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BEASTS, HORNS, AND CROWNS #8
DEFENDING JESUS WITH A SWORD
Is it possible to believe that something is right — and maybe it actually IS right . . . but in order to pursue the right, you do it all wrong? The long history of religious terrorism is a tragically poignant answer to that question. Many times, people with bombs have set off those bombs because in their hearts they were convinced that they were soldiers in the cause of truth. Even the 19 men who got onto those planes on the morning of September 11, 2001 believed that they were dying for a noble cause, that they were “helping” God.
Chuck Colson has a couple of books where he writes about his search for Christianity — a fascinating journey which paralleled his worst days in the firestorm called Watergate. In his first book, Born Again, he describes his first steps toward Jesus Christ, his initial studying of the Bible and the C. S. Lewis classic, Mere Christianity, and how he finally surrendered, in tears, and invited Jesus into his life.
Then in a subsequent volume, Loving God, he confesses how his own role as a Watergate conspirator helped him to realize that the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection just had to be true. There was no way that the 11 disciples could have stolen the body of Jesus, hidden it, then dried their tears, concocted a Resurrection theory or lie . . . and held onto that fabrication through thick and thin, through trials and dangers and the threat of death. And the way Colson knows that is this: when he and John Dean and Ehrlichman and Haldeman and all the rest were threatened with jail time for their own political shenanigans, their little “coverup” lasted essentially from March 21, 1973 until April 8 of that same year. In other words, two weeks! They couldn’t hold a lie in place for more than 14 days.
But there’s another interesting point in Colson’s book, Loving God. He and his White House associates were actually people who believed in good, noble causes. They believed in the Constitution. They were trying to achieve “peace with honor” in Vietnam. They wanted to make the government more streamlined, more effective at helping people. Most of Colson’s friends had sacrificed lucrative careers in the private sector to come to Washington and try to help Richard Nixon fulfill his campaign pledge to “bring us together.” But, time and time again, Colson and Gordon Liddy and Jeb Stuart Magruder and John Mitchell had used improper methods, the wrong means, to get the right goals to the finish line.
These past couple of days, as we’ve been studying the mysterious dream of Daniel chapter 7, our focus has been on verse 8 and the so-called “little horn.” What is this little horn? Why does it “have eyes like a man and a mouth that [speaks] boastfully”? And if you take all of the clues, one by one — we found eight of them yesterday — many of us who are Christian believers and who dig into the book of Daniel come out with one inescapable conclusion: the little horn is actually the Christian Church. Following the breakup of the Roman empire, the last truly global power that was “civil” or secular in its makeup, the church of the Middle Ages was the ruling influence that came upon the scene next.
Some of the clues God in heaven gives Daniel help us to arrive at this conclusion. Today let’s look at just a couple — and I want to emphasize, very gently and humbly again, that we weep together as we do . . . because the Christian Church is US. You and me. Friend, you and I might be Protestant today or Catholic, and we look back into the dusty history books and say, “Well, that wasn’t us; that was some other denomination with cardinals and bishops.” But in a very real sense, the Body of Christ is ONE body, and always has been. So we stand shoulder to shoulder in needing to repent of past transgressions, and of having a forgiving attitude toward our spiritual forefathers.
Last week, as we were still thinking about the dreadful fourth beast of verse 7, the empire of pagan Rome, we suggested that the ten horns on its head were ten actual kingdoms which came up around 400-500 A.D., just as Rome itself was collapsing. Here’s that list again: Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Burgundians, Lombards, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Alemannians, Heruli, and the Sueves. Different historians and denominations render the list with slight variations, but there’s fairly common agreement. These could very well be the “ten horns” of verse 7.
Now, let’s notice what Daniel predicts in verse 8:
“While I was thinking about the [ten] horns, there before me was another horn, a little one, which came up among them; and three of the first horns were uprooted before it. This horn had eyes like the eyes of a man and a mouth that spoke boastfully.”
We’ve already studied how the Christian church of the Middle Ages began slowly to wield political power. In his book, God Cares, Mervyn Maxwell takes us down a few centuries, and writes:
“The Roman EMPIRE was replaced by the Roman CHURCH; or, as nineteenth-century writers used to put it, pagan Rome was succeeded by papal Rome.” Then he gives a couple of examples: “And the pope’s power — and his religious and political claims — increased for centuries. In 1076 Pope Gregory VII informed the subjects of Henry IV, emperor of Germany, that if Henry would not repent of his sins, they would not need to obey him. Henry was the most powerful monarch in Europe at the time, but he nonetheless made a pilgrimage to Canossa in the Alps, where the pope was residing, and waited three painful days, barefoot in the snow, until Pope Gregory forgave him. Taking his cue from Gregory VII, Pope Pius V in 1570, in the bull (or decree) Regnans in excelsis (‘He who reigns in the heavens’) declared that the Protestant queen of England, Elizabeth I (1558-1603), was an accursed heretic who hereafter should have no right to rule and whose citizens were all, by papal authority, forbidden to obey her.”
So there were certainly reasons why this was called “the Dark Ages.” Bible prophecy here in Daniel paints a future picture when this little horn would persecute others, and seek to destroy men and women who were trying to follow God. And tragically, the Christian Church did indeed enter upon what we now sorrowfully look back on as “the Inquisition.” Many thousands lost their lives as misguided believers led others to the stake and the rack.
But now back to these ten tribes. And here we find an interesting, Chuck Colson-type example of a Church trying to defend truth . . . and yet following the wrong path. From its very inception, the church Jesus founded obviously believed in Him as the risen Savior and Lord. From the days of Peter and Paul, that was the foundation of their belief. So by the time the term “catholic” had come into use, and the Church of Rome was an established power in Europe, it rightly and courageously held to the belief that Jesus Christ had come from God, that He was with God, and that He WAS God. In fact, the doctrine of the Trinity held that Jesus Christ had always BEEN with the Father. There was never a time when God the Father was here but not Jesus; God the Father did not “have” Jesus, or “make” Him, or “create” Him, or ever experience a year or a month or a day when He existed without Jesus Christ being present as well. Christians everywhere can be thankful for the heritage of truth regarding the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the eternal pre-existence of Jesus our Savior which we receive from our early church heritage, our common “catholic” background. I really mean that.
However, three of these ten tribes or Daniel 7 “horns” that came along were out of favor with this doctrine because they were “Arian.” They believed in the greatness of Jesus, but not in His eternal pre-existence. They taught that He had been created. Needless to say, the “Arians” and the established Christian church of those centuries were at fierce loggerheads. By the way, that’s A - R - I - A - N, not “Aryan,” as in “Aryan nation” or “Aryan supremacy.” In any case, around the year 493, one of those three “Arian” tribes, the Ostrogoths, went so far as to invade Italy. Twenty-five years later, their leader, Theodoric, even captured the pope and exiled him to Constantinople in an effort to get him to persuade the Catholic emperor to stop persecuting the Arian Christians. History tells us that the pope actually died in jail.
However, we also read that the emperors controlled by the church retaliated, and exactly three of these tribes — the three “Arian” groups — were methodically wiped out. In 493 A.D., Emperor Zeno maneuvered to get rid of the Heruli; by 534 A.D. Emperor Justinian had exterminated the Vandals, and in 538 he basically had broken the power of the Ostrogoths. Three horns “plucked up by the roots” to make way for this new and powerful little horn which, again, pursued a very noble goal — defending the pre-existent deity of Jesus Christ — but by coercive force and civil power.
Friend, it’s a wonderful thing to believe what you believe. And then to share it across the back-yard fence with your neighbor, or with a work associate, or here on the radio. To enroll your best friend in the Discover Bible Course. But when we’re tempted to browbeat others, or to expect the government to “help” us defend the truth, then we’ve taken a wrong turn; we’ve gone the way of the boastful little horn.
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