Gifts from the Edge of Time - Faithful Under Fire: Daniel 10-12, pt 3.
James Baldwin was once asked whether he could discern talent in someone. “Talent is insignificant,” he replied. “I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck — but most of all, endurance.”
Daniel was not a talented ruin. He was a man of endurance — the kind that does not come from gritting your teeth but from knowing the one above the waters. He 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.
We open them in the same atmosphere in which Daniel left them: the world of exile. An address in this age. A home in the age to come. That is the thread the whole book has been pulling — exile theology that relativizes every competing loyalty and instills the kind of resilient faith that survives furnaces and dens and twenty-one-day silences and the desecration of the sanctuary. Kingdom first. City of God first. Citizenship in heaven first. Everything else finds its proper place from there.
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Gift One
Hope — The Dead Do Not Stay Dead
Daniel 12:2 is one of the most electrifying promises in the Old Testament: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”
The exile is not the end of the story. The furnace is not the end of the story. The lions’ den is not the end of the story. The time of trouble such as never has been is not the end of the story. The end of the story is the dust of the earth opening, and the sleeping ones rising, and the wise shining like the brightness of the sky.
The hope Daniel gives us here is not optimism. It is not a disposition or a spiritual temperament. It is a confident expectation anchored in a specific bodily fact. The resurrection is the total answer to the total problem — physical death addressed by the bodily resurrection, spiritual death addressed by the righteousness the Anointed One brings in when he is cut off and raised, eternal death addressed by the everlasting life promised to those whose names are written in the book. This God raises the dead. He has done it. He will do it again.
The word translated many in verse 2 is the Hebrew rabbim, and that signals a partial resurrection, not the final general resurrection of the last day on which all rise. Perhaps Matthew 27:51–53 describes the moment when this partial resurrection occurred: at the hour of Christ’s rising, the tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; coming out of the tombs, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. Is it possible that some of the rabbim of Daniel 12:2 and the polloi of Matthew 27:52 are the same company — the Old Testament saints raised at Christ’s resurrection as the first fruits of the general resurrection still to come?
And what if Daniel was among them? The man who was carried into exile as a teenager, who prayed toward Jerusalem with his windows open for sixty-seven years, who fell as dead before the linen-clothed figure above the Tigris — he woke from the dust of the earth on Sunday morning and walked into the holy city. If so, Daniel returned from two exiles: the exile of Babylon, and the exile of death. Both ended by the same one who hovered above the waters and told him he was greatly loved. Whether this is the case or not, we know that at the resurrection we will join Daniel around the throne of the Lamb to acclaim the Savior.
And those who are wise, verse 3 says, shall shine like the stars forever and ever. The stars. In Genesis 15:5, God takes Abraham outside and says: count the stars if you are able to number them — so shall your offspring be. The stars of Daniel 12:3 are the stars of Genesis 15. The promise made to an old man standing under the night sky finds its ultimate fulfillment in the multitude raised from the dust, shining forever. The first gift is hope — and it has Abraham’s face and Daniel’s face and the face of everyone whose name is written in the book.
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Gift Two
Trust — The Permission to Not Understand
We began this series twelve weeks ago with two great foundational truths: the sovereignty of God and the faithfulness of God. They have been on display through every page. And here, in the final verses, Daniel gives us the most honest sentence in the book.
He has seen the Ancient of Days on his throne. He has seen the Son of Man receive the everlasting dominion. He has seen the ram and the goat, the seventy weeks, the anointed one cut off, the armies of heaven in cosmic conflict. He has fallen as dead before the linen-clothed figure above the Tigris. And after all of it, he says in verse 8: “I heard, but I did not understand.”
He is not rebuked. He is not corrected. He is simply told that the words are sealed until the time of the end.
The second gift is the permission to do exactly what Daniel did: trust. The most common response to Daniel 12 in Christian culture is to try to decode it — to calculate the 1,290 days and the 1,335 days and construct a prophetic timetable. Daniel himself does not do this. He confesses bewilderment and keeps trusting. The gift is the discovery that not understanding and not trusting are entirely different things. You can hold divine mystery with open hands and still be the man who is greatly loved.
“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.”
Proverbs 3:5–6
Daniel did not lean on his understanding. He leaned on the one above the waters who swore by his own eternal life that the end is in his hands. The sovereign God who governs history does not require us to understand his timetable. He requires us to trust his character.
The Christian who admits he or she does not fully understand the prophetic architecture of Daniel 12 is in the best possible company. Finitum non capax infiniti — the finite cannot contain the infinite. Daniel is the most supernaturally informed human being in the Old Testament and he still cannot contain what he has been shown. The question is not how much we comprehend. The question is whether we trust the one who holds the sealed scroll and the keys of death and Hades, and who swears by his own eternal life that the end is secure.
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Gift Three
Strength — Go Your Way
The waiting of verse 10 is not passive. “Many shall purify themselves and make themselves white and be refined.” The period of tribulation and waiting is the furnace that refines the wise and exposes the wicked. The exile’s waiting is not mere endurance. It is formation. The open window, the refused food, the refused bow, the prayer prayed into twenty-one days of apparent silence — all of it is the refining of those who will shine like the stars.
And where does the strength for the waiting come from? Not from within. C.S. Lewis understood this with characteristic precision. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lucy is terrified in the darkness when she hears Aslan say two words: Courage, dear heart. She does not find bravery within herself. The courage comes to her from the voice and presence of the one who speaks it. The Psalmist names the same reality: Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the LORD (Psalm 31:24). Courage is received, not manufactured. It comes from the presence of the one who commissions the going.
And then the final word. The benediction for all exiles.
“But go your way till the end. And you shall rest and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days.” — Daniel 12:13
Go your way. Not the explanation of everything. A direction. Daniel is not given the answer to every question he has asked. He is given enough — and then told to move. Go your way. Do your work. Pray your prayers. Keep the windows open. The sealed book is in safe hands. Your job is faithfulness, not comprehension.
You shall rest. Death renamed. Not defeat, not the final word, not the enemy’s victory. Rest. The sabbath sleep before the resurrection morning.
You shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days. The personal promise. Not they shall stand but you shall stand. Not an allotted place but your allotted place. Daniel’s name. Daniel’s place. The God who numbered the hairs of his head has numbered his place in the new creation.
The book of Daniel begins with Babylon trying to give Daniel a new name. It ends with God speaking his own name to him: you, Daniel. Babylon could not reach deep enough. Death could not hold long enough. Go your way, in the assurance that the one who started your story will finish it, and will finish it well.
What a magnificent book. What a moving close.
We exile people — those with an address in this age but a home in the age to come — will not be strangers to the unveiled world of Revelation when we open it in August. We have been living in it for three months. And the one above the waters will be seen at the center of the churches and the throne, opening the scroll, and ending our long exile from the holy city forever.
Go. Rest. Stand.
Three words. The whole commission of the exile. Not a program to execute, not a timetable to decipher, but a way to walk, a rest to receive, and a place already appointed.
The one above the waters made sure of it.