Rebellion Within: Daniel 8:9-15
One of humanity’s fundamental flaws is rebellion. We weren’t created with rebellion. We weren’t given a spirit of disobedience. We weren’t designed to rebel. None of that changes the fact that we do rebel. We rebel quite frequently. We do it because we enjoy doing things our own way.
I don’t think many of us intend to participate in rebellion. We don’t get up in the morning and declare an intention not to do what people expect from us. While we rebellion within, we also have other competing influences holding the blatant rebel in check.
What happens, though, is we go through the day and the world wears us down. Maybe we feel pulled in too many directions. Maybe we get tired of always doing things the right way and we start to take shortcuts. Maybe we get tired of having so many expectations placed upon us we start to find ways to quickly get rid of those expectations so we can get to the stuff we really want to do. Instead of giving our best effort, we do the minimum job to get a task done so we can move on to something more desirable.
When we do this often enough, we develop bad habits. Or, we develop lazy habits. Perhaps we develop selfish and self-serving habits. Those habits lead to bad choices, which leads to bad consequences, which eventually leads to rebellion. Sooner or later, we find ourselves doing things we know we shouldn’t do or things we don’t even believe are good, but we’re doing them anyways.
We often don’t intend to rebel, but we find ourselves there anyways. Paul confesses this much in Romans when he says he doesn’t understand his own actions. Paul ends up doing the very thing he hates instead of the good thing that God places in his heart. If I had to guess, Paul never consciously said he desired to rebel against the good God placed within him, but he ends up doing evil because of a series of poor choices that went unchecked until he started doing something noticeably bad.
So far, I haven’t spoken much about today’s text. I’ll make the deeper connection tomorrow. For today understand we end up at with a very rebellious horn that gradually grows more powerful. This horn is the outcome of hundreds of years of human kings striving for bigger empires and more power. The Babylonian kings transitioned to the Persian emperors, who transitioned to the Greek rulers, which eventually brings us to Antiochus Epiphanes – the little horn that grows rebellious against the heavenly host. There were decent rulers in the list, rulers who perhaps didn’t love God outright, but God could work with. Slowly and subtly, though, the rulers became less aligned with an agenda God could use and more aligned with their own quest for power. They grew rebellious. One of humanity’s fundamental flaws is rebellion.
