Knowing Your God on the Way to the Manger
An exposition of Daniel 11
Do you know your God?
School is out. We take a break and relax. So, you feel like you don’t have to learn something new. Many people annually rewatch a few, favorite, old Christmas movies like A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, etc. They like the familiar and don’t want to have to learn a new movie.
Work isn’t just to put food in our stomach but so we can live and so serve God, glorify God. The only way we can do that is if we know Him. To hear how to know God on the way to the manger, listen (because the chapter is 45 verses long, the first eight minutes are reading the chapter):
To hear how to know God from Daniel 11, click on the YouTube link above.
Eternal
The vision from 11:2-35 is history told in advance to Daniel, covering the time between the end of the Old Testament to the beginning of the New Testament. It was fulfilled in every detail just as the angel told Daniel.
Even little details are foretold just as they happened. There is so much detail that we don’t have time to explain it all now. God sees all of history in advance. He is in control. His plan for history cannot be thwarted. God stands over history seeing it all at once.
God shows us what happened “on the way to the manger.”
To hear how to know God stands over time and and is not bound by it, click on the YouTube link above.
The Enemies
We Christians have three basic enemies: the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Anti-christs trust in the “god of fortresses,” like Mao who said “power comes out of a barrel of a gun.”
The devil is in the “Prince of Persia” in chapter 10. The world tries to make people conform. The flesh is our fallen human nature, that part of our nature that wants to live as we please. The world makes people conform by appealing to their flesh, their greed or pride or cowardice.
Without greed and pride and cowardice the anti-Christ cannot succeed.
The people who know their God firmly resist the enemies of God. The key is knowing God.
In our modern world, people demand a God who respects their will to power, their so-called “freedom” to do as they will. They don’t know their God.
In the false doctrine of “Open Theism” God is supposedly “open” to whatever the future holds because He doesn’t hold the future.
To hear how to resist the enemies of God, click on the YouTube link above.
The End (11:36ff)
The coming attack on God’s covenant will use the pressure of the world. Some people may try to pressure you to put the success of business, making money, ahead of worship of God. The only way we can withstand the coming attacks is if we know our God. Stand firm and take action.
Know Your God: The whole Christmas greeting is “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom He is pleased” (Lk. 2:14) not just “peace on earth, good will toward men.”
To hear the end of the way to the manger, click on the YouTube link above.
Get to Know Your God this Christmas!
The Eternal stands over history while the enemies try to stop what God is doing, even trying to stop the Son of God born in Bethlehem from growing up, but in the End, the people who know their God will be bold. The question for you, then, is whether you really know your God.
Further Reading
“Ruth’s Prequel to the Christmas Story,”
https://mereorthodoxy.com/ruths-prequel-to-the-christmas-story (<click to go to the Mere Orthodoxy article)
Covenant Reformed Baptist Church is Caswell County’s/Danville’s Reformed Church.