Against the Flow: The inspiration of Daniel in an age of relativism

by John C. Lennox

For some years we in the West have enjoyed an unusually calm period of history, living in a more or less Christian culture conducive to the development of many institutions that enable life to flourish in relative peace. Yet, in the last century, there was more bloodshed in the world as a whole than in all the intervening centuries put together. We need to wake up to the fact that a great proportion of that bloodshed has been as a direct consequence of anti-God ideologies, forced upon people by dictators who held enormous power. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot tower over Antiochus Epiphanes in terms of the millions they put to death. Hitler’s rage against the Jewish people, and his murder of millions of them, has been unparalleled. If we replace the state-enforced pagan culture of Seleucid times by the state atheism of more recent times, the motives that drove Antiochus are still very much alive.