How Long, O Lord

Daniel 8 — How Long, O Lord?

Source: Christian Virtual Fellowship — Book of Daniel series (taught by Dustin Smith)

1. Setting the Scene — Another Apocalyptic Vision

Daniel divides neatly in half. Chapters 1–6 show Daniel as a prophet serving in the royal court. Chapters 7–12 show Daniel receiving dreams and visions that require an angel to arrive and explain them. This is what makes Daniel apocalyptic rather than simply prophetic — unlike Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, where “the word of the Lord came to” the prophet directly, Daniel’s visions are unveiled to him by a heavenly messenger. This is also what links Daniel most closely to the Book of Revelation.

Chapter 8 opens “in the third year of the reign of Belshazzar” (the same king from chapter 5), while Daniel is, in the vision, at the citadel of Susa in Elam, beside the Ulai Canal.

The speaker frames the whole chapter around a phrase that recurs throughout Scripture: “How long, O Lord?” When persecution arises, some people take matters into their own hands. But those who trust that God is the one who rescues and delivers know He must ultimately intervene — and that conviction produces a prayer, a petition: how long, O Lord?

The chapter breaks into three clear sections:

Verses	Content
1–12	Daniel’s apocalyptic vision of the ram and the goat
13–14	A two-verse conversation between two unnamed “Holy Ones” — angelic messengers — asking “how long?”
15–27	Gabriel arrives and explains the vision to Daniel — likely the first time Gabriel appears by name explicitly in Scripture

The speaker stresses a methodological point that governs the whole teaching: when an authoritative angelic interpreter tells you what the symbols mean, you take that explanation seriously rather than speculating past it. “That’s the purpose of apocalyptic literature — you have these poetic and metaphoric visions with signs and symbols, often with numbers, often with colors, definitely with animals — but when you have the revealer explaining it to us, we have to take those explanations very seriously… we have to take the free answers whenever we can get them.”

2. The Vision — A Ram, a Goat, and a Little Horn

Symbol	Historical Identity (per Gabriel)	Key Details
Ram — two horns, the longer “coming up after” the first	Media, then Persia (v. 20)	The Hebrew indicates the horns are not simultaneous — Media rises first, Persia after. The ram pushes west, north, and south; nothing can stand before it.
Goat — a single “conspicuous” horn, crossing “the surface of the whole earth without touching the ground”	Greece (v. 21); the horn universally identified as Alexander the Great	Strikes the ram “with his mighty wrath,” shatters its horns, tramples it. After defeating the ram, the goat “magnified himself exceedingly” — and the horn was broken.
Four horns replacing the broken great horn	The four generals who divided Alexander’s empire after his death	Arise “not with his power”; little further detail given.
Little horn, coming “out of one of them”	Antiochus IV — arising from the Seleucid portion of the Greek kingdom	Grows exceedingly toward the south (Egypt), the east (Parthia), and “the beautiful land” (Israel, per other Old Testament usage of that phrase).

The speaker offers a memory device: “Grease, goat, great” — Greece / goat / Alexander the Great.

He also draws a theological thread back to Daniel 7: there, the kingdom of God/Israel was pictured as a human being, not an animal, echoing Genesis 1’s design of humans ruling over the animals. Every pagan power in Daniel’s visions is instead pictured as an animal — a signal that something is disordered about their rule. “Animals ruling nations is not the sort of rule that God had described from the beginning in Genesis chapter 1. It was meant that human beings were to rule over the animals, not animals ruling over kingdoms.”

The Pattern of Pride and Judgment

A single rhythm repeats three times across the vision:

Power	Self-Exaltation	Judgment
The ram (Media–Persia)	“He did as he pleased and magnified himself”	Defeated and trampled by the goat
The goat’s great horn (Alexander)	“Magnified himself exceedingly”	“The horn was broken” — a divine passive, meaning God broke him
The little horn (Antiochus)	“He will magnify himself in his heart,” opposing “the Prince of princes”	“He will be broken without human agency”

“You got all these arrogant kingdoms, but in the end God gets the last word. If you’re going to be arrogant in your reign and your rule as a leader, as a ruler, then God’s gonna intervene, and he’s gonna humble you, and he’s going to replace you.”

3. The Little Horn’s Arrogance — Fighting the Host of Heaven

The little horn’s rise is described in escalating, cosmic language: it “grew up to the host of heaven and caused some of the host and some of the stars to fall to the earth, and trampled them down,” even “magnified itself to be equal with the commander of the host.”

Historically, Antiochus IV took the title Epiphanes — Greek for “made manifest” — claiming to be a god made manifest in human form, one of the first rulers in history to make such a claim about himself.

His most egregious acts (vv. 11–12):

He “removed the regular sacrifice” from the Jerusalem temple.
“The place of his sanctuary was thrown down” — metaphorical language of disdain and destruction.
“The regular sacrifice will be given over to the horn” — the temple is no longer sacrificing to the true God.
He “will fling truth to the ground.”

The speaker verifies each of these against the historical record of Antiochus IV’s actual campaigns and actions: “We know this from history… they are all things that Antiochus the Fourth did in his own lifetime.”

4. Excursus — Angels as the Heavenly Counterparts of Nations

The little horn’s arrogance is described as reaching so high that it battles “the host of heaven” — the angels themselves. The speaker offers supporting evidence that, in apocalyptic thinking, angels can represent earthly nations, and that earthly battles have a corresponding “angelic” battle in the heavens:

Judges 5 — “The stars fought from heaven from their courses, and they fought against Sisera,” an earthly king — the “stars” understood as angels, not literal stars.
Isaiah 14 — the poetic taunt against a proud Babylonian king (“I will ascend to heaven… I will make myself like the Most High”), which the speaker argues is not about the fall of Satan but a description of arrogant human kingship — strikingly similar language to what is said of Antiochus.
Daniel 10 (previewed for a future study) — Gabriel explicitly names “the prince of Persia” and “the prince of Greece” as opposing angelic figures, and identifies Michael as “your prince” — Israel’s angelic representative. From this the speaker draws the same principle behind Revelation’s “angel of the church of Ephesus” language: earthly conflicts between nations correspond to conflicts among the angels who represent them.

The speaker adds a caution here: “We should be careful at taking this little bit of information here and developing whole brand new theologies… but I think there’s something here we have to take seriously.”

5. “How Long, O Lord?” — The 2,300 Evenings and Mornings

The two “Holy Ones” of verses 13–14 ask the chapter’s defining question:

“How long will the vision about the regular sacrifice apply, while the transgression causes horror, so as to allow both the holy place and the host to be trampled?” … “He said to me, ‘For 2,300 evenings and mornings; then the holy place will be properly restored.’”

This is the first appearance in Scripture of the concept later called the abomination of desolation — here, “the transgression that causes horror.” The speaker stresses this is a thing set up in the temple, not a person, and its effect is to halt the regular (twice-daily) sacrifice.

The Math

The “regular sacrifice” in Hebrew refers to a sacrifice offered twice daily — once morning, once evening.
“2,300 evenings and mornings” is therefore not 2,300 days but 2,300 half-sacrifices — 1,150 days.
1,150 days is roughly three years and three months.

The Historical Fit

The abomination was set up in the temple in 167 BC.
The temple was cleansed in December 164 BC — a date the speaker notes we know precisely: December 25th, later the calendar date of Christmas, but centuries earlier the date of the temple’s cleansing.
167 minus 164 is roughly three years — matching the 1,150-day count derived from the text.

The speaker’s caution: “There are a lot of people that are self-proclaimed prophecy experts that like to take this 2300 and apply it in a lot of places that have nothing to do with the Holy Temple being restored. But that’s the purpose of this right here, quite clearly… these are the authoritative heavenly messengers that are revealing the vision, explaining it to us — we have to take their words very seriously.”

“A Time of an End,” Not “The Time of the End”

Gabriel tells Daniel the vision pertains to what is often translated “the time of the end” — but in Hebrew, both nouns are indefinite: it literally reads “a time of an end,” not “the time of the end.” The speaker argues this matters enormously: “the end” in question, read in context, is the end of the temple’s desecration — not the end of the age.

6. Four Appearances of the “Abomination of Desolation” in Daniel

The speaker traces the same phrase through the rest of the book, noting that in every instance it describes an object or act, never a person:

Reference	What Happens
Dan 8:13–14	“The transgression that causes horror” halts the regular sacrifice; ends after 2,300 evenings/mornings, when the holy place is restored
Dan 9:27	The little horn stops the sacrifice and grain offering mid-week; “on the wing of abominations… one who makes desolate” — that one is already decreed for destruction
Dan 11:31	Forces from Antiochus “desecrate the sanctuary fortress,” remove the regular sacrifice, and “set up the abomination of desolation”
Dan 12:11	From the removal of the sacrifice and the setting up of the abomination, 1,290 days are counted

The speaker notes that Jesus later draws on this exact imagery in the New Testament, apparently assuming His listeners already understand it from Daniel — a point flagged for future study rather than developed here.

7. Confirmed by History — 1 and 2 Maccabees

Written after Daniel but before the New Testament, the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees describe the actual events behind the vision, using Daniel’s own Greek (Septuagint) wording:

1 Maccabees 1:54 — “They erected the abomination of desolation on the altar of the burnt offering” — quoting Daniel’s phrase directly to describe an altar/image to Zeus physically set up in the temple.
1 Maccabees (on the cleansing) — “The Jews had torn down the abomination that Antiochus had erected on the altar” — again, a thing Antiochus set up, not Antiochus himself.
2 Maccabees — Antiochus sent an Athenian senator to compel the Jews to forsake their ancestral laws and to rename the Jerusalem temple “the Temple of Olympian Zeus.”
2 Maccabees 9:10 — describing Antiochus’s final illness: “No one was able to carry the man who a little while before had thought that he could touch the stars of heaven” — a direct echo of the vision’s language of cosmic arrogance, and confirmation that Antiochus died of disease, not “by human agency.”

8. Applications for New Covenant Christians

God judges self-exaltation. Every occurrence of a power “magnifying itself” in the vision is followed by an act of judgment that removes it from power. This should caution believers against pride and arrogance, echoing Jesus’s teaching that “the first shall be last” and that those who lower themselves to serve others are the ones ultimately exalted.
“How long?” is the proper prayer of the persecuted righteous. The question appears roughly sixty times across Scripture. When difficulty arises, God’s people are meant to seek His intervention — praying for ourselves and for one another — rather than “taking matters into our own hands” or trying to solve the problem “with my own ingenuity.”
Worship itself is resistance. The phrase “how long” appears most frequently not in laments generally but specifically in the Psalms — the worship book of the Bible. Persecution aims to force people to abandon faith and hope; offering praise and worship to God keeps the focus on who the true God is, resisting both cultural accommodation and violent retaliation.
Holiness matters because God’s dwelling matters. The vision longs for the desecrated temple to be restored to holiness, showing that God has a vested interest in the holiness of His dwelling place. Since the New Covenant temple is now the body of Christ, believers are called to “eradicate any unholiness that may reside in our hearts, in our minds, and in our behavior” — the same stress on holy living, now located in a different dwelling.

Summary

Daniel 8 Is	Daniel 8 Is Not
A vision of Media–Persia and Greece, explicitly named by Gabriel	A vision requiring guesswork about which kingdoms are meant
A warning against pride, judged repeatedly by God	A political commentary praising conquest or empire
A prophecy whose “2,300 evenings and mornings” (1,150 days) points to the temple’s historical restoration in 164 BC	A countdown to “the end of the age” or a code for modern events
The first scriptural appearance of “the abomination of desolation” — a thing set up in the temple	A description of a person who is the abomination
A call to pray “how long?” and to worship as an act of resistance under persecution	An invitation to take matters into one’s own hands
A picture of God’s concern for the holiness of His dwelling — now the body of Christ	A message limited only to Daniel’s own generation

“We have to ask God how long it is going to be until you help us. Our response to those difficulties in life should be praise and worship.”

Dan 8:8

Explanations