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The Little Horn Wages War against the Saints, and Then the Saints Are Defeated

Daniel showed he was curious about what God had shown him, for he said,

“Then I wanted to know the true meaning of the fourth beast, which was different from all the others…I also wanted to know about the ten horns on its head and the other horn that came up.” (Dan. 7:19-20).

I believe the true meaning of this fourth beast and the ten horns is that they intended to perpetuate their ungodly influence over the centuries that followed after the Roman Empire ended. Then when the little horn arose, it solicited all these other evil powers to help him to confuse the saints, so they will fail to understand that they had already received permission to possess the kingdom at Pentecost.

These evil spiritual powers and the little horn were intent on suppressing the truth about the kingdom of God, so they could maintain their ungodly momentum in the world. Therefore, during this time period, the ungodly momentum continued to build, and the manifestations of the kingdom of God was suppressed until we reach the description of the boastful horn’s activities,

“As I watched, this horn was waging war against the saints and defeating them.” (Dan. 7:21).

What would the war that the horn waged look like? The saints are described as if they are being attacked as in a war and they were being defeated by the horn. Since they are being defeated, this evidence appears to describe an acceleration of the evil spiritual powers that was operating in the world.

We need to look at the indications of how the defeat of the saints was accelerating in the culture to confirm Daniel’s prophecy in Daniel 7:21. I said earlier that when: intimacy with God, forgiveness of sins, being continually filled by the Spirit, and releasing the Spiritual gifts are stifled or inhibited, then the saints are being defeated, because the kingdom message was stolen from the saints’ hearts. It appears as if the age of Enlightenment became a perfect environment for the little horn to increase its ungodly influence.

A Brief History of the Horn’s War Against the Saints and When He Defeats Them
I want to take a brief historical examination of some of the influences from the Enlightenment era to see if we can find evidence of the little horn’s activities that gives an indication that the saints were being defeated. There is no consensus as to when the Enlightenment started, but the most widely held views state that it began in the middle of the seventeenth century, or it began at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Thomas Paine was a political writer who wrote about cultural structures near the beginning of the Enlightenment in his work: The Rights of Man. He penned, “Religion is the basis of civil society and the source of all good and of all comfort.” The Enlightenment did not immediately turn against Jesus Christ and the saints, but as it matured more hostile views began to emerge.

Francis Bacon, a pioneer of the Enlightenment era, “sought to eliminate all metaphysical concepts and advised us to attend to what he called ‘facts.’ To know the facts is to have power over them.” Bacon was one of the originators of Freemasonry. Bacon’s motive behind the elimination of the metaphysical and replacing it with facts was rooted in Freemasonry’s desire to eliminate Christianity. The elimination of all metaphysical concepts implies that the gifts of the Spirit were being viewed as invalid and not factual. Therefore, Freemasons had wanted to eliminate Christianity and the demonstration of the gifts of the Spirit by the saints. With this perspective, we can see how the saints, the believing Believers, were beginning to be pushed away by the little horn.

Rene Descartes, an Enlightenment thinker, developed a dualistic worldview in which “God could influence the human mind, but he could not act upon the world itself…he sought a basis of certainty in his mind and not the faithfulness of God.” Descartes’ point of view enabled his successors to confront the concept of God with their doubts about whether God really existed at all.

Descartes’ thinking was that God could not act upon the world implies that the believers could not display the gifts of the Spirit in Descartes’ day. But if they did, they would have shown that God acts upon the world through the believing Believers who are followers of Jesus Christ. But the believers failed to do that in Descartes’ day. Instead, many believed that God did not act upon the world. The little horn was building its ungodly momentum and the saints were now being pushed further away.

By the end of the Enlightenment, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote an obituary for God stating that “God is dead.” Nietzsche believed that through rationalism, science, and the decline in moral values, the culture had killed God. Nietzsche, with his polarized statement that God is dead, gave other people permission to abandon their faith in God.

God’s obituary was a clear sign that the saints were now being defeated; the prevalent view was that religion was based on groundless superstitions and many biblical truths were thought to be myths as well. God being considered dead is a testimony that indicated there were not enough believing Believers alive in that day who could release the gifts of the Spirit and definitively show that God was very much alive!

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto that “all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of development, that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles.”

Exploitation, domination, and oppression are thought to be the works of the devil from a liberation theological perspective. They encourage believers to bring in justice to battle against these forces of exploitation, domination, and oppression.

Liberation theologians believe the issues of exploitation, domination, and oppression are issues that Jesus wants His followers to address. Therefore, Marx’s desire to see the oppressed freed from their oppressors was actually a Godly response to the issues. But Marx viewed the bourgeoisie as the oppressors, and he included the religious leaders in this group. He makes this interesting historical comment:

“When the ancients’ world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the eighteenth century to rational ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience, merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge”(emphasis added).

Marx writes that rational ideas and the expression of the domain of knowledge essentially pushed away Christian ideas because of the free competition of eighteenth-century thought. Marx gives us a hint about the little horn’s activities.