Who Are You | More Than Meets The Eye - Daniel 10 | November 17

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Daniel chapter 10. In the third year of King Cyrus of Persia,

Daniel 10 · chapter mention

a message was revealed to Daniel whose name was Belteshazzar.

The message was true and was about a great conflict. He understood the message

and had understanding of the vision.

In those days, I, Daniel, was mourning for three full weeks.

I didn't eat any rich food, no meat or wine entered my mouth,

and I didn't put any oil on my body until the three weeks were over.

On the 24th day of the first month, as I was standing on the bank of the great

river, the Tigris, I looked up and there was a man dressed in linen with a belt

of gold from Ufaz around his waist.

His body was like barrel, his face like the brilliance of lightning.

His eyes like flaming torches, his arms and feet like the gleam of polished

bronze, and the sound of his words like the sound of a multitude.

Only I, Daniel, saw the vision. The men who were with me did not see it,

but a great terror fell on them, and they ran and hid.

I was left alone, looking at this great vision. No strength was left in me.

My face grew deathly pale, and I was powerless.

I heard the words he said, and when I heard them, I fell into a deep asleep

with my face to the ground.

Suddenly, a hand touched me and set me shaking on my hands and knees.

He said to me, Daniel, you are a man treasured by God.

Understand the words that I'm saying to you. Stand on your feet,

for I have now been sent to you. And after he said this to me, I stood trembling.

Don't be afraid, Daniel, he said to me, for from the first day that you purposed

to understand and to humble yourself before your God, your prayers were heard.

I have come because of your prayers. But the prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me for 21 days.

Then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me after I had been left

there with the kings of Persia.

Now I have come to help you understand what will happen to your people in the

last days, for the vision refers to those days.

While he was saying these words to me, I turned my face toward the ground and was speechless.

Suddenly, one with human likeness touched my lips. I opened my mouth and said

to the one standing in front of me, My Lord, because of the vision,

anguish overwhelms me and I am powerless.

How can someone like me, your servant, speak with someone like you,

my Lord? Now I have no strength and there is no breath in me.

Then the one with a human appearance touched me again and strengthened me.

He said, Don't be afraid, you who are treasured by God. Peace to you. Be very strong.

As he spoke to me, I was strengthened and said, Let my Lord speak,

for you have strengthened me.

He said, Do you know why I've come to you? I must return at once to fight against

the prince of Persia, and when I leave, the prince of Greece will come.

However, I will tell you what is recorded in the book of truth.

No one has the courage to support me against those princes except Michael, your prince.

Sarah, thanks for reading for us today. This reading is a bit obtuse.

And if we were reading this for our own devotion in our own time,

it might be pretty confusing.

We've got an angelic being, a sick Daniel, angels being held up by the prince of Persia.

What does this mean? And I'm going to start by saying, I don't know exactly

what all of this means, but I believe there are truths that we can gather from this text.

And so what we're going to do today is we're going to look at perhaps the historic

meaning of this passage, what this would have meant to Daniel,

what it would have meant to the readers, the original readers of the text of

Daniel, and then we'll pull out some wisdom for us.

And in youth lately, we've actually been going through a book called How Not to Read the Bible.

And this book outlines four principles, and I'm going to have Emerson come up

and share them. No, I'm kidding. All right.

No, the four principles, it's never read a Bible verse. So we don't want to

read a verse outside of its context.

We want to understand where it is in its context to understand what's the historical

context around it. What is the biblical context around it?

The second principle is, I actually didn't write these down,

so I might need to lean on Emerson.

The second principle is the Bible was written for us, but not to us.

This passage of Daniel's, Daniel itself was written to a specific set of people,

the Jewish people who were returning from exile.

It wasn't written to you and me, but it was written for our edification that we might know God more.

The third principle is the Bible is a library, not a book.

There's all these different types of literature encapsulated within this one book.

There's poetry and there's prose, there's wisdom and there's apocalypse.

And we're gonna talk about that word today a little bit more.

And then the last principle is that all of scripture points to Jesus.

And so those four guiding principles will guide us as we study Daniel 10 today.

And I want us to open, or I want to start by beginning with the three principles,

the three pieces of wisdom that I think we can pull out from this for our lives today.

And that first one is, there is more to the world than meets the eye.

The second is that the resurrection of Christ is the lens by which we must view the enchanted world.

And third, when we pray, real things happen. But first, let's dive into this historic moment.

So Daniel 10 opens and it says, in the third year of King Cyrus of Persia,

a message was revealed to Daniel, whose name was called Belteshazzar.

This indicates to us that Daniel would be about 84 years old at this time.

He's lived through numerous empires. He's been of the highest heights,

and he's also been in the pit with the lions.

And so, we see that Daniel has lived a lot of experience, and we see that this

vision, this chapters 10, 11, and 12 are one cohesive vision together.

And it's a vision of a cosmic conflict.

Sarah's version, I don't know, maybe that was ESV, it talked about this,

the coming conflict or the great war.

Some versions like New King James will say, the appointed time.

The point of this is that there is this struggle. There is a conflict coming

for the people of Israel.

And likely what this refers to, this cosmic conflict that shapes the rest of

Daniel's vision is this coming conflict with Antiochus Epiphanes.

Antiochus Epiphanes was an evil ruler of the Seleucid Empire doing a quick history

trip right after the time of Alexander the Great.

If you have read any of the Maccabees, those are intertestamental books.

They talk about this ruler, Antiochus Epiphanes.

And he was to the Jews then, what to the Jews today would be Hitler.

He was evil to the bone and his rule over the Jews, and I don't use this slightly, was demonic.

And we'll talk a bit more about that later. So Daniel, he has this vision of

this great coming cosmic conflict, and he is very sad. He begins to mourn.

He eats no pleasant food. He begins to pray.

And he prays for three weeks, three full weeks. And then he has this vision.

He has this vision of one like a man, but not like any man that you or I have seen probably.

This man, he, it says, who's clothed in linen.

We might be able to see a man like that if we go to the Mediterranean,

but whose waist was girded with gold of Uphaz, whose body was like beryl,

his face like the appearance of lightning,

his eyes like torches of fire, his arms and feet like burnished bronze in color,

the sound of his words like the voice of a multitude.

This is not a normal man. This is not someone that you can walk down the street and find.

This is someone beyond our current experience.

And commentators and scholars are a bit divided on the identity of this man.

Some would say that he is Jesus. Coming is what is called a Christophany,

an appearance of Christ before his birth.

Others would say that this man is an angelic being.

And I do want to read Revelation chapter one. If you have your Bibles,

we're just going to read Revelation 1, 12, and we're going to start in verse 12.

Then I turned to see the voice that spoke with me. Having turned,

I saw seven golden lampstands.

In the midst of the seven lampstands, one like the Son of Man clothed with a

garment down to the feet and girded about the chest with a golden band. Sounds familiar.

His head and hair were like wool, as white as snow, his eyes like a flame of fire.

His feet were like fine brass, as if refined in a furnace, and his voice like

the sound of many waters. and it goes on and it continues.

And we realize that this explicitly states that that man is Jesus.

There's another vision in Ezekiel. We're gonna turn to Ezekiel chapter one, starting in verse 25.

A voice came from above the firmament that was over their heads.

Whenever they stood, they let down their wings and above the firmament over

their heads was the likeness of a throne, an appearance like a sapphire stone

on the likeness of the throne was the likeness with the appearance of a man high above it.

Also from the appearance of his waist and upward, I saw as it were the color

of amber with the appearance of fire all around within it.

And from the appearance of his waist and downward, I saw as it were the appearance

of fire with a brightness all around.

Like the appearance of a rainbow in a cloud on a rainy day, so was the appearance

of the brightness all around it.

This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of Yahweh.

So we see in each of these visions, the visionary is having this experience

and encounter with the heavenly, something beyond the physical realm.

And I personally would say that from what I've read and studied,

that this would be an angelic being, not necessarily Jesus, but if you disagree, that's fine.

Because of his conflict that occurs later in the passage and his.

A weakness in that conflict, but that's a side note. What I want to draw out

is this idea of these descriptions are meant to excite the imagination of the readers.

It is likely that these descriptions are attempts to pen, to write down what

the reader sees. This is why we say a picture is worth a thousand words.

It's really hard to communicate the reality, the fullness of what one sees with words.

And so, they use this heightened language, this really vivid imagery that our

imaginations might be stirred.

And this is actually what would be called apocalyptic literature.

Now, apocalypse, as Zach has talked to before, is not necessarily end times

prophecy. That's not what it means at its very base sense.

It's actually a translation of the word revelation. That's why we have the last

book of our Bible is called the revelation of Jesus.

The actual translation is the apocalypse of Jesus. We use the word revelation

or epiphany would be another word that we could use for that.

And so what apocalypse is, is it's an unveiling of reality.

James Smith says it like this, the point of apocalyptic literature is not prediction,

but unmasking, unveiling the realities around us for what they really are.

So as Daniel's having this image, this vision of this heavenly man,

this angelic being, he's seeing reality, not for sometimes what our limitations

are as human, but for what it truly is.

And so as the story continues, we see that Daniel becomes very weak.

Up to this point in Daniel, he has passed all his tests, you might say.

His human track record has been flawless. He's been a man in exile who has proved faithful to God.

The story of scripture from Genesis three onward, we are meant to be looking

for this man who will pass the tests.

In Genesis three, God says that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent.

And so we're looking as biblical readers, we're looking for this offspring of

Eve that will ultimately crush evil.

And so each of these different characters in scripture, they have these tests

and we wonder, are they going to pass them? And are they going to be this seed?

And even in Genesis 4, the story continues this way, and it begins with the

seed of the woman being born.

And you wonder, is this Cain, is he going to be the one that crushes the head of the serpent?

And if you've been in the church for a little bit, you know that Cain is not

the one who crushes the head of the serpent, but allows this animal creature

sin to have dominion over him and ends in death and separation and exile.

The story of scripture continues and you see Noah and he's a man righteous in

his generation. and you wonder if he's gonna be the one that crushes the head of the serpent.

But then Noah has his own garden experience where he fails and drinks from the vine.

And then you go to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and you wonder if they're gonna

be the ones and they all fail their tests.

And this story continues with the Kings. You have Saul, Solomon,

David, they all fail. And so then we get to this point in exile where Daniel comes on the scene.

And Daniel, he passes the test of ritual food. He doesn't eat the ritually impure food.

And then he has this test of, is he going to pray or stop his devotion to Yahweh

and turn his devotion to the king of King Cyrus or King Darius, sorry, King Darius.

And he doesn't change his devotion.

He doesn't change his allegiance to protect his life. And so Daniel,

he's this character who we wonder, I think we're meant to wonder,

is he this Messiah figure that's going to crush the head of the serpent?

But I would put forward that these last few chapters, 9, 10,

11, and 12, they indicate Daniel's failure, but it's not a moral failure.

It's a failure of mere frailty.

He's presented with the way that the world truly is. His vision that is clouded

by his mere humanity is unveiled to see the heavenly realities going on around

him. And it causes him to be very sick.

So we, as the reader, we're left looking for this next seed of the woman that

is going to crush the head of the serpent.

And even in Daniel's frailty, the messenger of God encourages him.

He puts his hand on him. He touches his lips, which is interesting.

If we think about Isaiah, there's something there to be meditating on.

But this angelic being, he comforts Daniel.

And he says that he is, in Sarah's translation, it said, treasured by God.

In my translation, it says greatly beloved.

And Spurgeon in a sermon at one point, he said that for Daniel to understand

his belovedness was not too great a thing.

It was actually right for Daniel to hear and reflect on the fact that he was beloved by Yahweh.

And so despite Daniel not being this seed of the woman, this messiah figure

through prayer, he is encouraged by this messenger of God.

While he is overwhelmed by reality of the way things actually are,

the angel does not seem shaken.

Instead, he encourages Daniel to be strong for he is greatly beloved.

Daniel's prayers were heard, his humility noticed, and it was because of his

humble prayers that the angel came to him.

And this is where it starts getting a little bit out of our comfort zone.

Maybe not for you, but maybe for some of us.

The angel begins to speak about withstanding, being withstood by the prince of Persia.

He has this battle for 21 days, and this leads to a whole strand of theology

that That is fascinating and compelling and worth meditating on.

I'm not an expert on it, but if you're interested in thinking about this idea,

I have some resources I could definitely help you with.

But we're going to watch a Bible project video that talks about some of these

oppositional spiritual beings.

You have this heavenly being that comes to comfort Daniel, but he's opposed

by another being, which means that this being is in opposition,

whether it's human or spiritual, in opposition to God. And so we're going to

watch this video and then we'll continue our talk.

Again, I hope that all made sense. I could probably spend a long time unpacking that.

But one of the things I want to highlight that that video discusses is that

these spiritual beings, and that actually is part of a whole series that the

Bible Project did on spiritual beings.

And so they talk about all of these different types of beings that maybe might

not be familiar to you and me.

And so it's actually worth a watch. There's like five or six videos that are

worth watching. But this idea, it maps on the spiritual and it talks about the

spiritual being manifest in the physical.

What we see from this worldview that an ancient Jewish reader would have is

not that the spiritual and the physical are completely separated and distinct,

but they're actually interrelated.

They're closely related to one another and what happens in one impacts the other.

For an ancient Jewish reader, this actually was very encouraging.

This chapter 10 here in Daniel and others, they were written to an ancient,

or Daniel more broadly, was written to an ancient Jewish people struggling from exile.

They were returning to their land and finding it wanting.

And they were preparing for the many troubles that were laying ahead.

And in returning to Jerusalem, which is happening about this time in Daniel

10, the Jewish exiles are returning to Jerusalem. the Jews did not receive the

power and glory and honor that they had under David or Solomon.

No, they were conquered again and again by rival imperial armies forced to serve other nations.

So it's no wonder that the author of Daniel sees this constant cosmic battle,

not merely as physical, but having spiritual realities, that it's a deeply spiritual cosmic battle.

And so for us today, how do we approach Daniel 10?

How do we approach and how do we live differently because of it?

How do we allow it to shape us?

And so I think the first takeaway that I want to highlight is that reality goes

far beyond what you and I see or hear, what we touch or smell.

There's far more to the world than meets the eye.

Daniel spent time praying and fasting, and he was met by a spiritual being who encouraged him.

You or I, we might give lip service to this idea of the spiritual realm,

and indeed, some of our faith backgrounds give us better or worse foundation

for understanding this.

But our basic socio-philosophic historic moment has not prepared us for the

true reality of the spiritual realm.

From the Enlightenment to our current postmodern moment, the last 300 years

have been disenchanting the world.

We have become materialists. In the words of Madonna, we are materialists,

we are living in a material world, and I'm a material girl.

Those those words they actually speak to the heart of the

western mind that matter what we see the

physical around us is all that really matters and his

new book on enchantment rod drear describes this phenomenon as actually a minority

view in all of history and in our current geographic moment as well we in the

modern west think that our worldview of science and materialism is the correct

one but we don't realize is that

for the rest of history people did not believe the same way that we do.

People believed in a spiritual realm that operated closely within and beyond the physical.

Indeed, even today, the Western mind is the minority compared to the rest of the globe.

If you look at everybody across the world right now, there's actually far more

people who have this understanding of reality being beyond what we just see

and hear than there are that actually limit it.

And so Richard Loveless, a theologian, wrote in 1979, this is a long quote,

so bear with me, said that Christians since enlightenment have become nervous

about acknowledging the reality and agency of demonic powers.

18th century rationalism offered Western culture a plausible bargain.

It would dispose of ghosts and vampires and other troublesome creatures at the

cost of ridding the universe of all created beings in the interval between man and God.

He goes on to say that the death of Satan was not only a tragedy for the imagination,

it was rather the result of a rather amazing failure of imagination.

And for the age of reason, it was a remarkably unreasonable assumption that

the Lord of hosts should not include among those hosts some creatures above

the estate of man and that the human conflict between the cities of God and

man should have no analog among fallen and unfallen angels as irrational and unlikely,

particularly in light of the terse but clear or biblical evidence to the contrary."

End of quote. So it's a long way of saying,

to minimize the presence of the spiritual realities of the world around us is

to live in a false reality.

Loveless is articulating the need for a re-enchanted view of reality.

And he argues that it fits squarely within the biblical framework.

What we want to allow Daniel chapter 10 to do is to shape our worldview rather

Daniel 10 · chapter mention

than having our worldview shape Daniel 10.

So I'm not arguing for a regression or what I am arguing is for having a clear

biblical understanding of reality.

I remember when Sammy and I moved to Boone, we had a friend drive us around.

We moved from College Station, which is, and we moved to Boone, North Carolina.

And our friend who also moved from Houston, as she was driving us down the Blue

Ridge Parkway, she said, welcome to Narnia.

That's where you live now. And it was this idea that we live in a place that

seems a bit more enchanted than College Station, at least, which is kind of sad.

What Daniel 10 teaches us is

that there are beings at play, forces of good and evil that are very real.

Our systems and structures of power, they reflect these realities.

And as the Bible Project video explained, the spiritual realm appears to map

onto or at least engage with the physical realm.

So our structures of government, our interactions with fellow humans,

or our rulers and leaders can, in some sense, reflect these heavenly realities.

And this is why I mentioned earlier that Antiochus' epiphanies was viewed as demonic.

It wasn't that ancient Jewish people were just trying to insult him because they didn't like him.

It's because they actually believed demonic forces to be at play within physical kingdoms.

This is why it's possible to think of these chief princes of Greece and Persia

to not be merely human or merely demons, they can reflect both simultaneously.

To explain this away might shortchange truth.

I do offer a warning, though, to us. While some of us might need to hear that

this is a very real part of reality, some of us might need to hear these words

from C.S. Lewis in Screwtape Letters.

He says, There are two equal and opposite errors into which the human race can

fall into about the devils.

One is to disbelieve their existence. The other is to believe and to feel an

excessive and unhealthy interest in them.

They themselves, the demons themselves, are equally pleased by both errors and

hail the materialist or the magician with the same delight.

The goal of the believer is to have the correct worldview or a correct worldview

shaped by scripture and centered on the sun.

I believe that our Western mind needs this re-enchantment, but it's not to be

found in some fascination with the occult, with magic or manipulating spirits for our own gain.

And Acts 8 actually speaks to this. You have Simon the magician approach Peter

and John, and he tries to buy this power of the Holy Spirit.

And Peter and John, they rebuke him. They're like, you totally are missing the point.

This power of the Spirit is actually a gift from God and to use it for your

own gain is manipulative and it's a complete reversal of the way that God designed it.

And this leads us right into the next takeaway, that it's the resurrection of

Christ that is the lens through which we view this enchanted world.

Daniel 10 through 12 is about a cosmic battle at play in the physical geopolitical realm.

It likely meant to speak of the time, as we've said, of Antiochus Epiphanes,

but the wisdom behind it is instructive for us today.

What's different between Daniel and you and me is that we operate under completely

different metrics than Daniel because of Christ's resurrection.

Where Daniel looked forward to the day of resurrection, we look back to the

day of the resurrection of Christ.

We live in the hope of the resurrection today.

And Jesus actually, he talks about this in Matthew 28, when he says that all

power that he says, he's just resurrected and he's sending out in what's called the great commission.

He says that all power and authority has been given to me.

And then he says, go therefore and make disciples of all nations.

This idea of all power and authority, it communicates as we were singing earlier

that all thrones and dominions, all powers and positions, that Jesus reigns above them all.

No longer is the world handed over to these powers, but actually Christ has

all power and authority.

And we are now part of advancing the kingdom of God. And so Paul picks up this

idea of Daniel 10 when he talks about our cosmic war.

He says that though we walk in the flesh, we do not wage our war against the flesh.

Our war is actually against the principalities, these powers,

these rulers of darkness.

And while Christ has won the victory, we, the church are still in the process

of deposing these rulers.

But now we have the authority of Christ to do so.

And so this leads us to our third takeaway that we like Daniel operate in this realm through prayer.

The angel told Daniel that his words were heard the first day he began praying and fasting.

And then since that day, the angel was moving to get to Daniel to encourage him.

Daniel, an 84-year-old man praying in Babylon in exile, had the ear of Yahweh.

And when he prayed, things shifted in the spiritual realm.

And this point has been convicting for me over the last few weeks that when

I pray, I'm not speaking into an empty void.

I'm actually commuting with the God of all creation. And when I pray,

when we pray, real things happen, whether we see it or not.

Paul talks about this in 2 Corinthians 10, that the weapons of our warfare in

this cosmic war, they're not fleshly, but they're mighty in God for pulling

down strongholds, for casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against God.

When we pray for the corrupt power systems that reflect the demonic power,

our prayers are heard and they affect reality.

When we pray for our family members that are believing lies,

our prayers are heard and they affect reality.

When we pray for our leaders like Peter and Paul encourage us to,

our prayers are heard and they affect reality.

Abraham Heschel, he was a Jewish scholar. He said that prayer is meaningless

unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids

of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehood.

The liturgical or worship movement must become a revolutionary movement seeking

to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope and the vision.

And we as believers, we look forward to the, we look back on the day of Christ's

resurrection and forward to the day of the future resurrection of all things,

when all things are made right.

So our prayers are situated in this theme of Daniel and the greater theme of

Israel, that all creatures, the visible and the invisible,

the things above and the things below the stars and the moon,

the seas and all its creatures, the powers and authorities, the angels and the

demons, all of humanity, all of it is subject to Christ's rule.

We pray because we know that God has empowered us to advance his kingdom here.

We pray because we, we look forward to the future day of the resurrection of all things.

We pray because we live in the resurrection and we pray because what we do now

in this realm really affects reality.

Father, we want to be a praying people. We want to be a people who like Daniel

have a correct worldview of reality.

We long to see your kingdom come and your will be done here on earth.

Would you enchant us by your spirit that we would move from a worldview of materialism

to a biblically transformed spirituality.

May your resurrection be our guiding light shining in the darkness of this world.

Father, would you teach us to pray?

Thank you for listening to mountainside churches podcast we hope you found inspiration

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