Like stars: Daniel 7-12
For more than six decades, Daniel and his friends remained faithful and changed the world. No, it was not perfect, and there were certainly bumps and setbacks along the way., but by the end of Daniel 6, the world was different than it was when Daniel was hauled away to Babylon. The most powerful man in the world called on all of his subjects to worship the one true God, and he both allowed the Jews to return home and promised to pay for the reconstruction of their temple.
When we hear accounts like this, we often assume that Daniel and his friends were extraordinary people of such profound faith that we could never hope to be like them. We forget that, when Daniel and his friends were first taken as hostages to Babylon, they were probably only about 15 years old, and they were torn away from their parents, their temple, and every other system that would have supported their faith development. We forget that the culture in which they found themselves living did everything in its power to strip them of their faith and to transform them into model Babylonians. And we forget that they had no written copies of Scripture. More, they did not have a significant part of the Old Testament or any of the New Testament at all!
In a very real way, then, when it comes to faith, we have the advantage over Daniel and his friends, and the implication of that reality is that we can live our lives every bit as faithful and impactful as Daniel. But how?
While the first half of the book of Daniel was primarily historical narrative, the second half is considered by scholars to belong to the genre of apocalyptic literature because it records Daniel’s visions and prophecies concerning the end of time. We could, then, mine these six chapters for insight into The Day, but that would be of little help as we endeavor to live faithfully and impactfully today. Fortunately, there is more in this second half of the book than insight into end times, and with a little work, we can find in Daniel 7-12 four keys that will help us here and now.
Keep an eternal perspective.
The first of these comes from Daniel 7-8, where the prophet recorded a pair of visions that come to him during the first and third years of Belshazzar’s reign, respectively. Belshazzar, you will recall, was the last ruler of Babylon who was known for his wild parties and blasphemed God instead of attending to the needs of the people or even preparing the city for attack. You might also recall that, sometime between Nebuchadnezzar’s death in 562 BCE and Belshazzar’s death in 539 BCE, Daniel left the king’s service and was not invited to Belly’s party in Daniel 5. The nature of Daniel’s departure is unclear, but evidence suggests he did not leave on the best of terms. Yet, Daniel was smart enough to see which way the wind was blowing. Belshazzar was going to make life tough for Daniel and his people.
In the first of Daniel’s dreams, recorded and interpreted in chapter 7, the prophet saw four beasts. In verse four, he saw a lion with eagle’s wings; in verse five, there was a bear with ribs between its teeth; in verse 6, he saw a leopard with four heads and four bird-like wings; and in verse 7, Daniel saw what he could only describe as “frightening and dreadful, and incredibly strong, with large iron teeth” that “devoured and crushed,” feet that trampled everything in its path, and ten horns. Then, as Daniel continued to watch starting in verse 9, God showed up. In verse 11, God killed the fourth beast. In verse 12, he removed the power of the other three beasts. Then, in verses 13-14, “one like a son of man” came on the clouds, and God gave him “an everlasting dominion that will not pass away” and a “kingdom… that will not be destroyed.”
As the dream continued in verse 15, Daniel asked for an interpretation of what he was seeing. Thus, in verse 17, he was told that the beasts represented four kings who would rise from the earth, but in verse 18, he learned that “the Most High will [ultimately] receive the kingdom and possess it forever, yes, forever and ever.” Indeed, as the interpretation continued, Daniel was warned that the fourth king, especially, would wage war against the holy ones and, for a time, prevail “until the Ancient of Days arrived… and the holy ones look possession of the kingdom” (verse 22). At that time, despite the ranting and railing of the fourth beast, Daniel learned in verse 27, “The kingdom, dominion, and greatness of the kingdoms under all of heaven will be given to the people, the holy ones of the Most High. His kingdom” – that is, the kingdom of the Most High – “will be an everlasting kingdom, and all rulers will serve and obey him.”
In the second vision, recorded in chapter 8, Daniel saw a ram with two horns charging to the west, north, and south, overcoming everyone in his path. Then, flying in from the west, came a goat with a conspicuous horn between his eyes that overwhelmed the ram. In short order, though, the large horn was broken and replaced by four other horns. From one of these horns, four new ones sprung, and then a fifth appeared that grew very large, powerful, and arrogant. In verse 11, this horn managed to shut down the regular sacrifices in the temple, and in verse 12, it “threw truth to the ground and was successful in what it did.” Daniel then heard angels speaking to one another about these events, and one revealed that this final horn would rule “for 2,300 evenings and mornings; then the sanctuary will be restored” (verse 14).
Starting in verse 15, Daniel offered the angel Gabriel’s interpretation of this second dream. In verse 20, the ram represented the kings of Media and Persia (e.g., Darius and Cyrus). According to verse 21, the goat represented the future king of Greece, Alexander the Great. The four horns represented the four generals who would divide Alexander’s kingdom after his premature death in 323 BCE, and the horn that rose above them all represented, according to verse 23, “a ruthless king, skilled in intrigue.” This king was described over the next few verses as great in power, causing incredible destruction, and fostering corruption and treachery. Most scholars identify this king as Antiochus IV, who launched a devastating, bloody attack on Jerusalem based on the false rumor that the city was rebelling against him. Yet, in verse 25, Gabriel noted, “Yet he will be broken – not by human hands.”
As we look in these visions for a key to living lives of faith and impact, there are two things that we must notice. First, both of these visions foresaw a future that was going to be rough for the people of God. At the end of Nebby’s reign, Daniel was surely feeling like things were moving in the right direction, but these dreams made clear things were going to get a whole lot worse. And second, as bad as things were going to get, God was sill going to win. The victory was not going to come as quickly as Daniel wanted: Antiochus was still 400 years into the future, and here we are another 2200 years down the road. Indeed, God still has not realized this final victory, but when he does, it will be complete and last forever.
For Daniel, then, the point of these visions was not that God would instantaneously deliver him and his people from hardship. Rather, it was that, no matter how bad things get in the here and now, they should keep an eye down the road and know that God wins in the end. Yes, God wins in the end, and God reminded Daniel of this truth because he knew that it was crucial to getting through the hardships Daniel would face.
It is called perspective, and we must keep an eternal perspective. This means taking the long view and remembering that God is eventually going to win once and for all eternity, and if we are going to live faithfully throughout our lives and make an impact on the world, then it will be of immeasurable worth. Indeed, when things get rough here and now, it may just be the knowledge that God wins in the end – and he has invited us to the victory celebration – that gets us through. Keep an eternal perspective.
Pray.
A second thing that buoyed Daniel and helped him live faithfully in a faithless world is found in chapter 9. After jumping ahead nearly twenty years to the first year of King Darius sometime after the events of Daniel 5, Daniel recounts how he was studying the word of the Lord to the prophet Jeremiah and discovered that “the number of years for the desolation of Jerusalem would be seventy.” It was a reference to Jeremiah 25:11: “This whole land will become a desolate ruin, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon for seventy years.” It connected also to Jeremiah 29:10, in which the Lord proclaimed, “When seventy years for Babylon are complete, I will attend to you and will confirm my promise concerning you to restore you to this place.” And all of this was significant because the first year of King Darius started in 539 BC, 66 years after Daniel and his friends were among the first captives taken from Jerusalem to Babylon.
Suddenly, Daniel realized that the restoration of Jerusalem was coming soon.
In response to this discovery, Daniel wrote in Daniel 5:3, “So I turned my attention tot he Lord God to seek him by prayer and petitions.” That is, Daniel prayed, and if we are going to life faithfully in a faithless world, we must do the same. Pray. This, however, is to be no ordinary prayer. There were several things that Daniel did in this prayer to make it effective, and we must take note!
He prayed in earnest. The evidence of this is in verse 3, where we discover that Daniel did not just pray. He prayed “with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes.” Fasting, of course, meant going without food or some other essential for a time. Sackcloth referred to Daniel’s clothing: instead of the comfortable robes he typically wore as a member of the court, Daniel donned rough, burlap-like sackcloth. It was itchy, sticky, and generally uncomfortable. Finally, ashes referred to throwing dust in the air, over his head, and then sitting down on the ground. These were not just random things, either. They characterized the prayer of a person in profound personal grief, and they showed that Daniel was praying with everything that he had.
He praised the Lord. We see this immediately in verse 4, where Daniel hailed, “Ah, Lord – the great and awe-inspiring God who keeps his gracious covenant with those who love him and keep his commands…” We see it again in verse 7: “Lord, righteousness belongs to you.” And again in verse 9: “Compassion and forgiveness belong to the Lord our God.” Moreover, he did it again in verses 15 and 16. You see, then, Daniel started this prayer by recognizing God’s greatness, graciousness, and faithfulness. He praised for who he was: righteous, compassionate, and forgiving. And he praised God for what he did: brought his people out of the land of Egypt. All of this praise was, to God, a fragrant offering and pleasing aroma, and it was to Daniel a source of profound encouragement. Every time he uttered a word of praise, his faith was bolstered just a little bit. Don’t believe me? Consider how Robert Emmons, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, describes gratitude, which is closely related to praise:
Gratitude makes us appreciate the value of something, and when we appreciate the value of something, we extract more benefits from it; we’re less likely to take it for granted
In effect, I think gratitude allows us to participate more in life. We notice the positives more, and that magnifies the pleasures you get from life. Instead of adapting to goodness, we celebrate goodness. We spend so much time watching things – movies, computer screens, sports – but with gratitude we become greater participants in our lives as opposed to spectators.
Robert Emmons, as quoted by Brené Brown in Atlas of the Heart
The challenge here is that we too often consider gratitude an emotion, and so, if we are not feeling it, we do not praise. Yet, researcher Brené Brown insists, “While gratitude is an emotion, if we want to experience its full power, we must also make it a practice” (source: Atlas of the Heart). That is, we must resolve to express gratitude deliberately, regularly, and despite whatever may be going on around us. Just like Daniel.
Daniel took responsibility. In verse 5, he declared, “We have sinned.” In verse 6, he said, “We have not listened to your servants the prophets.” In verses 7-8, he wrote, “Public shame belongs to us.” In verses 9-10, he added, “we have rebelled against him and have not obeyed the Lord our God.” Verse 11: “All Israel – including me – has broken your law and turned away.” Verse 13: “We have not sought the favor of the Lord our God.” Verse 14: “We have not obeyed him.” Time after time, Daniel prayed in the first person – we, us, and even me – rather than the third person – he, she, or they. Time after time, Daniel took responsibility for this sin, but that may not mean exactly what we typically think it does. You see, while I Daniel was not personally culpable for breaking any of the laws – that is, he was not personally guilty – he was nevertheless recognizing that he had to be part of the solution. He had to help turn things around and lead Israel back to the Lord. That is what he was taking responsibility for, and we must do the same!
He based his prayer on God’s promise and compassion. Again, we see this in several places throughout the prayer, but none are more clear than verse 18: “For we are not presenting our petitions before you based on our righteous acts, but based on your abundant compassion.” Daniel knew that, if Israel’s salvation was to be based on their own righteousness, they were up a creek because they were not righteous. It would be like offering Monopoly money for a new car! Thus, Daniel based his prayer instead on who God is. In verse 9, he said, “Compassion and forgiveness belong to the Lord our God.” He based it on what God had done. In verse 15, he reminded God of how he had delivered Israel from Egypt, and in verse 16, he said, “Lord, in keeping with all your righteous acts, may your anger and wrath turn away from your city.” Further, he based his prayer on God’s own reputation. Still in verse 16, he appealed to God’s honor, reminding him that he had chosen Israel, Jerusalem, and Mt. Zion as his own, and by allowing them to languish in exile, they had become an object of ridicule, which meant that he was an object of ridicule. You see, then, it was not because of anything Israel did that he should forgive and restore. No, Daniel prayed that God should forgive and restore because it was consistent with who he is and what he does, and it would bring glory to himself. In fact, this is how he concluded his petition in verse 19: “Lord, hear! Lord, forgive! Lord, listenand act! My God, for your own sake, do not delay, because your city and your people bear your name.”
He listened. Now in verse 20, Daniel shut up, and he observed in verses 21-22, “While I was praying, Gabriel, the man I had seen in the first vision, reached me in my extreme weariness, about the time of the evening offering, [and] He gave me this explanation.” The rest of the chapter, then, is Gabriel, the same angel who predicted the births of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, assuring Daniel that God had heard his prayer and was already working on the answer. More than that, he then spent four verses describing what that answer would look like. This was exactly what Daniel needed to hear!
We must recognize that Daniel did not flippantly pray, “Hey, God, let’s get this restoration thing going already.” No, he was very deliberate in the way that he prayed, and if we are to faithfully navigate this faithless world, we must do the same. We must pray earnestly, praising God for who he is and what he has done, taking responsibility to be part of the change that must happen to bring our society in line with him, basing our petition on his promise and compassion, and listening carefully for his response. We must pray.
Remember that you are still loved by God.
The third thing that buoyed Daniel is also found in chapter 9. Consider verse 23, where Gabriel responded to Daniel’s prayer with this interesting statement: “At the beginning of your petitions an answer went out, and I have come to give it, for you are treasured by God.” Sixty-five years after Daniel was hauled away from his home into exile, with the world in chaos around him and people plotting against him, the significance of this statement cannot be overstated. In fact, the Hebrew word behind this conveyed three big ideas.
Daniel and his people were still desirable. While it would have been easy for Daniel to think that he and his people were rejected by God and God no longer had any interest in them because of their sin, that could not have been farther from the truth!
Daniel and his people were still precious. While one might have thought that their sin tainted them, broke them, and made them junk, God assured Daniel that they still had value and worth. They were still precious in his sight!
Daniel and his people were still beloved. That is, as bad as things were, God was still committed to doing what was right and best for Israel.
To be certain, this was good stuff, but God did not say it just once. No, he reiterated the same idea in Daniel 10:11 and again in 10:19, and given that one of the principal rules of Bible study is that repetition signals importance, this is clearly something that God wanted Daniel to remember. Indeed, as terrible as your sin or situation may be, this truth is crucial:
Remember that you are still loved by God.
He has not rejected you or turned away from you because of your sin. You are still precious in his sight, and he is still working on your behalf, always doing what is right and best for you. Yes, remember that you are still loved by God.
Lead people to righteousness.
So we come to Daniel 10-12. Starting in Daniel 10:1, our hero recorded a final vision from the Lord which he received in the third year of Cyrus king of Persia. That date is significant because extrabiblical sources attest that it was during Cyrus’ first year as king that he allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem. By the time Daniel saw this vision, then, the restoration was begun. Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel had already led the first group back to Jerusalem and begun to rebuild. They began laying the foundations of the temple, and eventually, they would hold a tremendous celebration that we can read about at the end of Ezra 3. But then the Jews’ enemies showed up and forced the work to stop. By the time Daniel had his vision in year three, then, it was quite clear that the whole effort was teetering on failure.
Worse, the vision made clear that they were in more trouble than anyone realized. At the end of chapter 10, the angel of the Lord told Daniel of the battle that was raging between good and evil. In chapter 11, he said that the conflict would continue and spill over into the physical world in the form of wars, tyrants, and all sorts of other terrible things. By the start of chapter 12, the angel revealed, “There will be a time of distress such as never has occurred since nations came into being until that time.” Certainly, this was less than encouraging.
It is fortunate, then, that this was not the end of the story. In fact, the angel concluded in Daniel 12:3, “Those who are wise will shine like the bright expanse of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.” Notice the vivid imagery of this promise. Now, we have all looked up at the night sky with wonder, but the impact of this imagery is magnified for anyone who has gazed upon the stars far from the lights of a city. You see, the farther you are from the light pollution of the city, the darker the night gets, and the darker the night gets, the brighter the stars shine. This was precisely the angel’s point. People who choose to live according to wisdom, to do what God defines as right and avoid what God identifies as wrong, will shine clearly for all to see in this sin-darkened world.
Moreover, by Daniel’s day, people were already navigating according to the stars. They had discovered that they could use those bright lights in the sky to figure out where they were and where they needed to go, and if we will commit ourselves to wisdom, then whether we realize it or not, people will begin to do the same by us. That is, they will see what we are doing, compare it to what they are doing, and they will be able to figure out what they need to do to be righteous. Like a beacon in the night, we will beckon them to righteousness, and some will even choose to follow.
As a case in point, just today, I was in our neighborhood grocery store. Many of the staff members are aware that I am a pastor, and one of them asked what our church was doing for summer outreach. When I told him about the outreach ministries we just completed in our area schools and community, another woman jumped in. She is from Bosnia and lived through the atrocities of ethnic cleansing and civil war in the 1990s. She marveled that a church would do the sort of things that we were talking about because, in her experience, churches do not do that. As she spoke, it became clear that, to her, the church to which she was accustomed was utterly irrelevant, but there was real curiosity and excitement about the possibility of a church that actually did what Jesus said.
In this sin-darkened world, we must be wise so that we may lead people to righteousness. Ultimately, this is what Daniel did, and it is what we must do as well. No, we will never be exactly like Daniel. For example, we may never have the ear of the king or the president, and we may not have the ability to interpret dreams or walk out of a lions’ den unscathed. Yet, we can choose wisdom. Even in the midst of this faithless world, we can do what God defines as right and avoid what he identifies as wrong even in today’s world. We can lead people to righteousness, and it we will do that, we can change the world, one person at a time.
Do everything without grumbling and arguing, so that you may be blameless and pure, children of God who are faultless in a crooked and perverted generation, among whom you shine like stars in the world, by holding firm to the word of life.
Philippians 2:14-16 CSB