Daniel: The Wise Will Be All Right Series

THE WISE WILL BE ALL RIGHT—Daniel 10-12

***The 2010 movie, “The Kids Are All Right,” was about two women who married, with each having children by the same sperm donor. They raised their kids together. The plot takes crazy twists and turns, as one of the women has an affair with the sperm donor, who does his best to corrupt the kids. Yet true to Hollywood idealism, everyone is happy in the end. The kids are all right, it seems. Oh that that were always true in real life! (Note to pastor: movie was Rated R; I never saw it. Skip this if you want.)**

“Will we be all right?” We ask that question, because life can be confusing, even scary, sometimes.

Families struggle. There are financial challenges, emotional struggles, marital stress. Children make bad choices, and adults take painful detours along the paths of life. Carefully-laid plans don’t work out, and people we trust disappoint or betray.

Communities seem more dangerous than before, with more to fear: Drugs, gangs, violence. Danger in the streets, ungodly influences, unbridled immorality and greed. Online danger, in social media, violent videos, or hyper-sexualized media.

Our nation faces challenges: a pandemic, political turmoil, and the specter of overwhelming debt, along with economic and social inequality.

Throughout the world, there are wars, genocide, religious persecution, and daily crises.

Will we be all right?

THE WORLD OF DANIEL WAS NO LESS INTIMIDATING THAN OURS.

In chapter 1, Daniel was a young man, thrown into the pagan culture of Babylon. He was suddenly confronted with strange literature, religion, astrology and sorcery. He saw his friends thrown into a fiery furnace for their faith, and he himself was thrown into a den of lions. He was in the banquet hall when the Persians swept into Babylon, and he became a political figure in the mighty Persian Empire.

Now Daniel is old, and he is troubled. He says in Daniel 10:2-3, “At that time I, Daniel, mourned for three weeks. I ate no choice food; no meat or wine touched my lips; and I used no lotions at all until the three weeks were over.”

When Daniel prayed and fasted, God sent him a vision of a heavenly messenger—perhaps an angel—to settle his mind about what the future would hold.

What if you could see into the future? Would you want to? You could make a killing in the stock market, move somewhere “safe,” or warn your grandchildren. Perhaps knowing the future would be troubling, even toxic; you might panic or give up on life, or you might feel helpless to do anything about it.

The messenger in Daniel’s vision gave him a detailed and accurate outline of events in the future of the Jews. We are not going to read Daniel 11 (or this sermon would be like the sermon title a few weeks ago, “This May Take a While”). If you take the time to study it, with a good commentary or a pile of books at your side, you will find that the first 35 verses read like a history of 537-164 B.C. It summarizes the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great, which was divided into four parts, with 4 rulers. Then it describes the many decades of war and intrigue between the Seleucid dynasty of Syria and the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt.

The vision so closely matches history that some wonder whether it was written after 164 B.C. Few, if any, prophecies in the Bible are so detailed, and the literary method of placing words in the mouth of an historical figure was quite common in that time. On the other hand, Isaiah 46:10 points out that God can “make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come.”

Someday, when we greet the saints from the second century B.C. in heaven, we may hear, “Wasn’t it amazing what God showed Daniel about the future? Too bad it was sealed up until we discovered it (in a cave or closet). By then it had all happened already.” Or, we might hear instead, “You didn’t know it was written after it happened? We all knew that. If Baruch ben Sirach had written about the death of Antiochus Epiphanes, he would have been tortured and crucified. By setting it in the time of Daniel, he gave us a perspective we needed in such terrible times.”

Either way, the message is the same:

GOD SEES HISTORY BEFORE IT HAPPENS; IT IS NEVER A SURPRISE TO HIM.

In Daniel 11:36-45, the vision continues with a vision of an arrogant and impious king. This part of the vision doesn’t describe any known historical events very well, causing some modern believers to speculate that the vision is a prediction of events still to come—events near the “end times.” The vision involves “the Beautiful Land”—certainly the land of Israel, which feeds their speculation about future wars in that area.