Questions Asked — Chapter 16: Seventy Sevens
This document records genuine questions raised by the group during the session. It is a companion to the main chapter note, not a replacement for it.
Q: Are the four empires of Daniel all already in the past?
Yes. All four empires that Daniel's visions describe — Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and the fourth — have risen and fallen as political entities. The first three are unambiguously past. The fourth is the subject of ongoing interpretive debate (Rome, Seleucid Greece, and the Islamic Caliphate are the major positions), but even under the Caliphate reading, the original historical manifestation ended with the dissolution of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924. What remains future is the final revival and the Antichrist's reign within it.
Q: Is Greece still in power? You said it would rule until the Antichrist comes.
Greece as a modern nation-state is not in power. What Daniel's vision describes is not the Greek nation but the Greek civilizational tradition — the philosophical, political, and cultural framework that Alexander's conquests spread across the known world and that, through Rome and then Western Europe, became the foundation of modern Western civilization. Democracy, republican governance, and the intellectual tradition of the Western world are downstream of Greek thought. In that sense, the Greek civilizational legacy has expanded from a cluster of islands and city-states to encompass Europe, the Americas, and the Western world broadly.
This connects to the prophecy in Genesis 9 about the sons of Noah. Japheth, whose sons include Javan (the biblical name for the Greeks), was told his territory would expand. That expansion is traceable in the geographic spread of Western civilization from its ancient Mediterranean roots to New Zealand.
Q: If it's been 2,000 years since Alexander's generals and those empires, how can the Antichrist come out of one of them? Does he live that long?
He does not live that long — no individual human does. The prophecy is geographic and civilizational, not genetic. When Daniel says the little horn comes out of one of the four kingdoms, it means the Antichrist emerges from the region and the cultural-political tradition associated with that kingdom. In this case, the northern Seleucid kingdom corresponds to present-day Turkey and northern Syria. The prophecy is saying that the final Antichrist power will arise out of that geographic and civilizational sphere — not that a single person has existed continuously since 323 BC.
Q: If the little horn grows toward the south, east, and toward Jerusalem — doesn't that alone tell us he's coming from the north?
It is one strong clue, yes. Something growing in power "toward the south, toward the east, and toward the beautiful land" is orienting itself toward Jerusalem from a starting position that is northwest or north of it. Turkey sits directly north of Jerusalem. Combined with Daniel 11's sustained focus on the king of the North, and Isaiah's repeated reference to "the Assyrian" as a future enemy of God's people, the geographic indicators consistently point in the same direction.
Q: Is the Antichrist not human? Does he live long enough to be tied to empires from thousands of years ago?
He is fully human. The confusion arises from the nature of prophetic language, which speaks about kingdoms — geographic regions, peoples, and political traditions — rather than individual biological lifespans. The Antichrist is a man who will arise from a particular part of the world at a particular moment in history. His connection to the ancient empires is the connection of region and inheritance, not the connection of continuous personal existence.
Q: If the Romans destroyed the temple, doesn't that make Rome the Antichrist's empire?
The phrasing in Daniel 9:26 is precise: "the people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary." It does not say the ruler himself destroys it. The Roman general Titus commanded the siege, but historical records indicate that Rome did not want the temple destroyed — Titus attempted to preserve it, and the fire was set from within by soldiers whose identity remains unclear but who were almost certainly Syrian and Arab conscripts drawn from the local population. The people who destroyed the temple belonged to the same ethnic and geographic stock as the northern Seleucid and later Islamic powers — not ethnic Romans from Italy.
Q: Is Erdogan the Antichrist?
No individual living today can be identified from Scripture as the Antichrist. What can be said is that the political direction Turkey has been moving — its leadership publicly advocating for a reconstituted Islamic political union under a single authority — is consistent with what the prophecy describes as the seventh kingdom giving rise to the eighth. The person who will be the Antichrist has not been identified. What Scripture gives is the profile of a kingdom and a region.
Q: Does the Antichrist's covenant with many start the seven-year clock? What has to happen before that?
Yes — Daniel 9:27 specifies that the final seven years begin when the Antichrist confirms a covenant with many. Before the midpoint of those seven years, a temple of some kind must exist on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and sacrifices must have been reinstated, because the Antichrist stops those sacrifices at the three-and-a-half-year mark. The covenant itself — likely a peace arrangement that allows Jewish access to the Temple Mount — is probably what creates the political conditions for the temple and sacrifices to be established in the first place.
These questions reflect the live discussion that took place during the session. For the full teaching context, see the main chapter note.