “warnings” from our founding fathers they “prophesized” what is happening today. Thomas Jefferson warned of the “centralized banks” issuing currency, and now you apply that to the Federal Reserve. Or Benjamin Franklin’s and Alexander Tytler’s warnings about the end of the republic when people can vote themselves money. Were these prophecies or just knowing history and warning us not to repeat it?
This is the problem with history; we see millenniums of records of a cycle that inevitably repeats itself over and over. Again we claim to have “evolved” from the old way of thinking, yet for some reason we just keep doing the same thing. The only thing that really evolves is “technology” or the way we kill each other. Sure we develop better forms of communications and health, but the carnal desires for more destroy the fabric of any society.
I have claimed from time to time our world may have already been through “the end times” and we are just on the other end messing things up like Adam and Eve did the first time! Think about it, God and man in paradise was destroyed by Satan’s temptation. What is there that says the end has past, we inherited the world and some other angel fell to repeat the past? Time will go on, “the end” is just the world as we know it, not the end of time. Think about it, what happens after the end … the second after, time goes on. Just like the end of space, what’s on the other side?
That was a tangent! The verse caught my attention since we see the person of authority tempting the “right” people with money and power to turn their eyes away from the one true God. Granted most of us will never be in a position to be “bribed”, but it is something to be aware of that can and may happen. Again, did Daniel just know history would repeat, or did he have a true vision? I believe the vision since the details match quite well to history.