Summary

We read about powerful forces. Antiochus will act with strength among God’s people.

In doing so, he uses precisely that part of the people whose hearts are far from the Lord. They become his allies.

Antiochus even forbids that the temple would still be used to sacrifice to the Lord. He goes so far as to place a large statue of the Greek god Zeus Capitolus in the temple. Now Zeus is to be worshiped in the temple, in the house of God—a terrible and blasphemous act. Surely it is harrowing that a large portion of God’s people now go to the temple to worship Zeus there!

Here we see the work of the devil through Antiochus’s activities. Antiochus is clearly someone who points to the antichrist. It is the antichrist who, after Christ’s coming and his work on earth, seeks to destroy and harm Christ’s church. It is also for this reason that the Lord Jesus, as well as Paul and John, recall what we read here in Daniel as referring to the antichrist. In Matthew 24:15 the Lord Jesus points to the destruction of the temple that is to come. He then also speaks of the abomination of desolation. This is a clear reference to what we read here in this verse. There is a basic correspondence between what we read in Daniel and what the Lord Jesus prophesies in Matthew 24. The Lord Jesus prophesies that the Romans will come and destroy the temple. The Romans then take all kinds of articles from the temple to Rome, and they put these holy objects from the temple of the Lord in a temple of Zeus Capitolus!

Paul shows us in 2 Thessalonians that in the history until Christ’s return on the clouds the antichrist is also at work. You see this most clearly in man’s unwillingness to bow down before God and his words—in the exaltation of man specifically in the church. Man seeks to be like God. Paul writes about this in 2 Thessalonians 2:3–4: Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion (apostasy) comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. In Daniel 11:36–39 you see very clearly that Antiochus is a foreshadowing of the antichrist. Take a look at these verses to see this similarity.

Through Antiochus the devil is using all his forces to tempt the entire church in a concentrated effort to break God’s holy covenant and block the way to the coming of Christ as the Saviour.