Faithful Under Fire Daniel 10-12 War of the Worlds
Last week a news story caught my eye. An asteroid the size of three football fields will pass near Earth in three years. Scientists have named it Apophis — after the ancient Egyptian deity known as the god of chaos. It will come within 20,000 miles of Earth’s surface, closer than many of our own satellites. NASA assures us there is no risk of impact for at least a century.
An asteroid named after the god of chaos is passing closer than our own satellites. Wow! The visible world has its terrors. But Daniel 10 pulls back the curtain on a realm of conflict that makes Apophis look manageable — a war that has been underway since before that asteroid formed, since the moment in Genesis 3:15 when God set enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. God started this war for the worlds. We are living inside it right now.
The church lives between two declarations. We have heard Jesus say It is finished. We are waiting to hear him say It is done. We live between the resurrection and the return, between the day God called us from death in sin to life in righteousness and the final day when he calls us from the grave to everlasting life with him. Many things characterize that period. One stands out in Daniel: conflict.
This is the truth that chapters 10 through 12 press upon us with unusual force: 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 has been mourning for three weeks when the curtain is pulled back on the banks of the Tigris. What he sees stops him as completely as anything in a life already full of extraordinary visions. A man clothed in linen, a belt of gold, a body like beryl, a face like lightning, eyes like flaming torches, arms and legs like burnished bronze, a voice like the sound of a multitude. The men with him flee. Daniel alone remains — and what remains of Daniel is almost nothing. No strength left. His radiant appearance turned to corruption. He falls on his face as a dead man.
Before the vision explains itself, it confronts us with the reality of the invisible world. The Nicene Creed — which we confess together — speaks of God as maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. Today, the invisible becomes visible, and it is overwhelming.
The invisible realm has two sides. The angelic host — ten thousand times ten thousand (Psalm 68), sent to serve the heirs of salvation (Hebrews 1:14), present in our lives whether we see them or not, as Elisha’s servant discovered when his eyes were opened (2 Kings 6:17). And on the other end of the angelic spectrum, the governing principalities and warring powers under the dominion of their leader, contesting every step of the gospel’s advance across the globe.
C.S. Lewis identified the two errors we are most likely to make about this reality:
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.” - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Preface
The biblical response is neither dismissal nor obsession. It is alert, sober, armed engagement — the kind Peter calls for when he writes to exile people about how to live in a war zone (1 Peter 1:13–19), the kind Paul describes when he urges the whole armor of God (Ephesians 6:10ff), the kind that recognizes that part of Christ’s own mission was to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8).
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When the angelic messenger finally speaks to Daniel, the first thing he says is the most important pastoral sentence in the chapter: from the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard (v.12).
Three weeks of fasting. Twenty-one days of apparent silence. And the answer: your prayer was heard on day one.
The delay was not silence. It was warfare. The word translated "prince" in verse 13 is the Hebrew sar — a word that, in its documented range of meanings, includes "patron-angel," the spiritual being assigned to govern a nation before the divine council. The prince of Persia is not the emperor. He is the spiritual power behind the emperor, aligned against God’s purposes. And this being had withstood the heavenly messenger for twenty-one days.
Not the overwhelming figure Daniel first saw above the Tigris. His messenger. The linen-clothed figure had been present all along — above the waters, sovereign over the conflict, while his messenger fought through the resistance to reach Daniel. The prince of Persia could contest a heavenly messenger for three weeks. He could not move the one who hovered above the waters. He is always already there.
Prayer is not preparation for the war. It is the war. Daniel’s twenty-one days of fasting were twenty-one days of heavenly contention. From the first day something moved in the heavenly realms. The earthly intercession and the invisible warfare are one event seen from two angles.
In the midst of the battle, Daniel confesses his weakness repeatedly — no strength remaining, face to the ground, trembling on his hands and knees. And each time he does, the messenger meets him: a touch, a standing, a strengthening. The pattern echoes Joshua 1:8–9. This eighty-year-old man is not backing down from the battle. He is being strengthened at every point of acknowledged weakness — which is precisely how the strengthening works. God meets our weakness with his power, our trembling with his peace.
The weapons the exile carries into this conflict are not the weapons the world would choose. Not political leverage. Not cultural influence. Not institutional prestige. The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds (2 Corinthians 10:4). We should look less at an election cycle and far more at the elect Son of God who sends his mighty angels to do battle on behalf of his people and liberate the nations.
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But the war does not end in the fire. It ends in a resurrection.
Daniel 12:1–3 gives us the outcome: Michael stands up. The time of unprecedented trouble arrives. And then the most electrifying promise in the Old Testament: many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life. The cosmic conflict that chapter 10 reveals resolves not in the victory of the beast but in the standing of the dead.
The one who holds the keys of that outcome is the one who placed his right hand on Daniel by the Tigris. Revelation 1:17–18:
“Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades.”
The prince of Persia could withstand a heavenly messenger for twenty-one days. He could not withstand the cross for twenty-one seconds. The powers are disarmed (Colossians 2:15). The keys belong to the Living One. The war continues — but we already know how this conflict will end. Yes, there will be pain and suffering along the way, but it will be worth it, and it won’t destroy us. The pain of the present isn’t worth even comparing with the glory to come.
How do we know? Our Commander and King, the One in the Linen Robe who walks on the waters of Babylon as well as Galilee, is our Savior-King. He will strengthen us with his word and raise us in his triumph on the last day. The one who died and rose again to rescue us is the one who will also raise us from the dust.
Daniel himself returns from two exiles: the exile of Babylon and the exile of death. Regarding the first, if Daniel was raised from the dead as part of the company of Old Testament saints who shared in Jesus' resurrection day and were seen in the streets of Jerusalem on that first Easter morning 2000 years ago, then he too finally came home from exile. Both exiles were ended by the same linen-clothed figure who hovered above the Tigris and told him he was greatly loved. Daniel made it home after all.
The war is real. The outcome is not in doubt.