Dan's 100+ Winning Streak!

This guy is having an amazing streak of luck.  He sits at a blackjack table in Vegas and has beat the house 75 straight times.  Needless to say, his pile of chips is HUGE and growing.  He is definitely getting noticed (especially by casino management) but just keeps raking it in.  After 100 straight winning hands, he pushes back from the table and calmly demurs, "That's all for now."

No one is this lucky!  There has got to be something going on here to account for such an incredible feat of defying the odds.  This is precisely the conundrum men face when it comes to Daniel 11.  You remember Daniel (the guy who was invited to the Lion's Club for dinner).  He was a prominent figure in the Chaldean and Medo-Persian empires of the sixth century BC.  He was also an amazing prophet. 

Late in his career, he described a series of future events with amazing specificity.  In the first third of chapter 11, he outlines a sequence of 60 key events that will occur in the Middle East between his day and the second century BC.  In the next third of the chapter, he details 40 key features of events that will occur in the reign of a leader who can be identified as Antiochus Epiphanes (175-164 BC).  I have attached two documents that show in two columns what Daniel said would happen(left column) and a brief summary (in the right column) of what actually happened.  Taken together, these prophecies and their historical counterparts blaze a prophetic winning streak that is 100 events long.  Here - check 'em out:

Download daniel_11_part_one.pdf
Download daniel_11_part_two.pdf

So, what's going on here?  How is it possible for someone living in 534 BC to predict with such precision an extended sequence of events spanning over 300 years?  Is something fishy going on here?  Or could it be that Daniel actually has a hot-line to God?

Comments

[CF]

This particular passage, Daniel 11, is one of the most compelling sections of the Bible to establish the veracity and reliability of Scripture. In light of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one has to do a lot of gymnastics to escape the obvious conclusion that Daniel's prophecies were given before the events actually occurred!