Today, I am reading and commenting on Daniel 11-12.

This is a difficult passage to read and understand.  It begins by describing the rise of Alexander the Great and the division of the empire he built into four parts.  Part of what makes it hard to follow is that it glosses over historical events in ways which make it hard to know where in the historical timeline the parts of this vision are.  For example: at the beginning it talks about a king arising in Persia who will “stir up everyone against the kingdom of Greece.”  Now there are two issues here.  The Persian king who first invaded Greece was Darius, but the passage appears to be referencing his son Xerxes.  The second issue is that Greece was not a single kingdom at that time, but rather an amalgam of city-states.  I will discuss why that is not the problem some would make it out to be in a moment.  It follows talking about the Persian king who stirred people up against Greece by mentioning a king who will arise and do as he pleases.  The fact that it then tells us that after the death of this king his kingdom would be split among four kings suggests that it is referring to Alexander the Great.  Now if you read this passage and did not know history, you might think that king was instead a Persian king.  I use the above as an example of how the writer glosses over details of history in a way which those who know the history in detail will find problematic, but which convey the flow of that history.  As we read this passage we get a feel for the way in which the land of Israel, and the people who lived there, got caught in the battles between the Seleucid Dynasty in Persia and the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt.  This vision was not intended to give a detailed account of the future.  It was intended to remind those who lived through those troubling times that God had a plan for that future and that events would turn out according to what He had ordained.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Daniel 9-10.

When Daniel realized that Jeremiah had prophesied that the Exile would last seventy years, and that seventy years had almost passed, he began to pray.  I was struck today by the part of Daniel’s prayer where he said, “We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy. ”  We do not pray and expect God to answer our prayers because of our righteousness.  In fact, as Daniel’s prayer makes clear, we are sinful and deserving of God’s judgement.  We expect God to answer because He has said that He will and because we know that He is merciful.  And even though Daniel expected God to answer his prayer, before he made his request of God he acknowledged that he and the Israelites had sinned and deserved God’s judgement.  We need to follow Daniel’s example and both confess and repent of our sins before we put our petitions before God.  I realized something else as I wrote this.  The phrasing I used about us expecting God to answer us suggests that I think we have the right to expect an answer.  That is not the case.  God is under no obligation to answer our prayers.  God answers our prayers out of His great mercy, not because we deserve those answers.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Daniel 7-8.

When I was younger these two visions were among my favorite passages in the Bible.  I felt that as the events described came to pass we would see how they predicted the future.  I still believe that they describe a time in Daniel’s future, but now I think their meaning for us is more complicated than demonstrating God’s ability to reveal the future.  Which means I find them challenging to write about.  Today I want to write about the first vision.  There are four beasts mentioned and their descriptions seem bizarre.  The first one is described as a winged lion, which has its wings torn off, is stood up like a human and given a human mind.  The second looks like a bear, but is raised up on one side.  Then we are told it has three ribs between its teeth.  I have always assumed that to mean that it has the ribs of some animal in its mouth that it is chewing on, but it struck me today that perhaps they were supposed to be thought of like baleen in the mouth of a baleen whale (if you don’t know what I mean, go look up baleen whales).  Even without the ribs part I have trouble forming a picture of this beast in my mind (what does it mean by “raised up on one of its sides”).  The third beast looks like a leopard with four bird wings and four heads.  That is a strange look, but at least one that I can fully imagine in my head.  The final beast I always imagine as looking something like a tunnel boring machine.  Although, I struggle with the ten horns.  I wonder if we were intended to be able to visualize these beasts, or if it was more to just metaphorically compare them? (kind of a lion, kind of a bear, kind of a leopard, and some kind of monstrous mechanical beast).

Now, I have typically seen these four beasts compared to empires which existed sequentially.  The winged lion was seen as the Babylonian empire, the bear as the Persian empire, the leopard as the Hellenistic empires (Alexander the Great and the four empires built by his successors), the fourth beast as the Roman empire.  The problem is that when the fourth beast is destroyed the other three are allowed to live for a time after that, although stripped of their power.  The only part of the understanding of this vision which I grew up with which fits my understanding today is that Jesus’ kingdom represents the end of the rule of these four beasts.  I was hoping that as I wrote the above I would develop some further insight into the meanings of these four beasts, but that did not happen.  The only thing which I have to add at this point is that each of these beasts are supposed to give us insight into living in this world and our tendency to focus solely on the fourth beast interferes with us fully comprehending the meaning of this vision.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Daniel 5-6.

Reading the account about the writing on the wall, I was again struck by something which I had never thought about before.  It’s not that I never noticed, just that I never thought it noteworthy.  When the fingers appeared and began writing on the wall, the ruler of Babylon, Belshazzar, was terrified.  I had never really thought about it because fingers appearing and starting to write would be somewhat frightening in any case.  Today, it struck me, the writer thought it necessary to point out that Belshazzar was terrified.  That suggests that there was more going on than just the fingers appearing.  Which led me to think about the fact that the writers tell us that he was deliberately committing sacrilege against the God of the Israelites by using goblets taken from the temple in Jerusalem to drink from while praising other gods.  To me this suggests that Belshazzar understood that the writing represented judgement against him, despite the fact that he could not read it.  This is confirmed for me when he became even more frightened when his “wise men” could not read the writing.  Those “wise men” would have been well trained in the lore surrounding the gods whom Belshazzar acknowledged so that, if the writing was from one of those gods, they should have been able to read it.  So, Belshazzar knew the message even though he was unable to read what was written.  The message of Belshazzar’s fear is the same as what Paul writes in the first chapter of Romans, God’s qualities have been known such that people are without excuse.  Later in the passage, Daniel even tells Belshazzar that he knew about God, and still refused to be humble before Him.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Daniel 3-4.

I love the story of the fiery furnace.  It holds such important lessons for us.  This morning I was struck by a phrase which I never thought about much in the past.  When Nebuchadnezzar confronted the three friends over their failure to worship the golden image he had erected they responded by saying, “we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. ”  Notice that they did not say that they did not need to defend themselves at all before him, just that they did not need to do so “in this matter”.  “This matter” was their refusal to bow down and worship the image of gold which he had set up.  They rejected his authority over them in the matter of who or what they worship.  They then asserted that their God could, and would deliver them from his attempt to punish them for refusing to accept his authority in this matter.   Finally, they stated that even if their God did not deliver them from his punishment, they would not follow Nebuchadnezzar’s dictates as to how, who, or what they should worship.  We should follow their example.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.