How they Prove the Past and Foretell Our Future.
Probably my favorite movie of all time is Inception, the 2010 Leonard DiCaprio film with the dreams within dreams within dreams.
The plot of that movie is a tangled web if there ever was one. You have to take it nice and slow, understand things one piece at a time, and once you understand all the smaller parts, you can put it all together and finally understand what’s going on.
You might need to watch it a few times to get it all, but trust me, it all fits together. And even if you don’t always understand what you’re looking at, the Hans Zimmer music is usually enough to keep you interested.
Dreams can be kind of loopy sometimes. And heavily symbolic. And you don’t always understand what’s going on when you’re in them. That was certainly the case for the Prophet Daniel in his book.
Daniel has a few truly wacky dreams and visions throughout his story. They involve ferocious beasts, a goat having a showdown with a ram, and a statue made of many types of metals.
These dreams are so hard to understand, they cause many Christians to just kind of read past them and move on to the next chapter as quickly as they can.
But these dreams are not just the effects of eating that leftover Chinese food. Daniel’s dreams were from God. They actually had real-world predictive power. The details Daniel saw in his dreams were specific to things to come.
And some of these things he dreamed about have already happened; there are others that actually haven’t happened yet.
So we’re going to dig into Daniel’s dreams in chapters 2, 7 and 8 of his book, and I’ll explain what they mean today. And just like trying to understand Inception, we’re going to do that by taking things nice and slow; understanding one piece at a time, and then putting all those pieces together. Maybe with a little help from Leonardo DiCaprio.
So if you’ve ever found Daniel’s Dreams to kinda weird, and would like to know why they’re in the Bible, then turn with me to Daniel 7, and let’s get weird.
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3:15 - Daniel 7 and the Four Beasts
11:25 - Daniel 8 and the Ram and Goat
14:50 - Daniel 2 and the Statue
If you want to get in touch, my email is weirdstuffinthebible@gmail.com
Hosted by Luke Taylor
If you’re intrigued by strange Bible stories, uncovering Bible mysteries, or learning about unusual biblical teachings, this podcast is for you! Dive deep into weird Bible facts, biblical controversies, and the supernatural in the Bible, while exploring the hidden stories of the Bible you may have never heard. Get a fresh perspective as we explain the Bible in ways that challenge the norm and uncover the unexpected. I’m so glad you’re here- don’t forget to SUBSCRIBE so that you never miss an episode!
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Find the answers to all those questions you were too embarrassed to ask in Sunday School. Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. Hosted by Luke Taylor.
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Daniel’s Wild Dreams: How They Prove the Past and Foretell the Future
Daniel 2, 7-8
Introduction
Probably my favorite movie of all time is Inception, the 2010 Leonard DiCaprio film with the dreams within dreams within dreams.
The plot of that movie is a tangled web if there ever was one. You have to take it nice and slow, understand things one piece at a time, and once you understand all the smaller parts, you can put it all together and finally understand what’s going on.
You might need to watch it a few times to get it all, but trust me, it all fits together. And even if you don’t always understand what you’re looking at, the Hans Zimmer music is usually enough to keep you interested.
Dreams can be kind of loopy sometimes. And heavily symbolic. And you don’t always understand what’s going on when you’re in them. That was certainly the case for the Prophet Daniel in his book.
Daniel has a few truly wacky dreams and visions throughout his story. They involve ferocious beasts, a goat having a showdown with a ram, and a statue made of many types of metals.
These dreams are so hard to understand, they cause many Christians to just kind of read past them and move on to the next chapter as quickly as they can.
But these dreams are not just the effects of eating that leftover Chinese food. Daniel’s dreams were from God. They actually had real-world predictive power. The details Daniel saw in his dreams were specific to things to come.
And some of these things he dreamed about have already happened; there are others that actually haven’t happened yet.
So we’re going to dig into Daniel’s dreams in chapters 2, 7 and 8 of his book, and I’ll explain what they mean today. And just like trying to understand Inception, we’re going to do that by taking things nice and slow; understanding one piece at a time, and then putting all those pieces together. Maybe with a little help from Leonardo DiCaprio.
So if you’ve ever found Daniel’s Dreams to kinda weird, and would like to know why they’re in the Bible, then turn with me to Daniel 7, and let’s get weird.
[theme music]
Daniel 7
Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and today we’re going to be talking about Daniel’s wacky dreams; how they accurately predicted the past, and why we can trust what they’re telling us about the future.
I imagine many a pastor has decided to do a sermon series on the book of Daniel, because it’s full of so many epic stories. Daniel and the Lion’s Den. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. Nebuchadnezzar being essentially turned into a wild animal for 7 years. The hand writing on the wall.
If it weren't for the Book of Daniel, we wouldn’t have great American classic songs like Dare to Be a Daniel by Philip Bliss, Belteshazzar by Johnny Cash, or “I work real hard at the chocolate factory” by Bob the Tomato.
And so it’s understandable why many pastors have wanted to do sermon series on the book; it provides weeks of material. And yet I’ve also observed many of them flail and flounder when they reach the second half of the book, and you get into all of these puzzling dreams and visions. Many pastors don’t know what to do with them.
But don’t worry: I do (or else I wouldn’t be recording this today). We’ll look at chapters 2, 7 and 8 in this episode. And let’s start with Daniel 7. This takes place during the time that the Israelites had been conquered by Babylon. Of the Israelites who didn’t die, most of them were taken captive to Babylon.
Daniel was one of those captives; he had shown himself to be so faithful and dependable that he was heavily promoted to a prominent place in the Kingdom. So this time period is a time that Babylon ruled the world. The known world.
Babylon’s modern identity would be Iraq, but Iraq’s borders today do not represent what Babylon had back then. The Babylonians had conquered the entire Middle East region, and it was growing. They had what I call a world empire. It didn’t literally cover the world, but they were so powerful that every other nation was like a tick in comparison to Babylon’s might.
Other nations in history we might consider world empires include Egypt and Assyria, but Babylon was truly like no other.
Let’s begin Daniel’s dream now in chapter 7.
Daniel 7:1-2
In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel saw a dream and visions of his head as he lay in his bed. Then he wrote down the dream and told the sum of the matter. 2 Daniel declared, “I saw in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea.
Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Inception says, “Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.” And that might be true in normal dreams, but this is a spiritual dream. This is a vision from God being placed in Daniel’s head as he was sleeping that night, and Daniel is going to know that this is no ordinary nightmare.
Daniel 7:3-4
3 And four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. 4 The first was like a lion and had eagles' wings. Then as I looked its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man, and the mind of a man was given to it.
So this is so strange, right? What could this possibly mean? The meaning is actually pretty simple. Daniel is going to see various animals and beasts in this dream, and each of them represents a great nation who will try to take over the world. The first one up is Babylon.
How do I know it represents Babylon? The lion was the mascot of Babylon. Specifically the winged lion. I can’t show you because this is an audio-only podcast, but if you look up ancient Babylonian architecture, you’ll see a lot of winged lions adorning their walls and statues.
This lion’s wings were plucked off and it was made to stand like a man and given a man’s mind. This references the leader of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar. As I mentioned before, he was cursed to live as a wild animal for 7 years; this story is told in Daniel 4. It’s an incredible lesson about pride and how God can humble us. That represents him.
So the first beast that Daniel sees in his dream is a winged lion, which is a picture of Babylon.
Next: Daniel 7:5
And behold, another beast, a second one, like a bear. It was raised up on one side. It had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth; and it was told, ‘Arise, devour much flesh.’
This beast represented another empire: the Medo-Persian Empire, led by King Cyrus. It was called this because it was an alliance of the Medes and the Persians. They were the next world Empire after Babylon. They conquered Babylon in 539 BC.
It was represented as a bear that was larger on one side than the other. This is because the Persian side was much larger than the Mede side in the Medo-Persian Empire.
The bear has three ribs in its mouth. I believe this refers to the three previous world empires that the Medes and Persians swallowed up to create their world empire: Egypt, Assyria and Babylon.
Why a bear? The animals Daniel sees in his dream seem to relate to how quickly these empires conquered the world. Babylon did it much faster, so it was a winged lion. The Medo-Persian empire was much less majestic and swift, and so it was a deformed bear instead of a lion.
Of course, none of these empires conquered as speedily as the next one:
Daniel 7:6
After this I looked, and behold, another, like a leopard, with four wings of a bird on its back. And the beast had four heads, and dominion was given to it.
This beast referred to Greece, and Alexander the Great’s conquest. He was a leopard because Alexander the Great conquered the world in a span of about a decade. He defeated the Persian Empire in 333 BC. The wings speak to the swiftness of this creature.
Alexander the Great was an amazing individual. He was trained by the Greek Philosopher Aristotle. He died at the young age of 33, yet by that age he had brought the world to its knees before him. It is said that he flung himself onto his bed in tears not long before he died because he had no more worlds left to conquer.
But what about the four heads? This is probably the strangest part of this verse: a four-headed leopard. This is because Alexander the Great had four generals: Seleucus, Philip, Ptolemy and Antigonus. After he died, the Greek Empire was divided up amongst these four generals. Each of the four and their ancestors reigned over a different division of it.
After this, Daniel dreams of one more Empire:
Daniel 7:7-8
7 After this I saw in the night visions, and behold, a fourth beast, terrifying and dreadful and exceedingly strong. It had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces and stamped what was left with its feet. It was different from all the beasts that were before it, and it had ten horns. 8 I considered the horns, and behold, there came up among them another horn, a little one, before which three of the first horns were plucked up by the roots. And behold, in this horn were eyes like the eyes of a man, and a mouth speaking great things.
What Daniel sees here as this fourth beast is the Roman Empire. This one gets a little bit into eschatology because it seems that not everything has been fulfilled yet in regard to the Roman Empire.
So Greece took control in 333 BC. But it was conquered by the Romans in 146 BC, and the Romans continued to rule for hundreds of years. However, the Roman Empire was never conquered by another world empire. It essentially collapsed, and many Bible scholars believe that the empire of the Antichrist in the End Times will be a revived Roman Empire.
This is a 10-horned beast because the Antichrist will have 10 divisions in his empire. The little horn that comes up among them is the antichrist himself, and it said he was speaking “great things.” One of the signifying characteristics of the Antichrist is his big mouth.
There’s a bit more information in here about the Antichrist, and I’d like to share that with you in this week’s newsletter. So if you’d like to get that, scroll down in the show notes for today’s episode and you can find the link to sign yourself up for my newsletter. All you have to put in is your email, and you can get additional tidbits and expansions on these episodes each week. If you don’t like them, you can unsubscribe at any time.
Daniel 8
Let’s go on to the next chapter. Daniel 8 is not technically a dream but a vision. Daniel is awake when he receives this information. God gives him another vision of the future kingdoms and rule of the antichrist.
Daniel 8:3-4 say
3 I raised my eyes and saw, and behold, a ram standing on the bank of the canal. It had two horns, and both horns were high, but one was higher than the other, and the higher one came up last. 4 I saw the ram charging westward and northward and southward. No beast could stand before him, and there was no one who could rescue from his power. He did as he pleased and became great.
This ram is the Medo-Persian Empire. Remember how earlier it was the bear and one side was bigger than the other? That’s the ram right here with two horns, and one is higher than the other. The higher one represents the Persians, and the smaller horn represents the Medes.
Now if you remember, the Medo-Persian Empire was defeated by Alexander the Great’s Greek military. Here’s how that is depicted in
Verses 5-7
5 As I was considering, behold, a male goat came from the west across the face of the whole earth, without touching the ground. And the goat had a conspicuous horn between his eyes. 6 He came to the ram with the two horns, which I had seen standing on the bank of the canal, and he ran at him in his powerful wrath. 7 I saw him come close to the ram, and he was enraged against him and struck the ram and broke his two horns. And the ram had no power to stand before him, but he cast him down to the ground and trampled on him. And there was no one who could rescue the ram from his power.
The Goat is the Greek Empire, and its horn is Alexander the Great. This is depicting the Greek army’s might. They totally trampled the Medes and Persians. But remember: Alexander didn’t live that long, and he had four generals who took over his kingdom after he died.
Daniel 8:8
8 Then the goat became exceedingly great, but when he was strong, the great horn was broken, and instead of it there came up four conspicuous horns toward the four winds of heaven.
And so, the generals divided up his territory. Now, the Greek territory was humongous. That’s why the Greek language is so pervasive in history. The conquered and took over so much. Even when the Roman’s conquered them centuries later, the Greeks had been so adept at enforcing their culture on everyone that the Roman Empire’s language was still Greek, and many of the people of the Roman Empire still worshipped Greek gods like Zeus.
It is my belief that the antichrist will originate somewhere from the territory of the Greek Empire, and part of why I believe that is because of where Daniel’s visions go from here. We won’t have time to connect Daniel 8 and 11 today, but Daniel 11 is the most specific chapter on prophecy in the entire bible- and gives a lot of great info on the Antichrist.
Daniel 2
But for now, let’s look at one more dream that connects a little bit more with chapter 7.
So the four creatures that Daniel sees in his dream in chapter 7 are four world empires: Babylon, the Persian or Medo-Persian Empire, the Greeks, and the Romans. And of course, I believe that when you place Daniel side-by-side with Revelation, you also see great end-times prophecies come out of Daniel with the Revived Roman Empire of the Antichrist.
So Daniel’s dreams here have meaning. The details matter. And again, this is not because he ate that expired granola bar he found at the back of his cupboard and now he has food poisoning. The details of these dreams correspond to reality.
And we can look back now and understand; oh yeah, the lion was Babylon and the bear was the Persians and the Four-Headed Leopard was clearly the Greeks… but for Daniel, this was all future. He couldn’t have known these other empires were coming; this was God telling him about things to come.
And Daniel wasn’t the only one. There was another dream in the second chapter of his book, a dream of a great statue. Only Daniel did not actually have this dream. King Nebuchadnezzar had it, and Daniel was able to interpret it for him. So let’s look at that one next starting in Daniel 2:37.
Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had a dream of a statute that had a gold head, a chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, feet of iron mixed with clay. Then a great stone struck the statue and knocked it down.
Most Bible readers are going to come across all these things and have no idea what to do with this information. Here’s what it meant.
Daniel 2:37-28
37 You, O king, the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom, the power, and the might, and the glory, 38 and into whose hand he has given, wherever they dwell, the children of man, the beasts of the field, and the birds of the heavens, making you rule over them all—you are the head of gold.
The statue’s head of gold represented Babylon.
Verse 39
39 Another kingdom inferior to you shall arise after you, and yet a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth.
This is following a similar pattern to the dream of Daniel 7. The silver chest and arms of the statue represent that Medo-Persian Empire, which is probably why there are two arms.
Then after the Medes and Persians is the kingdom of Bronze, which is Greece, the kingdom of Alexander the Great. And if you remember who came after the Greeks…
Verse 40
40 And there shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron, because iron breaks to pieces and shatters all things. And like iron that crushes, it shall break and crush all these.
This is the Roman Empire. It steamrolled over everything else. So Daniel- living in the 6th Century BC- is able to receive all these prophecies about the next several hundred years of world history.
This is the same stuff you might learn about in a World History class in high school or college. How the Babylonians and then the Persians and then the Greeks and then the Romans all had their day in the limelight. Daniel foresaw all these things to such a great degree that non-Christians who do an analysis of Daniel conclude that he must have lived hundreds of years later and wrote about all these things after they happened, since nobody could have predicted these things with such specificity.
But of course, if you believe in God, then there’s nothing impossible about this, because God knows the future. He told it to Daniel in advance. It might be world history for us, but it was all future for Daniel.
And that’s not all Daniel saw: he saw our future as well.
Daniel 2:41-43
41 And as you saw the feet and toes, partly of potter's clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom, but some of the firmness of iron shall be in it, just as you saw iron mixed with the soft clay. 42 And as the toes of the feet were partly iron and partly clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong and partly brittle. 43 As you saw the iron mixed with soft clay, so they will mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold together, just as iron does not mix with clay.
Daniel, interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, told us about the revived Roman Empire of the Antichrist. It’s sort of a Roman Empire, which is why it has the iron mixed in. But it’s also made up of clay- it said a mixture.
If we really wanted to go down a rabbit hole here, we could mention how some connect this idea of a mixture to the Nephilim and how they were a mixture, and that perhaps we could see another event similar to the Nephilim creation in the last days. Especially since Jesus said the last days would be like the Days of Noah. Perhaps we could look at that for a future episode someday and dig into that question.
So a lot of things in the dreams of the book of Daniel sound so strange, so confusing. But like I said: if you just put them together one piece at a time, the whole picture starts to become pretty clear. The hard part is doing all this research to find one piece at a time.
As said by the great con artist Frank Abagnale- played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can- “People only know what you tell them.” And if you don’t know about world history and Babylon and Greece and all that, a lot of these details will go over your head as you read your Bible.
That’s why I recommend getting ahold of a great commentary that explains all this when you study out Daniel. My favorite is the Walvoord Prophecy Commentary Series by John Walvoord. He has four volumes out: on Daniel, on Revelation, on Thessalonians and on Matthew. There’s an updated editions with notes from Mark Hitchcock and Charles Dyer. It’s so helpful.
Next time on this podcast, I’m planning an episode about the common practice of casting lots in the Bible. This is a method people in the Scriptures would use to ascertain God’s will a lot in the Scriptures, and it seems to work- which might cause us to wonder, should we be casting lots to determine God’s will? I plan to get into that next week.
Make sure you’re subscribed so you can get it!
The Kingdom of Jesus
Daniel’s dreams tell us a lot about the future. Not just his future, but our future as well. It tells us about this man known as the antichrist; he’s usually described as a horn in Daniel. A horn with a big mouth.
He loves to brag on himself. Every time the antichrist comes up in the Bible, his boastful mouth is emphasized. His chief characteristic is pride. He is going to think he’s unstoppable. He will probably be quoting Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Titanic: “I’m King of the World.”
But not only is his big mouth included every time the antichrist comes up, but also his defeat by King Jesus.
Daniel 2’s dream of the statue ends this way: a stone strikes the feet of the statue and knocks it all down.
Daniel 2:34-35
a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. 35 Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, all together were broken in pieces, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.
That’s the kingdom of Jesus right there. It will someday replace all the Kingdoms of the World. He strikes the feet of the statue, that kingdom of the antichrist, and the Kingdom of Jesus stands supreme forever. It’s talking about the Second Coming of Christ right there. Here’s what he will do to the Antichrist in the dream from
Daniel 7:25-26
25 He shall speak words against the Most High,
and shall wear out the saints of the Most High,
and shall think to change the times and the law;
and they shall be given into his hand
for a time, times, and half a time.
Now this confuses some Christians because it says that the saints will be given into the hand of the Antichrist in the tribulation. Many Christians say, “wait a minute, I thought God would protect us?” I will explain that in the newsletter for this weekend, so make sure you’re subscribed if you haven’t already. But here’s what will happen to the antichrist.
26 But the court shall sit in judgment,
and his dominion shall be taken away,
to be consumed and destroyed to the end.
You can also read about it in Revelation 19. The Antichrist is the first individual who is picked up and thrown into the Lake of Fire at the Second Coming of Christ. The Antichrist’s Kingdom will not last. A statue with feet made of clay is not gonna hold up that long. Especially when Jesus is coming.
We might put it this way: just like one of Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriends, the Kingdom of the Antichrist is gonna be on the younger side.
But the Kingdom of Jesus is gonna last forever and ever.
The Bible is not weird for giving us dreams and visions. We are weird when we won’t take the time to understand one piece at a time and then put the pieces together. And that’s what we did today. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time on Weird Stuff in the Bible.