The prophecies of Daniel - part 5

We are going to have to digress for a while. You see, I need a metaphor to make the next "time" make sense. Fortunately, the book of Daniel provides the just the thing. It is called "the abomination that causes desolation". Let's take a look-see.

Daniel chapter 11 prophecies the troop movements and general going-ons of one Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Antiochus was the ruler of the Seleucid (Greek influenced regime of Syria) kingdom around 170 BC. In 167 BC Antiochus' army captured Jerusalem, and they immediately put an end to all the Mosaic rites of worship. Antiochus then set up an alter to Zeus in the holy temple. This is what Jesus references in Matthew 24:15 (so when you see standing in the holy place the abomination that causes desolation...) except that Jesus -- speaking 200 years after the Jews went berserk and got rid of the Seleucids and their Zeus shrine -- sites it as a future event. So what gives?

This one is easy.

First off, you need to understand that virtually every culture around the world has a legend that represents God (big God, Jehovah-God). For a long time scholars tried to tell us that Monotheism, the belief that there is only one God, evolved from Polytheism, ie: lots of gods. Then scholars began to document something called the sky-god phenomenon. It turns out that these primitive peoples with their many gods also have a legend for another God, a big G God, and that this God is all-powerful, but for some reason they can't reach out to Him so they have to settle for the little g gods. Except that in some cultures, the big G God has already been reimagined as a little g light weight who has lost his "sky-god" traits.

The word Zeus is closely related to two other Greek words, Deus and Theos, both of which simply mean "God", and words that simply mean "God" are one of the hallmarks of a sky-god legend. But Zeus isn't all powerful and he certainly isn't out of reach. If you think of God as a father figure, then Zeus would be Al Bundy. He gets drunk, he throws temper tantrums, he gets it on with women, boys, livestock. He's not like Jehovah-God. He's like you or me if we could throw lightning bolts and shapechange.

In 167 BC Antiochus' men went into the place of the mysterious God, the place where there were no visible representation for God, and they set up an image of a predictable god, a little god that doesn't deserve worship; a god you only sacrifice to when you want something. The abomination that causes desolation is the replacing of the almighty God of the universe with a dumbed-down replica. It's taking big God and shrinking Him down into something that you can control.

Yes, it happened in 167 AD, and yes, when Jesus spoke it was going to happen once again. Shrinking God is an abomination, and in the next post I'll show you how it causes desolation.