I touched on this briefly today in my introduction during church in order to get some focus on this topic. We will be following up with more and more details as time allows, possibly during the Sunday night Bible study after a few weeks in "The Political Platform" book. We will be addressing these exact verses on Tuesday night over the next few weeks since we are covering Daniel 9 right now.
Daniel 9:26 – The coming anti-Christ is described as being a descendant of the people who destroyed the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 AD. The people who destroyed the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 AD were the Tenth Roman Legion (Legion X or Leg X in the photo). History records that the Tenth Roman Legion broke through the city wall, dismantled the Temple, tore down Jerusalem’s walls and were stationed in Jerusalem for the next 200 years. Indeed, they were Roman citizens who were commissioned
as Roman soldiers, but the people in the Tenth Roman Legion were not from the city of Rome or from Italy. The people who destroyed the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 AD were from the land that is today Turkey and Syria.
POINT: Here is another definition of the religion, the region and the person of the anti-Christ. If the anti-Christ were to arise today and this verse were fulfilled in our time he would most likely be a Muslim leader who rose to become a Caliph and the Twelfth Imam. If this is correct then Islam would be the religion of the anti-Christ. According to Scripture the religion of the anti-Christ will desire to occupy the Temple Mount, radically deny the Christian God and destroy the Jews. Oh, and by the way, the religion of the anti-Christ executes their opposition by decapitation. At this point in history it is not a stretch to see the connection between Islam and the anti-Christ. Only time will tell. . .
The photo is of a Roman column just inside the Joppa Gate in Jerusalem where the Tenth Roman Legion was stationed for 200 years after destroying the Temple and the city in 70 AD. Walid Shoebat gives great references to people through church history who suggested this same connection of Islam and the anti-Christ. Below are just three examples (it was refreshing to finally get to quote from John Calvin.):
John Wesley (1703-1791):
Indeed, the iron teeth closely match Islam. Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it . . . have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth . . . that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth. Such was, and is at this day, the rage, their fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind.
Martin Luther (1483-1546):
The Turk (Ottoman Muslims from what is today Turkey, or the descendants of Tenth Roman Legion) is the flesh of antichrist. They help each other in their murderous work. The latter slaughters bodily by the sword; and the former spiritually by doctrine.
John Calvin (1509-1564):
It does seem that the fourth iron kingdom was in fact both the pre-Papal and the pre-Islamic undivided Pagan Roman Empire, as well as the later Western-Roman Papal and the contemporaneous Eastern-Roman Islamic Empire into which it then subdivided. . . Thus they correspond to the two legs of the later Roman Empire - Islam and the Papacy. . . The defection has indeed spread more widely! For, since Mohammad was an apostate, he turned his followers, the Turks, from Christ. . . The sect of Mohammad was like a raging overflow, which in its violence tore away about half of the Church. . . In Daniel 11:37, that Prophet predicted the coming of a terrible tyrant. This is how he described that tyrant: 'neither shall he pay regard to the God of his fathers, nor to the desire of women.' Applied to the Unitarian Muslims, this might well mean that they would ignore the Trinitarian God of their forefathers.
If nothing else it is interesting to see how the writers from the 1500-1700's describe Islam. They are definitely not calling it a religion of peace, but instead see it clearly as a religion of war that destroys the societies that it infests. It would be nice if we understood world history and the Scriptures. Our blindness and ignorance will be our curse and our judgment. At least our fall will be just and self-inflicted.
Like I said above, we will need to continue this discussion.
as Roman soldiers, but the people in the Tenth Roman Legion were not from the city of Rome or from Italy. The people who destroyed the Temple and Jerusalem in 70 AD were from the land that is today Turkey and Syria.
The book "Jerusalem 101" is finished. The unedited version fills three 3-ring binders and has somewhere around 700 pages made up of 400 photos, maps and diagrams. Tim Vaniman has the first 2 sections edited already. I have just finished the final chapter which opens with these words:
