Can we stop talking about Nadab and Abihu - Investigating God's Will for Today

Hello, and welcome to the Westside churches special Monday Morning Coffee podcast on this podcast, our preacher Mark Roberts will help you get your week started right. With look back at yesterday's sermon so that we can think through it further and better work the applications into our daily lives . Mark will then look forward into this week's Bible reading so that we can know what to expect and watch for. And, he may have some extra bonus thoughts from time to time. So grab a cup of coffee as we start the week together on Monday Morning Coffee with Mark.

Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to the Monday Morning Coffee podcast for Monday, October the ninth. I'm Mark . I'm working on some coffee. I'm looking at my sermon notes from yesterday and I'm ready to talk with you about Daniel. It was an unbelievable weekend. Edwin Crozier was here. It did some great stuff with our singles that was incredible, really wonderful. And we had a great day yesterday at West Side that was an unexpected blessing and in some ways, maybe , maybe not a blessing for everybody because I was supposed to be in Saratoga, Arkansas starting a gospel meeting yesterday. But Covid has arrived at that congregation and so we're gonna have to reschedule that and move that around. This is not the time for a gospel meeting, but that meant that I got to be at home and I had some extra material that I really wanted to talk about holiness and being holy coming out of that sermon on holiness and the heart of God. And that gave me a chance to do that. If you've not listened to the 9:00 AM stuff yesterday, you really should listen to that. That sermon's entitled Practical Holiness and really talking about how to do it, how to do it. It's not mystical, it's not weird, it's not strange. You can do it. You can complete holiness. And that's in the 9:00 AM And then in the 10 40, I merged some ideas about holiness with the Bible Authority Series to talk about Na Avenue Ahu because a lot of people, I'm seeing a lot of chatter about this in podcast hearing about this a little bit outta pulpits and , and especially on social media, when people start talking about the pattern of New Testament Christianity, people start talking about this is what the New Testament says. And and it authorizes with command example, necessary inference and and someone says, yeah , we ought to do all that. We don't need to worry about that. But you're Pharisee kind , all that stuff that static is starting up. Someone's gonna say, you know, what about Leviticus 10 and Nate Abbot Ihu ? And so yesterday had a great chance to talk a little bit more about Nate Ab Ihu and I'm gonna share with you one more piece of the Nate Abbot Ihu sermon that will help us think. I think. Think, I think, can you even say that? Think I think in a really biblical kind of way. So let's get started. So let's talk a little bit more about NAAB and ab ihu because like I said, I'm hearing people that are uncomfortable with that being used as a illustration of our obedience and our need to obey God exactly as his word explains and describes for us, I've heard people say, what's the deal with Na Avenue Tohu ? That's Old Testament, that's not New Testament. Why are we so fixated on that? And just talked a little bit about Leviticus chapter 10. I think if you look at it in its context, it's absolutely not a weird anomaly, but in many ways is kind of the pinnacle of what's going on in the book, especially right there. And even though we do not know for certain exactly what they did that was wrong, we know that they did something that was quote , not commanded them. They did something presumptuously that was an act of worship, unauthorized by God. And I think that teaches us that God is holy and his holiness is to be taken seriously. And whether we take God's rules for worship seriously shows whether we're treating him as holy. Now, I don't really, I'm not comfortable God's worship rules. I'm not real comfortable with that language, but I think it makes the point God has some things to say in the New Testament about how we worship and we need to worship that way. Or we are doing what Nate Ab Abai Hu did. So lemme just share with you then something that I think makes that point in a little bit different way. I love this. This is a satirical piece. I did not write this piece. This was forwarded to me. It's it's entitled An Open Letter from Nadab and Abi Hu . And this piece is soaked in irony. I think it makes the point in a wonderful, wonderful way. So here's an open letter to the congregation of Israel from your humble servants and priest , Nate Heaven , ab ahu brethren, it is with the utmost humility that we inform you of a change of worship practice. Be assured we bring about this change only after much prayer and study. We have recently concluded an in-depth study of the law and have decided to bring about a change in the type of fire used in worship. We are aware there's a standing tradition of using only one source of fire, but we as priests don't feel obligated to blindly follow tradition. Numerous polls indicate the overwhelming opinion that worshipers don't care where we get the fire. We are in agreement with the majority. As we cannot see how a change in fire will affect anything in the least about our sacrifices, why would that matter? Besides all of this, nowhere in the law does God forbid the use of what some have called strange fire. We feel that the lack of such a restriction was meant to give us freedom. Is there any place in the law that tells us we cannot do something that the Lord has not sit , seen, fit to condemn? Where does it say we can't do this? Also, Israel's the only religious group that limits itself to one kind of fire. We're a laughing stalk . We are being openly ridiculed by many groups. We are in danger of appearing distinctive. This self-righteous only one fire policy alienates us from others. We believe this change will open up many fellowship opportunities now. Now to set some of your minds at ease, we will continue to offer traditional service using the old fashioned fire as well as a progressive service with this new fire. And this approach will make it possible to appeal to a younger audience as we discover more entertaining ways to light the fire in our assembly. For those who still oppose the use of new fire, we ask you don't be judgmental . And we hope that we will not use this change as an excuse to divide our people or stir up trouble. Don't do that to us. We remind you. This has been well thought out and many priests have signed on with us. We're all very much looking forward to our first new fire service. God will be watching. We anticipate his joy over seeing his people taking a great step forward in throwing off the burdens of binding tradition. Oh , this will be of experience never to be forgotten. Our new contemporary worship service will no doubt make it easier for us to really be on fire for the Lord. So we'll see you at our new fire service. We think this new practice will spread like wildfire. Please come and enjoy what we know will be an illuminating experience for all of us signed naab and by you iu . Don't think there's much further comment needed. Is there? Don't think I need to say much more than that. Hope that helps you from Leviticus 10 to think about Bible authority and to think about holiness and how they come together. Now let's turn our attention to Daniel. So today's reading Monday, October the ninth is in Daniel chapter 11. We resume the reading in verse 10 and then we'll proceed down to verse 18. Once again, this is about the time between the testaments and this is mostly about the wars between the ese and the Sids. The tese have control of the south. That's Egypt. The Sid have control of the north, that's Syria and those kinds of lands and they battle back and forth. A lot of which happens right on top of Judea. That's why this is important. There'll be some persecution, there'll be some difficulties for God's people. These events affect their lives. And Daniel is given a vision to explain what's going on in Daniel chapter 11, verse nine. On Friday we read then the latter shall come to the realm of the King of the South, but shall return to his own land. The idea continues here. This is about anus or Antiochus II attacking Egypt and he loses verse 10, 11 and 12. He has a huge multitude. He goes to the south verse 11, but loses and loses badly. As a result, the tese are exalted. Verse 12, Antiochus III decides to attack the ese . He was defeated at Rafa . He brought 62,000 infantry, 6,000 cavalry , 102 elephants, tomy the fourth co countered with 70,000 infantry, 5,000 cavalry and 73 elephants. The result was Antiochus lost 14,000 men. There was peace then between the sous and toes as a result, but Antiochus had to give back Palestine. So you can see the animosity and problems there. And I just, could somebody make a movie about this timeframe and do the C G I and all that great stuff so that we can see 102 elephants facing off against 73 elephants. That would be an amazing battle scene. I would like to see that. So verse 13, again, the king of the North shall raise a multitude greater than the first. After some years he shall come on with a great army and abundant supply . So he campaigned Antiochus II campaigned over the next 14 years in Turkey and in other places in the east. And he won a lot and he became known as the great. And part of his strategy was winning over unhappy Jews who joined up with him. And this was first 14, a tough time in Egypt. There was , there were rebellions, there were problems. It was a tough time in Judah as well. Not certain if this is Egypt in verse 14 or Judah that's being described something . Ezekiel seven may actually be talking about some of this. But then here it comes, verse 1516, the king of the nor shall come and throw up siege works and take a well fortified city. That's probably Seiden was taken in 1 98. Forces of the South shall not stand even his best troops be no strength to stand. He who comes against him shall do as he wills. So here comes Antiochus iii . He defeats Egypt this time regains control of Palestine somewhere in about 200, 1 98 BC and it becomes lucid property from that time on. It's gonna be lucid property. They hold it until the Romans are gonna take it from them. So it's from 1 98 on. The solutions are in control. And actually in 1 98, Antiochus was welcomed into Jerusalem as a deliverer that yeah, that feeling isn't gonna last because of what his son is going to do. Then verse 18, Antiochus began to attack other areas, the coastlands, that would be Greek. Lots of things go on. Finally, Rome begins to put a stop to his expansion ideas. They do defeat him and they take hostages and some huge tribute from him, which he's not able to pay. He has to surrender his elephants. Oh, sad face. He lost his elephants. That's a drag. And he ended up dying in rather difficult and sad circumstances. He was trying to pillage a temple to get money to pay Rome and the citizens got real mad and they stormed the temple and succeeded and killed him. So talk about a bad end to Antioch is iii , but what's gonna happen next? What happens to the Sids who are controlling the land of Israel, the area of Judea? What are they gonna do next and how is that going to affect the Jews who live there? This is where we're going tomorrow as we keep reading in Daniel 11. It is Tuesday and the entire exciting drama of Daniel chapter 11 begins to focus on one dreadful king Antiochus iv . Before we get to him, verse 20, our reading today is Daniel 1119 to 28. So here's all of this interplay back and forth between the lucid and the tummies . And verse 20, here comes a pretender. One shall send an exactor of tribute for the glory of the kingdom. He shall be broken. This is Lucas IV and he attempts to loot the temple treasury. He is assassinated in a mysterious plot, which probably isn't very mysterious given who comes next and who was always doing things that aren't very mysterious and are usually murderous to advance his agenda in his place. Verse 21 shall arise . A contemptible person, Tom, the Royal Majesty has not been given. This is Antiochus the fourth . He's the son of Lucas iv . He was a hostage at one point in Rome, when you had to give tribute to a foreign power that had conquered you, you would have to send like Daniel Shaar and Meshach and ab Bendigo. You'd have to send some of your young men there. Anti Aus was appointed to be a regent and there was all kinds of interplay there. He ends up seizing the throne and he even takes away verse 22, the high priest. He deposed him in favor of his brother who became his ally. I think of the high priest throwing in with Antioch, his epiphanies. What are you thinking here? Well, at this moment, maybe not everybody knew exactly what was gonna happen and how awful this would be. And so he attacks the tese in the south and this section begins to deal with this attack against the ese and the plots and counter plots. In one 70 Antiochus advanced into Egypt. He was speaking all kinds of lies about friendship. And then he attacked Egypt succeeding and actually taking told he the sixth prisoner. The Egyptians responded by crowning. His brother told he the seventh as their new king. Well, Antiochus then united with six to regain the Egyptian throne. But after a while the alliance wore out and six joined with seven and they were able to repel the invasion in 1 69. Then Antiochus successfully rated the temple treasury. This of course was not popular with the Jews at all, but you can imagine a pagan ruler. He needs money to pay his army. He needs money to pay off tribute. He needs money to pay mercenaries to be in his army. These guys always need more money. Here's the temple Treasury sitting there fat and full. He doesn't care anything about God. He takes the money. So there's all these plots and counter plots leading down to about verse 28. He should return to his land with great wealth, but his heart shall be set against the holy covenant. He shall work his will or return to his own land at the time appointed. He shall return and come into the south, but it shall not be this time as it was before, Antiochus decided to attack Egypt again. And he marches south to take Egypt in 1 68. But it isn't going to be like last time when he had success with his invasion. Tomorrow we'll read about what set Antiochus off. How come he's so angry with the Jews? See you tomorrow. Welcome to Wednesday. And today we read Daniel chapter 11 verses 29 to 37. We're right smack in the middle of Antiochus epiphanies, Antiochus IV and his campaign against Egypt. All these power grabs all these wars and invasions and plots and counter plots. Antiochus decides to come to the south, verse 29, but it doesn't work. Why not? Verse 30, because ships of kiddom shall come against him. Kiddo is Rome. And we know from other accounts outside of the Bible, secular historians that Rome stopped the invasion that Antiochus had launched and they told him to go home. But he got real uppity about that and said, I'm gonna think about it, blah, blah blah . And the Roman general drew a circle around him in the sand. I mentioned this earlier in Daniel and said, I will have your answer before you step out of that circle. That was humiliating and embarrassing that Roman general made Antiochus admit he did not have the might in power to take on the rising Roman empire. A key part of this is that high priest that he had put in the high priesthood. Remember he deposed the high priest. Verse 22, put a man named Jason in the high priesthood. Jason heard that Antiochus was killed in Egypt. So he started a rebellion, decided they could do their own thing. Antiochus was not too pleased about that. So here he's been embarrassed here he's been humiliated and in his own backyard he's got a rebellion going on. The response to that was as he marched back home to Syria, he went right through Jerusalem and massacred about 80,000 men, women and children. And he desecrated the temple. 16 December 1 68 BC he marched into the holy of holy places. A gentile marched into the holy of Holies. He sacrificed a pig on the altar to desecrate it and to humiliate the Jews. And then he began to pass laws to burn Torah scrolls, to prohibit circumcision, to cause all kinds of things to happen that would wipe out the Jewish religion. Shockingly, some Jews went along with this and you see some of that in our text today. He'll turn back and pay attention to those who forsake the holy covenant. Verse 30 forces from him appear profane the temple. They set up the abomination that makes desolate. He put an idol up in the temple and he'll seduce with flattery. Those who violate the covenant, some people went along with him, some Jews went along with him. But there are people who stand firm. That's the Maccabee family. The Maccabee family is led at first by their father. He's an old man. He refuses to knuckle under to these new law laws and rules kills a soldier and then the Maccabee family say it's on and they head to the hills and run gorilla warfare. They are stunningly successful against Syrian troops who regularly underestimate them and just are very poorly led and as a result end up getting routed in battle by Jewish forces that are not in any way. They're equal in weaponry or in numbers. The Maccabees fight against the Syrians for the next several years and I think verses 31 and 32 really are helping us as we think about this rebellion or or maybe this counterinsurgency that the Maccabee family is part of. There are five Maccabee brothers, that's actually not the family name. Judas is the brother that leads and starts. He is the best of the generals and he's known as Judas Maccabee . The word maccabee just means hammer, which is a reference to his reputation in battle. They're not really the McAfee and family that was not their last name. If you asked to see their driver's license, it didn't say maccabee on it, but we just called them the Maccabees 'cause everybody then knows who you're talking about. So I love on the podcast that I have room to give you some extra information that will help you. Here's a quotation from first Maccabees chapter one beginning verse 11. Now one Maccabees is pretty good history. It's not inspired, it's not part of your Bible, but it's a good text if we want to know what was going on here. It says, in those days there appeared in Israel men who are breakers of the law and they seduce many people saying, let us go and make an alliance with the Gentiles all around us. Since we are separated from them, many evils have come upon us. The proposal was agreeable. Some from among the people promptly went to the king and he authorized them to introduce the way of living of the Gentiles there upon . They built a gymnasium in Jerusalem according to the Gentile custom. They covered over the mark of their circumcision and abandoned the holy covenant. They allied themselves with the Gentiles and sold themselves into wrongdoing. That's the danger here. Jews are gonna stop being Jewish and they're gonna become Greek. And that is what Antiochus really wanted. He wanted to make Jerusalem into a Greek city state. And of course Orthodox Jews saw that as horrible. We are separate. We are the people of God. And so the Maccabees go to war. Matthias is their father and there are five boys. John Simon, Judas Eliezer , and Jonathan Eliezer died in battle. The legend is he was killing an elephant and Judas also ends up dying in battle. John and Simon later battles they die, although we're not totally sure of that. But Jonathan , he does gain the final victory years later. It's a long difficult struggle where they are outmanned and outgunned if you understand the meaning of that phrase. And they are finally able to throw off Antiochus in the yoke of the Syrians. And there's reference to that here. When they stumble, they shall receive a little help. Notice as much as made of the Maccabees and their fight for freedom and for independence. What the Bible says about that is they were just a little help because the emphasis is on what God did. God's sovereignty, God's power. God is the one that brought Antiochus to the to the end using the Maccabees and verse 36, we get more of how awful this king really is. He exalts himself and magnifies himself above every God. He shall speak astonishing things against the God of Gods. He shall prosper till the indignation is accomplished for what is decreed shall be done. He is dreadful and vain and arrogant and blood thirsty. He is everything the Jews fear the most. And the book of Daniel is giving them a clue about what's going to happen and that they need to remain faithful to God because even though it looks like evil's winning in verse 36, evil is not winning, God is in control. More of that as we finish Daniel chapter 11, tomorrow it is Thursday and we are reading Daniel chapter 11 verses 38 to 45. We are completing Daniel chapter 11 today. This is a very difficult section and it leads right into chapter 12, which has its own difficulties. There are problems with any interpretation that you take with this material. If somebody tells you they've got it all worked out down to a T , they're probably just trying to sell you their book. Nobody has been able to offer an explanation or interpretation of this section that is completely without difficulties. And again, I would encourage you to be extremely suspicious of somebody who has come up with the magic formula has somehow cut the gorian knot here. Oh look, for hundreds of years, good Bible students haven't been able to completely solve all of this. Look at me. I know what nobody else does. I am. Can you tell really suspicious of stuff like that? So the options here is number one, this is still talking about Antiochus epiphanies. That's the guy that's under consideration. What about the text here would say there's any kind of jump or any kind of break? There doesn't seem to be anything between verse 35 and 36 or 36 and 37. There doesn't seem to be anything to indicate, hey, we got a new guy, a new character, somebody else. Fast forward 2000 years to the end of the world, there's nothing in the text to clue you to that. There are, however, people who try to say there's something here about the coming antichrist and the end of the world, they're gonna try to do some of that kind of thing. And there are people who try to see some things here about the Roman Empire moving it into Jesus's time. Again, all of that seems to be problematic to me. There's no clue in the text that we're to hit the fast forward button, but there's a giant gap here. The major reason that folks are uncomfortable applying all of this to Antioch epiphanies is it doesn't match the historical data we have about him. For example, verse 40 talks about the king of the South moving against him, but it was always the other way around. Antiochus always attacks them and there doesn't seem to have been a war against Egypt after 1 68. He didn't conquer Libya. The data that we have from history doesn't match what this says. Maybe the thing to remember about that is we don't always have all the data from history and who writes the history books? Winners write the history books and when you get beat , when you get embarrassed sometimes that stuff doesn't get recorded. I , I get it. And I'm not all together comfortable with saying that this is Antiochus epiphanies because I think there are some wrinkles in that understanding. But I think that is probably the most consistent and best way to view this particular text . And I would say this, we need to remember that in the Old Testament talk about the end isn't always the end. Capital T , capital E . It's not always the end of all things. Amos has an end in chapter eight in verse two, that's in 7 22. The end of Israel. Ezekiel has an end in 5 87. That's in chapter seven in verse two. That's the end effectively of the Judean kingdom. And I , I should add that sometimes prophecy can telescope events merging the near events with events in far in the very far future. I think some of that may happen at the end of the book of Revelation, but I am not convinced that's going on here. I think the best call, what I am the most compelled by is that this is dealing with the continuing future and the continuing wickedness of Antiochus epiphanies. And probably what's more important than all the events is why he died. And that is that God brings him to an end. This section really focuses on the attacks on God, not just the land and the people. So we read down to verse 37, yesterday, verse 37 may reference a particular cult in Egypt that Antiochus destroyed the one that women love or it may just reference cruelty to women in general. He was not a nice person in verse 38. Then Antiochus could be very religious when it helped him. If he needed it to strengthen and unify his kingdom, he could do the religion thing. Religion was always the servant of his political ambitions. But when the Jewish religion got in the way of his attempt to make Judea into a Greek colony and rule it like a Greek city state , Jerusalem would be the capital of that. It would be like Athens, it'd be like Corin because hey, that those were the cool cities in Antiochus time. That's, that's how you do things very much reminiscent of of in in more recent history when various kings and royal ambassadors and dignitaries would visit Paris during its golden time during, during the time when the Palace of Versailles was flourishing and the Louis this and Louis that before the French Revolution, those guys would go home and they would say, Hey, we gotta do it like the French are doing. Have you been to Paris? It's an amazing city Dean and I went to Paris and, and, and I got it. I, I can see why people would go home and say, wow, those people have got it going on. It's an incredibly beautiful city. That's what's happened here today . An Antiochus iv. He , it's not, no, he did not go to Paris. I'm not saying that he is impressed with Greek ways and Greek culture and the Greek language and what we're gonna do to Judaism . We're gonna Greek it. We're all gonna be Greeks and the Jews were saying, we are not doing that. We are the people of God. By the way, can you see where the EPT came from? Yeah. The Septuagint came from Jews in Egypt who said, we should do that Greek thing. We should do that Greek thing. And in order to do that we need to have a Greek Bible. So they translated the Old Testament. That was all the Bible there was at that time. They translate the Old Testament into Greek and there were some Jews who thought that was awful. You need to read the Bible in Hebrew. What are you people doing down there? And then of course some Jews accepted that it came to be accepted Jesus, even culture of the Sept . It was not awful to translate it into a foreign language, but it was part of this shift that was going on as a result of the persecution of Antiochus iv. And so verses 40 to 45 detail, the end of Antiochus IV to summit , it appears that he died in a war with Egypt. He ex , it seems like he act actually ended up dying over in Persia. And we do well to remember here that the death of Antiochus was not a golden age then for Judea and everything was just, you know, flowers and roses and, and fresh baked chocolate chip cookies for everybody with really good cups of coffee. No, it was a time of lots of warfare and division and this guy's gonna be high priest and then he gets assassinated and that guy becomes high priest until somebody assassinates him. It was a very, very difficult time. But by the time we get to the end of it all in verse 45, Antiochus comes to an end with none to help him. That's the message here, don't give up, don't lose your faith and decide that because Antiochus is so powerful and he's overwhelming everybody and he's pushing all these changes and he's making Jews act like Greeks. Don't do that. Don't become a Greek. Stand with God. Maintain your faith. See it. See where it is in the book of Daniel. What's Daniel? Shadrach , Meshach and Abednego . What do they have to do in Babylon? They have to stand with God. They have to trust in God's sovereignty, God's power. What God is doing. The message here in Daniel 11, not always clear, I I'm not gonna try to pretend otherwise. I don't know everything about Daniel chapter 11, but I know what it means. Don't quit on God. God's going to win. God is going to win. I would , I would say this as I wind up Daniel chapter 11, and I've probably talked too long for today's episode Anyway, I would say this brother Haley brother Homer Haley used to say that brother needed to spend the first 50 years of their life reading Daniel and Ezekiel and then you can read the book of Revelation and I , he said that tongue in cheek , he did not mean never read the book of Revelation till you're 50 years old. You understand that and I understand that. But what he meant was, if we are thoroughly saturated with the ideas of Daniel and Ezekiel, we will be able to understand much better the ideas in the Book of Revelation. And of course he's exactly right because the book of Revelation tells exactly the same story. Bone . Here today on the podcast, I'll I , I'll do the book of Revelation for you . Here it is. The book of Revelation is the same story as Daniel chapter 11. God and the devil get in a fight and God whips him. That is exactly the story of revelation. It is written to say be faithful unto death and you'll receive the crown of life. That's the story of Daniel 11 . That's the story of the Bible. But apocalyptic, rather than saying it in just dry doctrinal terms, who wants to hear somebody just preach in this dry sermon has these mighty images of a beast and a raging king and and there's wars and there's assassinations. It's vivid, it's exciting, it's dramatic and it drives home the point to the faithful. Don't quit on God. God is going to win. We'll see more of that as Daniel concludes on Friday in Daniel chapter 12. It is Friday and we read all of Daniel chapter 12 today. Hope you're having a great day. Let's work through Daniel chapter 12. Couple of expressions here that are very common in apocalyptic literature, just very standard stock and trade phrases. Verse one, there's gonna be a time of trouble such as never has been very common expression. Ezekiel five uses that of the destruction of Jerusalem. Jesus uses it in regard to the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 . Just a very common phrase like when you say, I'm so, so hungry, I could eat a horse. You're not really hoping somebody's gonna serve you up a race horse boy. They'd just be so stringy. Then Michael becomes verse one, the great prince who's in charge of Judah. He's listed there. Every nation seems to have a representative angel to watch over it and maybe fight for it. And then there is a resurrection in verse two. Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake some to everlasting life and some to everlasting shame and contempt. There are not a lot of references in the Old Testament to resurrection and the afterlife. Job 14, job 19 verse 25 and 20 seven's a reference in the Psalms in a couple of places. Psalm 16, Psalm 49, Isaiah may say some things about that a little bit, Ezekiel, there's really not a lot of that going on and this may be a resurrection of the righteous. It may just be symbolic of the revival of the nation. Having said that, you can't have a symbol if there's not some substance behind it. So Daniel 12 is definitely making a play on the idea that when you're dead, you're not just dead all over some point in time, you stand again and to receive good things or to receive terrible things. Daniel chapter 12 in verse three is one of the clearest references to eternity and to resurrection. That is in all of the Old Testament. So then Daniel chapter four is told to seal the book up. That's very characteristic of apocalyptic literature. This is special insider knowledge. Remember when we talked about Daniel chapter 10? You have to be humble. You have to want to know the will of God in order to get the cookies. Not everybody's gonna get a cookie. You have to be a special kind of person. I'm not sure how the podcast has become all about cookies, but you know they're oatmeal raisin. You know that those are the best cookies. Don't come at me, you chocolate chip people, oatmeal raisin any day. So you have to seal it up verse four, because not everybody can have this information. They're not wise enough. They're not humble before God. And especially because it's not the right time for it. It's not the right time for it. You unseal it when all these terrible things are happening and people are panicking and they don't know what to do. You say, oh, we got a message from God. Then it is unseal. The fact of course is it's been unsealed. We are reading this. It says then that we are in some way able to understand this information, able to use this information. The book of Daniel is unsealed during the time of all this Antiochus, epiphany's, maccabee and war, all that business because those people needed that. It would be a time when people run to and fro that references a lot of activity. Maybe because there's a famine of the word of God as Amos talked about Aus eight . And so people won't know what to do. The book will be unsealed and that'll break the famine. Here's the key question, verse six, how long? That's the key question in books like Revelation, books like Daniel God, we're being crushed, we're being run over. Antiochus is in the temple. He's put up an idol. He's sacrificing a pig on the altar. God, you gotta do something. We can't do anything. We are weak, we are powerless, but God you have to help us. When are you going to do that? That's the key question always in this kind of material. But verse seven says, there's going to be an end of these things. The power of the holy people are going to be broken. That seems to be the idea that evil will triumph until God intervenes dramatically. God is the one who stops antioch's efforts to exterminate Judaism. And Daniel says, wow, this is more than I can bear. I don't even know what to think about all of this. And the angel says, you don't need to know about this. It's not for you. Seal it up, preserve it, protect it. It's gonna be ready at the right time and it will be ready for those first 10 who purify themselves. And then there's some timing given. When are we gonna need this? From the time that the regular burn offering is taken away, that's the abomination of desolation. That's when Antiochus epiphany stops the the worship of God in the temple until the abomination that makes desolate is set up . There should be 1,290 days blessed. You see who waits and arrives at the 1,335 days. Don't even bother to write that down for q and a morning . I'm not sure. I don't think anybody is sure from the abomination of desolation in 1 67 BC there'll be a hundred . It'd be 1,290 days. We just don't know. Is that an exact timeframe or is that a reference to the indefinite time? Sometimes Daniel will say Time, times and a half a time, which means an indefinite period of time. We're we're , we're just not sure. Is this the time of no offering when Antiochus desecrated the temple and wouldn't allow the worship of God to go on? Very, very difficult. Some of those difficulties are compounded by the fact that differing calendars were being used at that time. The Babylonians used a lunar calendar, 354 days. The Essenes who are down at the Dead Sea, they use a solar calendar of 364 days. The Greeks used a Luna Solar hybrid calendar of 360 days. And then of course every calendar had to be corrected because the true year, how long it takes the earth to go around the sun is 365 in one quarter days. So depending upon which calendar you're using, 1,290 days could be 303 and a half years, or maybe the 1,335 days is three and a half years. 'cause you get an extra 45 days. And I am not sure what the difference is. This is gonna go on for 1,290 days and if you'll just wait 45 more days, you'll be blessed. Not sure , uh, about that at all. But again, go your way to the end. Stand with God. Stay with God. Don't be discouraged and give up your faith. That is the message of the book of Daniel. And I hope that despite all of the, I don't knows, and this is complicated, you are taking away from Daniel that you will stand fast no matter what civil authorities are doing, no matter what politics is doing, no matter what political leaders are doing, no matter what armies are doing, we're gonna do right. We're gonna stand with God because we'll be vindicated in the end. God will win. Well, thank you for listening. If you love the Monday Morning Coffee podcast, you know what to do. You need to subscribe or follow on your app so it'll download automatically. Please give us a review on iTunes or whatever app you listen on, tell other folks about the podcast. It will help them in their daily Bible reading. So until next week, I hope your coffee is delightful. One last swig for me. Hmm . I hope your coffee is delightful. Hope your Friday will be wonderful and the Lord will be with you today all day. I'm Mark Roberts and I wanna go to heaven and I want you to come to see you on Monday with a cup of coffee.

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