Battle of the Ages - Daniel 10-12, Part Two
History remembers its great battles - Marathon. Thermopylae. The Milvian Bridge. Tours. Hastings. The Horns of Hattin. Vienna. Waterloo. Gettysburg. The Battle of Britain. Midway. D-Day. Iwo Jima. Each one reshaped the world that came after it.
None of them compares to the fierce fighting that took place on a hill called Calvary 2000 years ago.
Last Sunday, we met the army — the angelic host, the ministering spirits sent to serve the heirs of salvation, the linen-clothed figure who hovered above the Tigris while his messenger fought through twenty-one days of resistance to reach Daniel. This week we meet the enemy — what the dark powers are, how they work, and what happened to them at the cross.
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All angels were created good. At creation, the sons of God shouted for joy (Job 38:7). The cherubim and seraphim were given to worship and serve around the throne. Some were assigned by God to govern the nations he had made (Deuteronomy 32:8). They were created for glory.
Some fell. Jude 1:6 describes angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling. A rebellion staged by creatures against their Creator. They attacked God’s image bearers. They entered the sanctuary and committed the first abomination of desolation. God declared war on the dark powers that day and promised to redeem what they had corrupted — the war announced in Genesis 3:15, the enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.
Moses names what happened next in his final song:
“They provoked his jealousy with different gods; they enraged him with detestable practices. They sacrificed to demons, not God, to gods they had not known, new gods that had just arrived, which your ancestors did not fear.” - Deuteronomy 32:16–17
The sons of God who governed the nations became, through their rebellion, the demonic gods the nations worshiped. This is not ancient mythology. This is the Bible’s own explanation for why every pagan culture in history has felt, behind its idols and ideologies, the presence of something real, something powerful, and something hostile to the true and living God.
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Nowhere is the nature of these powers more clearly unveiled than in Ezekiel 28 — one of the most remarkable passages in the entire Old Testament. The prophet is told to address the king of Tyre, a proud human ruler who has said, I am a god; I sit in the seat of the gods. God promises to bring him down: foreigners will draw their swords against him, and he will die the death of the uncircumcised.
And then the passage shifts into language that no human king could ever bear:
“You were the signet of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the garden of God… You were an anointed guardian cherub. I placed you; you were on the holy mountain of God… You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created, till unrighteousness was found in you. Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.” - Ezekiel 28:12–17
Is this the human king of Tyre, or the demonic prince animating his power? The answer is both. They are inseparable. This is how the demonic has always worked — not displacing the human actor but inhabiting and animating him, so that the proud king and the fallen cherub behind him become, in the prophetic vision, a single figure judged together.
The wars of Daniel 11 are more than armies on the march. Persia, Greece, Rome — behind every empire stands a patron-prince, a heavenly power that has defected from its assigned post and now drives the empire against God's purposes. The political conflict on the surface and the cosmic conflict beneath it are not two stories. They are one story, told on two levels at once.
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The powers arose to stop him. The Herodians. The Romans. The temple leaders who had let God’s house become a den of thieves — it is a terrible thing when the sanctuary itself becomes the instrument of the power’s agenda, and it still happens today. Together, they put to death the Son of God.
The Greeks had invented a new form of execution. The Romans perfected it. The cross was the most efficient instrument of shame and death the ancient world had ever produced. The powers had their weapons. And God had been planning to use it before the foundation of the world.
“We speak God’s hidden wisdom in a mystery, a wisdom God predestined before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age knew this wisdom, because if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” - 1 Corinthians 2:7–8
Read that sentence again. If they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. The powers engineered the cross as their ultimate weapon against the Messiah who had come to end their reign. And in wielding that weapon, they triggered the very judgment they were trying to prevent.
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.
The cross was their weapon. The cross became their sentence.
Paul names what actually happened on that hill:
“Canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in the cross.” - Colossians 2:14–15
Disarmed. Put to open shame. The same powers that animated the king of Tyre, the prince of Persia, the kings of Daniel 11, Herod and the Romans — stripped of their authority at Calvary. None of the battles of history compares. Marathon, Waterloo, and D-Day determined the shape of empires. Calvary determined the shape of eternity. And the side that appeared to lose won everything.
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The cross is the decisive battle, and the outcome of the ongoing war is not in doubt. The campaign moves forward as the gospel is proclaimed and embodied by cross-shaped communities around the world. Between the sentencing and its final execution — between the cross and the consummation — the defeated powers continue to operate, the way a beaten army conducts a guerrilla campaign after the decisive battle is lost. Right now, princes and powers are waging that campaign against the church and the advance of the gospel, targeting nations, cultures, ideologies, and individuals.
John saw the nature of that campaign clearly: the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short (Revelation 12:12). That wrath is not the confidence of a victor. It is the fury of a condemned prisoner. Real. Dangerous. Costly. But bounded. Limited. His time being short is not a warning to us. It is our comfort about him.
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So where does that leave the church? Daniel 11:32 gives the answer: the people who know their God shall stand firm and take action. In the midst of the worst of the Antiochian crisis — the abomination of desolation, the cessation of worship, the martyrdom of the faithful — there were those who knew their God. They did not merely endure. They were strong. They acted.
Where are the Daniels?
Not strategists. Not commentators. Not mere managers. People who know their God. People who refuse the king’s food. People who pray with their windows open. People who choose the furnace over bowing and mean it when they say, “But if not.”
I think of my late mother-in-law, ninety-two years old, in her rocking chair, working through a three-hour prayer list every single day — name by name, nation by nation, church by church, battle by battle. My wife once said of that chair: many wars were waged and won in that chair.
That is what a Daniel looks like. Not always young. Not always visible. Not always wielding institutional power or cultural influence. Sometimes ninety-two years old, in a rocking chair, with a prayer list and three hours and the same God who shut the mouths of lions for Daniel in Babylon.
The rocking chair of warfare is where the battle already won at the cross is brought to bear on the powers of the world. One prayer at a time. One name at a time. One day at a time.
This whole series has been asking one question in twelve different ways. Will you be a Daniel in your Babylon? Will you keep the windows open? Will you say, but if not, and mean it? The church does not advance the gospel by out-strategizing the powers. It advances the gospel by praying, proclaiming the gospel, demonstrating the love of Christ, and - if it comes to it - dying, for “by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony, loving not our lives even unto death,” the arch-foe is overcome (Revelation 12:11).
The rocking chair is not a retreat from the battle. It is the battle’s front line.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us — to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. (Ephesians 3:20–21)