Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18
In the first year of King Belshazzar of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in bed. Then he wrote down the dream: 2 I, Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, 3 and four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another. … 15 As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me. 16 I approached one of the attendants to ask him the truth concerning all this. So he said that he would disclose to me the interpretation of the matter: 17 "As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth. 18 But the holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever."
In the Book of Daniel, the character Daniel usually interprets dreams. In this dream, he must ask for assistance to understand his dream. At the appropriate time, our passage says, God will right wrongs. Visions like this in the Bible are the basis for the hope that the sufferings and injustices of this world will end in reconciliation and peace with each other and with God. My focus here is what it says about the saints, the “holy ones,” who shall gladly receive and welcome the rule of God, and therefore the judgment and transformation it will bring. We are going to read just a few portions of this vision. This vision declares the beastly character of the empires of the world. It describes in succession four beasts that represent empires that existed prior to 167 BC. However, it does not take much study of history, and of our time, to see that beastly powers are always at work. Political authority often sees the people of God to be a threat. Most human authority does not want to allow for allegiance to anything other than itself. Eventually, one with a human face and voice will come to judge beastly powers. This judge will actually come to fulfill the hopes and dreams of humanity.
The benevolent treatment of the foreign monarchs in Daniel 1-6 (?) has given way to the apocalyptic nightmare of the four beast-like empires. The religious crisis precipitated by the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes is the immediate occasion for the material of Daniel 7-12, written in 169-7 BC. The four “revelations” have as their purpose to console, strengthen, and exhort their coreligionists. The unflinching faith of these people had its ground in divine power and will to rescue all who trusted in God and in the providence of God. The conviction is that at the appropriate time, God will right all wrongs. If God is to set things right, this life and this history is not often the place where that reconciliation takes place. Believers have hope in the power of God, who takes human sin seriously and will restore justice in an often-unjust world. These people persevered in this conviction despite all appearances that God was silent and not at work. The point of the final visions is that the fourth kingdom is the final kingdom of world history. For believers, all prophesies of Daniel unfulfilled by the end of the sabbatical year in early autumn 163 BC were prophesies God will fulfill in the distant future, when God should see fit to bring the end.
The apocalyptic vision is in relation to history. The view of history that apocalyptic writers present, in that they also grasp future events before they occur, requires confirmation by the actual course of the events.[1] As written, of course, the course of history described in 11:1-39 from the Persian Empire to Antiochus IV provides the basis for confidence that God will fulfill the remainder of the prophecies. As we can see in Daniel 7-12 in particular, this conclusion is highly problematic.
Chapter 7 is a vision of the four beasts and “the man.” The author writes it between 169 and 167 BC as a development of the vision in chapter 2 and is the last in time of the four visions. Someone added the references to the small horn sometime in 167. In relation to Chapter 2, it replaces the four metals with the four beasts. It replaces the stone with the Ancient of Days. The reign of God will supplant human authority. One difference is that God establishes the reign of God in the people of God. We do not get a hint of persecution in Chapter 2, but it clearly exists in Chapter 7. All references to the “small horn” are later additions to the original text. The author of the additions is the same author of Chapter 9, for their interest is in limiting the persecution to 3 ½ years.[2] In addition, the Masoretic Text contains a transposition of the bear and lion, probably by accident.
In Chapter 7, although the dating is not of historical value, it presents the empires in correct chronological order. This is the only vision said to come in a dream. In verses 1-3, we find a description of the four beasts from the sea.1 In the first year of King Belshazzar of Babylon, note that 5:30-31 refers to the death of this king, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in bed. Then he wrote down the dream: 2 I, Daniel, saw in my vision by night the four winds of heaven stirring up the great sea, resembling Genesis 1:2. The surging ocean is typical of the world in which they live. 3 Further, four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another.
Verses 15-16 are part of the explanation of the dream.15 As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me, and the visions of my head terrified me. 16 I approached one of the attendants to ask him the truth concerning all this. So he said that he would disclose to me the interpretation of the matter. Daniel is the interpreter of dreams in 1-6, but an angel provides the allegorical interpretation for the dream.
In verse 17, we have a description of the four beasts from the sea. 17 "As for these four great beasts, four kings shall arise out of the earth. No need to go to mythology to explain the beasts, for they were beasts in biblical literature. We can see this in Job 26:12-13 (Rahab the sea monster, the fleeing snake; Isaiah 27:1, Leviathan the snake that lives in the sea; Isaiah 51:9-11, Rahab the serpent from the sea; Rev. 13:1, Beast with 7 heads and 10 horns. Such imagery derives from Canaanite/Ugaritic mythology, in which Baal, the storm god, defeats Yamm, the sea.
In verse 18, we have an account of the one in human likeness. This being coming from heaven is a direct contrast with the beasts from the ocean. It is clearly a symbol of the saints. It has no messianic meaning, though Jesus refers to it in Mark 14:62, based upon verse 13. This scene, combined with verses 9-10, resolves the tension through divine judgment. Although the figure of the divine one in human form will figure prominently in the New Testament as a description of Jesus, there are no classic messianic actions ascribed to that divine figure in this passage. His status as the one to receive everlasting dominion comes not from his deliverance of his oppressed people in a cosmic contest of good vs. evil, but rather from the bestowal of that dominion by decree of the divine council. 18 But the holy ones, the Aramaic term “holy ones” occurring only here for Israel. In Daniel 4:10, 14, 20; 8:13 it designates an angelic host, for which see I Enoch 14:22-23. It represents persecuted Jews. For Irenaeus, the inheritance of the reign of God is lordship over the earth. For him, the theme of the reign of God is primarily that God consummates the blessings through those who will inherit them.[3] The holy ones of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever—forever and ever."
The predictions were given in 500's and discovered 400 years later, in order to give faith to people in the one genuine prophesy: God will destroy the pagan kingdom that is persecuting the Jews and then the people of God will take possession of their kingdom.
This passage, along with Daniel 2, is part of the proposition that the ideal of an eschaton or end of history that is both end and completion of history going back to Jewish apocalyptic. Apocalyptic expected the coming of the reign of God as the end of the preceding sequence of worldly empires. The associated perspective fixes the background for an understanding of the message of Jesus concerning the imminence of the coming reign of God and also of the development of Christian eschatology. However, under the conditions of thinking today, the thought that human history will end has come into question.[4]
Daniel has a vision. He sees four beasts. One is like a lion that had wings. Another was like a bear with three tusks. The third was like a leopard with four wings. The fourth, more terrifying the others, had iron teeth and ten horns. He discovers that they represent kings and their kingdoms. The fourth kingdom will curse God and go after “the holy ones,” the people of God. In the end, the “Ancient One” shall arrive, sit on the throne, and sit in judgment of these beastly kingdoms. Yet, one “like a human being” will come in the clouds with the “Ancient One.” The one like a human being is actually a collection of people, “the holy ones.” They are the saints, who will come into their kingdom because of the action of God. It all seems rather confusing, but we should not the miss the point. Human kings and kingdoms often act in beastly ways. What God is doing in the world is to make us more human, in the way that God intended us to be.
Rather than focus upon the apocalyptic issues involved in this passage, I find myself gravitating toward reflecting upon the saints.
Those saints alive today must never forget they are here because of saints yesterday. I offer a brief reflection on how such an awareness will help us become more human and less beastly. You see, if we cannot respect and honor our past, our mothers and fathers in the faith, even with their imperfections, then we will not respect and honor those with whom we worship and learn today, who also have troubling imperfections. In honoring them we do not need to deceive the present.[5] One of the great lessons of history is that we do not learn from it.[6] They have their mistakes, faults, weakness, and sin. They may even have the worst of imperfections, namely, that of disagreeing with us.[7] One of the difficulties of modernity is that we keep talking about how free we are. We have freed ourselves from our past. All that does is admit that we have become slaves to that arrogant oligarchy of those who just happen to be walking about at this moment. A “traditionalist” means a determination not to automatically dismiss the opinion of anyone outright just because the person happens to be your parent.[8] If we have the courage to be traditionalists, to sit with the saints, we will participate in one of the most revolutionary activities of the church.
The church year reflected in the lectionary includes All Saints’ Day. John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement, enjoyed and celebrated All Saints Day. In a journal entry from November 1, 1767, Wesley calls it “a festival I truly love.” On the same day in 1788, he writes, “I always find this a comfortable day.” The following year he calls it “a day that I peculiarly love.” You check out the Ten Commandments, it says that thing about ‘honor your father and mother.’ The church set aside All Saints’ Day as its attempt to do that in just this small way. Because to be a Christian is to find yourself moving to a different rhythm, a different beat.Built right into Christianity is the courageous determination to be traditionalists, to sit with the saints, and thus participate in one of the most revolutionary activities of the church. This is the church's conversation with the dead, our continuing dialogue with the saints about how they have preceded us in this faith. We are not alone. Philosophers have long recognized in their studies that they are part of a long “great conversation” that occurs within human thought. We keep learning and re-learning what great thinkers from the past have said. Science is not like that. You can know chemistry, biology, and physics by studying the current state of knowledge. You can be contemporary, with the times, in science and math, and be none the worse. Such is not true of many areas of human life.
Charles Wesley, John’s brother, observes this theme in his hymn that appears in the United Methodist Hymnal as “Come, Let Us Join our Friends Above,” #709. In the first verse, he offers a wonderful image of the Church through the ages:
Let saints on earth unite to sing, with those to glory gone,
for all the servants of our King in earth and heaven, are one.
On All Saints Sunday, we remember all those—famous or obscure—who are part of the “communion of saints” we confess whenever we recite The Apostles’ Creed. We tell the stories of the saints “to glory gone.”
Alongside the likes of Paul from the New Testament, Augustine, Martin Luther, and John and Charles Wesley, we tell stories of the grandmother who took us to church every Sunday. We remember the pastor who prayed with us to receive Christ into our hearts and lives, prayed with us in the hospital, or even married us. We remember the neighbor who offered a helping hand when we needed it. We give thanks for the youth leader who told us Jesus loved us, the Sunday school teacher who showered us with that love, and the woman in the church who bought us groceries when we were out of work.
Retelling these stories grounds us in our history. These memories teach us how God has provided for us through the generosity and sacrifice of those who have come before us. The stories of the saints encourage us to be all God has created us to be.
Therefore, the church pauses on All Saints’ Day to give thanks for the communion of saints, that great cloud of witnesses who believed. Many experienced persecutions because of their beliefs, sometimes by a political state and sometimes by other Christians. They passed on the gospel to us today. We might even pause to give thanks for the saints we know today who in their way have witnessed to the faith in courageous ways.[9]
From the early days of Christianity, there is a sense that the Church consists of not only all living believers, but also all who have gone before us. For example, in Hebrews 12 the author encourages Christians to remember that a “great cloud of witnesses” surrounds us encouraging us, cheering us on.
A sign on the Winchester cathedral in England says, as you enter the church, “You are entering a conversation that began long before you were born and will continue long after you’re dead.” To be a Christian partly means that we do not have to reinvent the wheel, morally speaking. We do not have to make up this faith as we go. Israel loved its young people enough to tell them they do not have to make it up as they go along. The church participates in the same spirit, embodied in its scripture. Scripture will show the way. The saints who wrote scripture will teach us, if we will listen. Moreover, for modern, North American people, it takes a kind of studied act of humility to think that we actually have something to learn from the saints.
As Christians, God does not abandon us to the moment. Our faith is more than "contemporary" (literally: with the times). We do not invent the faith or the gospel anew in each generation. The words and lives of the saints guide and encourage. We learn to think with them. Think of the Christian faith as extended conversation with the dead, dialogue with the saints.
We like our freedom in America. Sadly, this has come to mean that we have a strong desire to be free of the past. In the process, we become slaves of those who happen be walking around right now. Today, as G. K. Chesterton put it, being a “traditionalist” means a determination not to automatically dismiss any opinion outright just because he happens to be your father or mother.[10]
I am thinking of some fathers and mothers of the faith I have had. A pastor who loved a line from a poem by Charles Studd:
Only one life, twill soon be past,
Only what’s done for Christ will last.
A Sunday School teacher who carefully and respectfully opened his Bible to the passage the youth SS class would study that day. A professor who generously spent time with his student after class and after graduation. I honor such persons today. I honor my biological parents. I also honor those parents in the faith. They taught me the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. As much as I may have changed in my life, I do not want that changed. These persons always treated the Bible with honor and respect. We rarely discussed theories about the Bible, but we put it at the center of our attempts to understand what it means to follow Jesus today.
The churches always need to be contemporary in the sense that they must minister to the needs and issues of the time. However, to do so does not mean we minister “with the times.” We must often minister “against the times.”
None of us is here, "on our own;" all of us are indebted to the saints for our faith.
Sometimes people say that the church is "old fashioned," or stuck in the past, too traditionalist and archaic. However, we see the past, the history of the church with God, the testimony of the saints as one way that God still strengthens us today as a great resource for thinking and living as a Christian.
The philosopher Nietzsche speaks of going to the underworld and there learning from the dead. He will return there often to talk with the dead. He must come to terms with past thinkers, recognizing they will tell him whether he is right or wrong. They will even discuss the rightness or wrongness of each other.[11] In a way, that is one of our most fruitful sources of knowledge – conversation with the dead.
We will sometimes hear words like this: "Well, it's good to know that there's someone up there cheering you on down here." That is not a bad way of envisioning the communion of saints. Sometimes we have it tough down here, in the here and now, living a faithful Christian life, serving Jesus as best we can. We praise God, for God has not left to our own devices. The saints cheer us on.
One person (minister) had an annoying and painful mouth ulcer, so he went to the neighborhood pharmacy seeking relief. The young pharmacist said, "Gentian violet, that's what you need." "Gentian violet? Is that not what my mother gave me for this when I was a kid? Do you mean to tell me that you medicine people have not made any further advances in the treatment of mouth ulcers than gentian violet? Is this traditional remedy all you've got?" "Don't knock traditional remedies," she said. "Sometimes they are the best remedies. You're a minister; you of all people ought to know that." She was right.
The body of the great English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy rests in Westminster Abbey, but his heart shares the grave of his first wife in the yard of the small parish church of Stinsford, Dorset. It was on a summer's day with the tranquility of rural England in the air that a man and his wife visited that church to pay their respect to the memory of Hardy. Next to a series of Hardy family graves, he came upon the tomb of another poet, Cecil Day Lewis. He had his stone inscribed with five lines of his poem, "Is It Far to Go?"
Shall I be gone long?
For ever and a day.
To whom there belong?
Ask the stone to say,
Ask my song.
"To whom there belong?" is a bid to search for eternity through belonging. Because of the hierarchical organization of nature, each of us belongs with matter around the universe, with all forms of life around the globe, with all other humans of our species, and also with different social groups. Each of these organizational levels -matter, life, the human mind, and society - has its own temporality.
"Ask the stone to say" is an invitation to explore time in the physical world.
The last line of the verse, being also its bottom line in a figurative sense, tells us that the ultimate reference of all inquiries, including that on the nature of time, is humanity, the measurer and measure of time. Together, they serve as a chart and an itinerary for our voyage of discovery.[12]
"It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people," quipped G. K. Chesterton in 1910. If that guarded approach applies anywhere, moral education would seem to be the place. In learning right from wrong, young people ought to have the benefit of ideas that have been around for a while. After all, when researchers experiment with new treatments in medicine, the policy is to ask adult volunteers, not to round up children. Common sense would seem to suggest a similarly cautious approach to experiments in teaching values.[13]
Soren Kierkegaard once said that a saint is someone whose life manages to be more than a "cranny through which the infinite peeps." The saint lives in two worlds. He or she has a vision of gladly welcoming the kingdom, thereby loosening the tight grip of this world, while at the same time receiving this world as a gift and loving it the way God loves it.[14]
I offer a brief prayer.
Lord, teach me to pray with the saints. Free me from enslavement from my time and place. Help me to mark the3 lessons of history and to learn from them. Give me the humility to receive instruction from someone other than myself or the people of my moment in history. Enable me to pray with the saints. Forgive me of my arrogance in thinking that being a faithful disciple is more difficult in my moment in history than it was in past moments. Thank you for the saints, all those dear people who lived the before me, who told me the stories of Jesus when I was young, who set good examples of fidelity before me. If I stand with Jesus today, I do so because of the gifts they so willingly shared. Amen.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and in remembrance and thanksgiving for the saints, all of them. Amen.
[1] Pannenberg (Jesus God and Man, p. 61)
[2] Ginsberg
[3] (Adv. Haer, 5.34.2)
[4] Pannenberg (Systematic Theology, Volume Three, p. 587)
[5] Schopenhauer
[7] William H. Willimon is the inspiration for what follows.
[8] G. K. Chesterton
[9] Here, if you were sharing something like this in a worship setting, you might recall some of your congregation's saints who have made your church possible for them today.
[10] As G. K. Chesterton said, one of the difficulties of modernity is that we keep talking about how free we are. We have freed ourselves from our past. All that does, said Chesterton, is that we have become slaves to that arrogant oligarchy of those who just happen to be walking about at this moment.
[11] The journey to Hades. I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and I shall yet return there often; and not only sheep have I sacrificed to be able to talk with a few of the dead, but I have not spared my own blood. Four pairs did not deny themselves to me as I sacrificed: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I must come to terms when I have long wandered by myself; they shall tell me whether I am right or wrong; to them I want to listen when, in the process, they tell each other whether they are right or wrong. . . . (The Portable Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann, ed. & trans. [New York: Penguin Books], p. 66.)
[12] - J. T. Fraser, TIME the Familiar Stranger, Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
[13] - William Kilpatrick, Why Johnny Can't Tell Right From Wrong: Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education, New York: Simon & Schuster
[14] Thomas G. Long builds on the thought by saying that the saint is someone who somehow manages to live in two worlds. The saint's faith has enabled him or her to release some of the tight grip by which most people hold on to this world and then is paradoxically able to receive this world as a gift. Eyes on the infinite, the saint manages to be thoroughly involved in the finite. The saint manages to chart his or her life by the stars, but walks on thoroughly solid earth. (Thomas G. Long, "Preaching in the Middle of a Saintly Conversation," The Journal of Preachers, Lent 1995, pp. 15-21.)
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