The End of Days at the End of Daniel

All right, if you have a Bible with you, turn to Daniel chapter 12.

Daniel 12 · chapter mention

And if you're with us for the first time, we're at the end of a series.

This is the very last chapter of Daniel.

And so we've had some interesting conversations, and probably we'll have one this morning.

My mother-in-law is going to be a hundred this week, and she's asleep.

Shh, there she is, your brother.

Yes, I was talking about you, Billy.

Okay.

I've got interested because she was born in 1926.

That was a long time ago, y'all.

And so her birthday is this Thursday.

Thank you for those of you who came to the birthday party yesterday.

And I got to thinking, who else was born in 1926?

Fascinating.

So that's a long time ago.

Queen Elizabeth II was born on in 1926, the year of our Lord.

Fidel Castro was born in 1926.

Marilyn Monroe was born in 1926.

Andy Griffith was born in 1926.

Start whistling everybody.

Chuck Berry was born in 1926.

Miles Davis, Don Rickles, Tony Bennett, and Mel Brooks and David Attenborough, who does a lot of the readings for historical documentaries and things.

And of that list, only Mel Brooks and David Attenborough are still with us.

But we're going to add Billy to that list.

So there's a tomorrow is Memorial Day.

All the people that I just mentioned, except for two, have departed.

Tomorrow's Memorial Day, and I looked it up online and it said since 1900, approximately 660,000 American service members have died in the line of duty.

That's a lot.

They've all departed.

And this is appropriate timing for this passage for us, because this passage is there's something interesting that's going in the passage that you don't see in the rest of the Old Testament.

It is, this is has the clearest statement, and commentators across the board say this.

This has the clearest statement of the whole Old Testament about the resurrection of the dead in Daniel chapter 12, verses 2 and 3.

Daniel 12:2

So if you're ever in a conversation with somebody about the resurrection of the dead, particularly in the Old Testament, Daniel chapter 12, verses 2 and 3.

Daniel 12:2

And because that's there, that's going to get a lot of our thought.

But there's actually a good bit more that's going on in the midst of this.

Yeah, do I want to go to it?

Yeah, I'll tell you a look.

So we looked at chapter 10 last week, and I asked you if you wanted to, you know, if you wanted to read chapter 11, you could read Daniel 11.

And in Daniel chapter 11, he goes through a great floor.

Daniel 11 · chapter mention

I'll get that later.

He goes through a great deal of history between the time of Daniel and the time of Christ, particularly an evil man, a Greek uh king by the name of Antiochus Epiphanes.

And he killed a lot of people during that time period.

He killed a lot of Jewish people during that time period.

And so we're picking up right after Daniel has received these visions.

None of the names show up in history, but what they accomplished and what they did during that time period was.

And so we're going to pick up with Daniel 12, starting with verse 1.

And because it's one of the shorter chapters in Daniel, in honor of God and his word, if you're able, let me invite you to stand as we read.

At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people, Michael being an angel, your people being the Jews.

And there shall be a time of trouble such as never has been seen, was a such as never has been since there was a nation till that time.

But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book.

And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

And those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the sky above, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars for ever and ever.

But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book until the time of the end.

Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.

Then I, Daniel, looked, and behold, two others stood, one on this bank of the stream, and one on that bank of the stream.

And someone said to the man clothed in linen who was above the waters of the stream, which was an angel, something that was Jesus, but probably an angel, how long shall it be till the end of these wonders?

And I heard the man clothed in linen who was above the waters of the stream, he raised his right hand and his left hand toward heaven, and swore by him who lives forever that it would be for a time, times, and half a time, and that when the shattering of the people, the power of the holy people comes to an end, all these things would be finished.

I heard, but I did not understand.

Then I said, Oh my Lord, what shall be the outcome of these things?

He said, Go your way, Daniel.

For the words are shut up and sealed until the time of the end.

Many shall purify themselves and make themselves white and be refined, but the wicked shall act wickedly, and none of the wicked shall understand, but those who are wise shall understand.

And from the time that the regular burnt offering is taken away, and the abomination that makes desolation is set up, there shall be one thousand two hundred and ninety days.

Blessed is he who waits and arrives at the one thousand three hundred and thirty-five days.

But go your way till the end, and you shall rest, and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of days.

Well, Daniel didn't understand what he had heard, and so I think we're in good company if we don't quite understand everything here.

But let me pray and ask God to bless us as we study this this morning.

There is a lot in here that is mysterious and unknown, not just to us, but to people throughout time.

And so we pray that you would help us to see the main things, the things that shine through, that give us encouragement and hope for the future, that give us comfort for the present, and that spur us on towards love and good deeds.

Would you bless us and pour out your spirit on this place and glorify the name of Jesus?

And Lord, I pray for me, uh, as I'm a person who's talking about holy matters that Daniel didn't even understand.

I pray that you would help me to be clear in my thoughts, clear in my uh communication, but certainly humble as I'm talking about these things.

Bless us and be with us, we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Have a seat.

Ben, can you put up that picture for me?

That is Connor and my daughter Catherine before she hit her first growth spurt.

Um she was probably, you know, maybe sixth grade, seventh grade when that was taken, and she was just a wee little thing, just walking around with us, and we could put her in a backpack and like sneak into Disney World and other things and not have to pay.

It was really fantastic at that point.

Now, clearly, this is uh a bit of trick photography and uh forced perspective.

And uh the reason I use this picture is because when you look at it just with your eyes and kind of its face value, uh you would say, okay, that's a very small person.

But then when you start thinking about it and use some other tools of interpreting a picture like this, you recognize there's something else going on.

There's a bit of foreshortening that's taking place.

And I use that word because commentators sometimes talk about what's going on, and when we read Old Testament uh predictions of the future, it seems sometimes like things are compressed together.

There's a foreshortening, and when you look at the things, they seem like they're right in succession, but they're not.

There's actually a big bit of time that's replacing them.

And so I brought in a kind of another visual aid.

You can take that picture down now, Ben.

Another visual aid.

And if you're wanting me to do a Gandalf impression, wait till afterwards.

So um, so the way that most of us think about, you know, any discussion about time is a timeline, which this is the beginning over here, and then maybe there are 10-year increments or 100-year increments or thousand-year increments, and all the way to the end over here.

But there's a time line, and so everything's going to be equally situated.

So here's a hundred years, here's a hundred years, here's a hundred years, and so they're in equal increments.

The problem is that if you turned it like this and you're looking at it from a different angle, then a lot of those things seem like they're compressed in time and are really closer together than they really are.

So when we come to the Bible, and sometimes people do this, and I grew up in a tradition that did this, where we're trying, we think that the point of the passage is largely to try to figure out the times.

Like, what are times, times, and half a time?

I don't understand what this means.

And some of those things are purposely vague because you know, Jesus even tells us a parable about if the owner of the house, if the owner of the house knew what time the thieves were coming, all of those things, he's saying, he would have prepared for it.

And so Jesus is saying, we're not gonna, I'm not gonna give you this uh detailed explanation of what's coming.

But what I'm gonna give you is kind of like road markers.

You're looking down a road, and this is going to come in your future, this is going to come in your future, and this is going to come in your future.

So these, what he's talking about in chapter 11 with Antiochus Epiphanes, and starting into chapter 12, there's a lot of distance between these two things.

We don't know exactly how long those things were.

And when he says, talked here about times, a time, times, and half a time, that's used to refer to various things in scripture.

And we're not sure what the time frame actually is.

So at one point it refers in Daniel to the coming of Antiochus Epiphanes.

Another time in Scripture it refers to the destruction of the temple after the time of Christ in 70 AD, and then another a time of church persecution.

So what's he referring to?

And there's a lot of debate.

If you want to get a commentary and read all of those things, that's what we're going to do.

But I think, regardless of the time frame you rest on, I think what he's really doing is giving us not so much a chronological view of what's taking place, but a conceptual view.

He's looking at the future.

So all of this from chapter 11 into this was Daniel's future.

But chapter 11 is our past, and into chapter 11, chapter 12, that's our future.

That's where we're heading.

And what he's telling us here is we have reason to rejoice in our future.

And this prophecy is given not to just give us the details, but to comfort Daniel.

Because Daniel's just received some really, really scary, frightening, and horrible news about what's going to happen to the nation of Israel over the next couple of hundred years.

They've already been through some very difficult things under the Babylonians and under the Persians.

And it's about to get worse under the Greeks and not Alexander the Great.

He was pretty favorable generally towards the Jews.

But Antiochus Epiphanes, it's going to be really awful.

And a lot of people have already died.

A lot of people are going to die, but that's not the end of the story.

He says the end of the story is a happy ending.

Daniel chapter 12, verses 2 and 3.

Daniel 12:2

And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars for ever and ever.

So what he's saying is, there's not a hard end to your life.

Then when you die, that's not the hard end.

There is something that comes after that.

There is maybe we can call it a chronological relocation where you're this is what Christians believe.

When we die, our soul and our body separate.

And our soul, the soul of those who believe in Jesus, enters into the presence of Jesus, and our bodies decomposed and are placed in the ground.

And then at some point in the undisclosed future, there's going to be a resurrection of the dead.

Now I don't know if you caught it as we were reading through this, but a lot of times we talk about the resurrection of Christians alone.

But this passage and Jesus say there's going to be a resurrection of everybody.

Everybody.

J.C.

Ryle wrote this.

He said, There is a resurrection after death.

Let this never be forgotten.

The life that we live here in the flesh is not all.

The visible world around us is not the only world with which we have to do.

All is not over when the last breath is drawn, and men and women are carried to their long home in the grave.

The trumpet shall one day sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible.

All that are in the graves shall hear Christ's voice and come forth.

Those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of condemnation.

This is one of the great foundation truths of the Christian religion.

Let us cling to it firmly and never let it go.

Now, there's there is great comfort in that.

My mom died at the beginning of COVID of cancer.

My father died about 10 years before that of diab complications with diabetes.

Billy's husband died during that COVID isolation from a fall.

There are people we love, there are people that you love, and it gives us comfort to know that someday, one day, we're gonna be back in youthful, healthy, strong bodies.

That's and some of you are going, amen.

That's why I moved to the villages.

Okay, so we'll all all the villages are gonna go, we're all gonna rise up together, it'll be great.

But the one of the reasons this is so important is what he's talking about here is yes, there's reunion, there's comfort, there's all of these things, but he says, and Jesus says later, we'll see this, that there is a vindication by being given everlasting life.

There will be a vindication for the innocent and for those who believed in Jesus and had their sins covered, for the righteous.

And that gives hope for us, for ourselves, and comfort because of those we've lost who've gone on before us.

But here's the second part of that.

He says, some will be resurrected and condemned, they'll be raised to life, and they have to face the judgment of what's taking place, and they will enter into, he says, eternal shame.

And that's one we don't like.

Unless.

Unless.

So Antiochus Epiphanes.

Antiochus Epiphanes killed thousands, tens of thousands of Jews.

And he was never held accountable for that on earth.

You know how Antiochus Epiphanes died?

He caught a cold, he got a bug of some sort, and he died without ever facing a tribunal, without ever have facing people who say, What you did to all of these people was wrong.

And if you've ever been wrong that way, one of the things you want is for the person to be held accountable.

My daughter was in town this past week.

She's grown now, she's not this big anymore.

She's she's big enough.

And she can drive, she can actually fit behind a wheel.

And uh she was in town this week, and she said, and I don't remember if it's out of the blue, I don't remember any context for the conversation, but she said, it's interesting to her, who she's she's on TikTok, I'm not.

She said it's interesting how many people she's seen on TikTok and other social media platforms who are saying, I now understand the Old Testament God, why God in the Old Testament did what he did after all the Epstein files and things came out, because of all the evil that they've seen.

And the idea that, you know, Jeffrey Epstein, he yeah, he was in jail for a bit, and you know, whatever, however, he passed away in jail.

Uh there was never a moment where the victims were able to say, in a court of law, this is what happened, and he's judged for that.

And what Daniel is saying is Antiochus Epiphanes is never going to get away with it.

And all the evils that have been done in the world, they will never get away with it.

Now, the this is an interesting thing that it's taking place in culture, and I've heard people say that, say this several times.

And they'll say, you know, I'm not afraid of death and I'm not afraid of hell.

And the reason people say they're not afraid of death and they're not afraid of hell is because they say, when I die, I'm not even gonna know I'm dead.

Because it's just like turning off an appliance and taking it and recycling it.

I won't even know that I'm dead.

And that's certain particular like cultural views of the soul and what it means to be a human being.

And what he's saying here is if what Daniel is saying is right, what Jesus says is right, what the whole Bible teaches is right, you'll never not know.

You'll never not know that you are dead and under judgment.

You'll never not know.

You're the soul doesn't die.

We continue on, right?

Have you ever seen the iron giant?

Souls don't die.

The giant robot says it, but it's actually the authors, the people who wrote the film who said that.

We don't die.

Jesus said the same thing that Daniel says in John 5, 28, verses and 29.

Do not be surprised at this.

The time is coming when all the dead will hear his voice and come out of the grave.

Those who have done good will rise and live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.

And that comes at the end.

Now, so here's the issue.

We're nobody gets away, and we all know at some level that at the judgment there are things we don't want to come up that are going to come up, and we will be judged.

So, how do you know?

How can how can you be sure that we were made to live eternally, souls don't die?

Uh how do we know that people will be resurrected at the end?

How do we know that's actually going to happen?

Because we have one who is re who was resurrected in the middle.

We don't have, you know, at the end we have to wait, but we have somebody who was resurrected in the middle to prove to us and show us there's one off the assembly line.

There's one who is the prototype, and that we will, the Bible says, have a resurrection body like his that is perfected and not subject to disease or decay or sin or anything else.

And so the question comes up: how do we know that Jesus was resurrected?

1 Corinthians 15 and throughout talks about these eyewitnesses.

So it gives about eight or nine different events in which Jesus appeared to sometimes an individual, sometimes individuals, sometimes the same individual over a period of time.

At one point, Jesus appeared to 500 people.

And so we have eyewitnesses.

And then the question comes up well, how do we know that they didn't just make it up to get power because of the perks that would come with being able to control other people and what they think?

Why would we think that what they said was true?

And a guy named Peter Creft wrote this.

He said, Why would the apostles lie?

Liars always lie for selfish reasons.

If they lied, what was their motive?

What did they get out of it?

What they got out of it was misunderstanding, rejection, persecution, torture, and martyrdom.

Hardly a list of perks.

So despite the perks, why were the apostles willing to die for this message?

Because they saw Jesus die and come back.

And they knew that if they die, they're going to come back.

Maybe not three days later, but according to what they said, what the Daniel and Jesus both say at the end of time.

So how can you know that you will be resurrected to the resurrection of life rather than being raised in the resurrection of?

Well, Jesus was talking about the resurrection in chapter 5, John 5, 29, 28.

Says, do not be surprised at this, the time is coming when all the dead will hear his voice and come out of their graves.

Those who have done good will rise and live, and those who have done evil will rise and be condemned.

Four verses before that, Jesus tells us how we can know which way we're going.

This is in John chapter 5, verse 24.

John 5:24

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.

He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.

Now to believe in Jesus means that you say, okay, I trust you for how to live life, but particularly I trust you for what happens when I appear before the judgment seat of God, that you have done exactly what you say you've done, that when I appear before then, I will receive the, I've received this verdict already, paid in full.

How do I know that my sins have been paid for?

Because Jesus was raised from the dead.

And the reason Jesus was raised from the dead was because he had paid for sins.

And he wasn't dying on a cross to pay for his sins, he was dying on a cross to pay for my sins.

He himself bore my sins in his body on the tree so that I might die to sins and live for righteousness.

So if a person receives a 10-year jail sentence and he serves his time, he gets out after 10 years and he goes his way, they can't put him back in jail because he's now.

They could for another crime.

But for that crime, they can't put him back in jail because he's already served his time.

When Jesus came forth from the tomb, it proved that he'd already done my time and your time and paid for his people.

So that means I can believe him and trust him.

If Jesus really came back, Tim Keller wrote this.

He said, if Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said.

If he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said?

The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching, but whether or not he rose from the dead.

Here's a guy who predicted his death by crucifixion and his resurrection, and then he pulled it off.

I think we can trust him for new life in the future when he talks about that.

Now, the reason he's writing this isn't simply, isn't simply to tell us what happens next.

He's writing to Daniel and to God's people through Daniel to help prepare them to live in light of the future.

Yeah, there's why is it doing that?

It's weird, isn't it?

I don't know why it's doing that.

So um, he's telling us to live now in light of our future.

So Daniel is shown horrible wars, and then he's told about the resurrection.

And after being told about all these things, there are these figures on the bank, and one of them apparently asks, How long shall it be to the end of the wonders?

Which is functionally asking, how long until everything's concluded?

When is this going to be over?

Like, can I put this on my calendar so I can prepare for it?

And Daniel asked in 12.8, oh my Lord, what shall be the outcome of these things?

And what Daniel's doing is he's doing what all of us would do.

He's trying, in some ways, to gear up or prepare and get ready for what to do.

How much do I need to stock up?

How long is this going to take place?

And the angel functionally says to him in chapter 12, verses 9 and 10, Daniel, go and live the way that God has already told you to live.

The days and times don't matter.

Go live the way that God has already told you to live.

So in chapter 12, verse 10, he made the statement, statements like this several times.

And the book of Revelation makes a similar statement at the end, if you want to go back and read that later, when I'm not preaching and it'll hurt my feelings.

Okay.

So in Daniel chapter 12, verse 10, many shall purify themselves and make themselves white and be refined, but the wicked shall act wickedly.

Daniel 12:10

So what's he saying?

He's saying, don't do anything differently.

Draw closer and closer to God, be refined, be purified, look to the blood of the Lamb to cleanse all of your sin.

For him, continue with your worship and your daily prayers, everything else.

And he's saying also that people who are pursuing a path of wickedness, you can't stop that.

Live the way God has called you to live.

And as you can, persuade people to follow the path of righteousness.

Tell them the gospel.

Tell them blessed are those who are leading others into righteousness through faith in Christ.

But no matter what happens or when, follow me, trust me, believe me.

I have given you what you need.

This is what Kyle Harper wrote.

Like any of you know who Kyle Harper is.

That's okay.

He says, for Christians, this life was always meant to be transitory and just part of a larger story.

What was important to the Christians was to orient one's life towards the larger story, the cosmic story, the story of eternity.

They did live in this world, experienced pain, and loved others.

But the Christians of that time are called to see the story of this life as just one of the stories in which they lived.

The hidden map was this larger picture.

And what Daniel's being told and what he's writing to us is if you if we know the larger story in the midst of whatever we're facing, no matter how tragic or difficult or hard, we know this is how I can face it.

Because I know that there's a happy ending that's coming.

There's a, I've been talking about Antiochus Epiphanes, and we do know about him from the history of the world, you know, like what we might call secular history.

But he also is in some religious writing as well.

He didn't write it, but it was written about him.

Some of you may have heard of the Apocrypha, the Maccabees, and other things.

These are books that were written in the intertestamental times, between the time of the Old Testament and the New Testament period.

They're not inspired, but we have no reason to think they're not historically accurate.

And there's an account in 2 Maccabees 7 of a Jewish mother and her seven sons who were arrested by the soldiers of King Antiochus Epiphanes.

He's a bad dude.

And he persecuted them.

And what he was trying to do first was to get them to dishonor the Lord God by breaking Jewish dietary rules.

And they wouldn't do it.

So the way he treated this mother and her seven sons became increasingly more gruesome and violent.

But each time that the king would begin to do these things to try to show his power and to try to persuade this, and so these brothers and mother watching each of the brothers in turn be killed in gruesome ways and being called to do whatever the king says, but they don't.

And each of them is recorded as responding to the king in light of what we just read.

So the second son said this to the king.

He says, You may kill us, but the king of the universe will raise us from the dead and give us eternal life because we've obeyed his laws.

We believe him.

The fourth son, after watching first, second, third die, said, I am glad to die at your hands, because we have the assurance that God will raise us from death.

And then the mother, he records what she said, kind of like grouping it all together into this, I believe.

She didn't say this exact same thing every time, but she generally said this.

I was not the one who gave you life and breath and put together each part of your body.

It was God who did it.

God who created the universe, the human race, and all that exists.

He is merciful.

And he will give you back life and breath again because you love his laws more than you love yourself.

And then finally, she's put to death.

And those aren't hero stories.

It's not stories about how heroic they were.

It was a story of people who believed.

They believed the promises.

They believed that God was this good.

They believed, they believed what Daniel had written.

And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

She didn't, they didn't just find comfort, they found courage and the hope that is ours in the gospel.

This is what one writer said.

He said, No matter how devastating our struggles, disappointments, and troubles are, they are only temporary.

No matter what happens to you, no matter the depth of tragedy or pain you face, no matter how death stalks you and your loved ones, the resurrection promises you a future of immeasurable good.

We're going somewhere.

We said this last week.

You're never alone and you're never adrift.

We are all moving to the throne of Christ.

That's the background plan over everything.

The plan of God predated the world, it predated civilizations.

Everything that we touch and that we hold here is ephemeral.

It's going to pass away, but the promises of God, they are eternal.

So what's it going to be like?

What's it going to be like in a resurrection body?

Will you know people when you see them?

Will you see them and say, oh, that's you?

When my father was getting sicker and sicker from his diabetes, I was the one who would, I would, I would drive him on the trip to the beach every year because he couldn't drive himself anymore.

And being a preacher, he would ask me the questions he couldn't ask his preacher.

So this is my son, he's not threatening, I'll ask him.

And uh one of the questions he asked was a question about uh, would you recognize people?

Will you know people?

And I figured it out later from my mom.

She said that he was asking about his dad because his dad had died in a fire.

And so he's wondering, am I going to recognize my dad?

And I was, he was 15 when his father passed away, so he was wondering, well, my dad recognized me.

And I said, Well, yeah, we'll recognize people, but it's going to be different.

And so this is the story I told my dad.

I said, when I was in ninth grade, uh, we, you know, we took we had summer vacation, we came back to the first day of school, and there was a new girl at school that everybody couldn't help but notice.

She was tall, she was thin, she was striking, and so, you know, guys noticed her, the girls noticed her.

And so finally a couple of girls went over and asked, Who, you know, who are you?

Is this your first year at our school?

And she said, No, my name is Marie So-and-so.

And they're like, you're little Marie, right?

Kind of short, a little bit dumpy.

And apparently, Marie that year, that summer, in between June and August, had hit her growth spurt, and what we might call today colloquially as her glow-up.

And so all of a sudden she's there, and at that point, recognition settled in.

Oh, Marie! Everybody's like, I cannot believe you look fantastic.

You.

You will be recognizably you.

And the people you love will be recognizably them.

The scars will be gone, the wheelchairs will be gone.

Guys, I think your hair will be back.

Um in the right places and not in the wrong And not just your body.

Your mind is over.