We began this book in a moment of loss. A city fallen. A temple plundered. A teenager standing in the court of the world's most powerful empire, being given a new name by an official who assumed the old one no longer mattered.

We end it with stars.

There is a bell in Philadelphia that has not rung since 1846. It sits behind glass, cracked and silent, visited by millions who come not to hear it but to read it. Encircling its crown is an inscription from the book of Leviticus: Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.

The roots of American liberty run deeper, and stranger, and more theological than the standard account allows. They pass through a burned book, a Scottish castle prison, a seventy-foot drop on a rope of knotted blankets, and a Princeton classroom. And at every point along the way, they are watered not by abstract Enlightenment philosophy but by a conviction older and tougher than that, the conviction that there is a law above the law of kings, and that its Author is the God of Scripture.

That is the story worth telling on the republic's 250th anniversary.

Daniel is finishing his course here in chapter 12: an unexpected life, begun in exile as a teenager, sustained through three empires, altered by visions he could not fully contain, and marked throughout by the faithfulness of a God who never once let go of him. One of the most remarkable figures in human history. And at the end of it all, he leaves us three gifts to open.

The powers invented the cross. The powers perfected the cross. The powers wielded the cross against the Lord of glory. And in that single act — the most catastrophic miscalculation in the history of the universe — they triggered the instrument of their own destruction. They did not know. The wisdom of God was hidden from them. They played the role appointed for them before the ages: the unwitting executioners of the sacrifice that would end their power forever.

As exile people, we not only live in contested territory — we are contested territory. Our very persons are a battleground. As we live and serve in beautiful downtown Babylon, we should not be surprised by the presence of resistance. The spiritual battle for nations, peoples, and persons is what this final section of Daniel is about.

Daniel could not have imagined any of this when he fell to his knees with Jeremiah's scroll in his hands. He prayed for the seventy years of exile to end. God answered with the Jubilee of Jubilees, with the end of sin itself, with a Temple that death cannot destroy and a righteousness that will never wear out.

Every Alexander, every Caesar, every figure the world calls great occupies the same position in the Bible’s cosmology: a creature appointed for a moment, serving a purpose they may not understand, and, even when they are fueled by their own selfish and cruel ambition, making way for the next creature in a sequence moving toward the kingdom that shall not be destroyed.

The beasts are not quickly displaced; for a long period, they roar and rumble across history. Centuries. Violence, murder, tyranny, displacement, immense suffering, and loss follow in the wake of their trampling, iron step, and grinding teeth. But the vision moves from earth to heaven, from the sea to the throne room, and what Daniel sees there changes everything.

Every one of us has signed up for an overnight stay in the lion’s den. Not as a possibility. As a certainty. Peter wrote to us as exile people, reminding us that we live in the Lion’s Den - it is the shape of faithful exile in a broken world is the shape of Daniel’s life — just as Daniel’s life had a den in it. The question is not whether the stone will roll shut. The question is whether we will have built the life that can survive the night. “Be sober-minded, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith…” (1 Peter 5:8ff).

Daniel 5 opens with Belshazzar throwing a party for a thousand lords. Outside the walls, the Medo-Persian army of Darius the Mede is besieging the city. But Belshazzar isn’t worried. Babylon’s walls are eighty-seven feet thick. The Euphrates River runs through the city’s interior. The grain stores can sustain the population for years. By every military calculation available to him, he is safe. His confidence isn’t irrational. It is simply wrong about what is coming — and from which direction.

The prophets understand this with agonizing clarity. Isaiah's great comfort chapters (40–55) frame the coming redemption from Babylon as a second Exodus, surpassing even the first. The geography carries the weight: to be delivered from Babylon is not just to go home. It is to be restored to the whole trajectory that Babylon represents the negation of.

This is also, of course, why Daniel is the book it is. Daniel and his friends are not merely civil servants in a foreign administration. They are the covenant people stranded in the epicenter of everything God has been working against since Genesis 11 — and they must bear witness there, in the city of man, to the God who rules all cities and all kings.

Here are some recommended resources for further study, prepared for those who’ve just studied a brief series on eschatology with me. This is also a good place to pick up helpful material in preparation for our upcoming sermon series on Revelation, starting in mid-August.

Before we consider what Revelation is, we need to reckon honestly with why it so often defeats us. Most Christians who pick up this book find themselves lost within a few chapters — bewildered by the imagery, uncertain about the timeline, and vulnerable to whichever confident interpreter they encounter first. Three deficits account for most of the confusion.

God has tender mercies for our pain. He has hard mercies for our pride.

“But if not…” says that if God, for reasons of his own that we cannot see and may never understand, chooses not to intervene in the way we hope, we still won’t bow. The obedience is not contingent on the outcome. The loyalty is not conditional on the rescue. We serve him because he is God, not because he has agreed in advance to protect us from all consequences.

This little stone — humble, subversive, seemingly insignificant — strikes the statue at its feet. Not at the head. Not where it looks strong. At the feet. And the whole thing collapses. Gold, silver, bronze, iron, clay — "they became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found." (2:35) And then the stone — the stone! — grows. It becomes a mountain. And the mountain fills the whole earth.

The Book of Revelation, the great companion volume to Daniel, knows this moment. In chapter 11, after the seventh angel sounds his trumpet, the elders in heaven fall on their faces and sing: "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever." That is Daniel 2 reaching its conclusion. The stone has become the mountain. The mountain has filled the earth.

If we are exiles, resident aliens here while being citizens of the heavenly city, then the most practical book in the Old Testament for this moment is the one we open in this series: the Book of Daniel.

These are the two pillars no Christian can live without: God is sovereign over where we are. God is faithful to meet us with his grace. The exile is within his purpose. The calling comes with provision. The same God who placed Daniel in Babylon gave Daniel everything he needed to serve there for the rest of his life.

Daniel was an exile. He did not comply. But neither did he withdraw, rage, or despair. He received grace to maintain his faith and grace to love and serve even those who hated him. He learned Babylon's language. He served in the government. He contributed to its flourishing. And he prayed three times a day, with his windows open toward home. That posture — present in Babylon without becoming Babylonian, engaged without being absorbed, hopeful without being naive — is the posture this series is about.

At least 1.5 million Jews perished in Auschwitz and its neighboring camp, Birkenau. The evidence indicates many more than that died. Hundreds of thousands of others were murdered under the terrifying efficiency of these Nazi death and labor camps. This is the brief story of one of those others, and the difference that one life offered up in love made in the life of another.