February 16, 2019: Day 77 – Daniel 7

What just happened?  It seems like we went from these wonderful Sunday School stories into the macabre of Revelation.  Here we find Daniel who is the one who has the dreams now and is in need of someone to interpret them for him.  When we read these very extreme accounts with beasts and devouring and destruction we could tune out because we just assign it to the apocalyptic and think that it has nothing to do with us.  

A difference in Daniel’s visions and dreams is that they have nothing to do with Daniel personally and his future fate.  It has everything to do with kingdoms and world events.  Let’s go through each of the visions and beasts and images that we have and try to interpret them.  I do not see them as predictive but rather as descriptive.  They are accounts of the events that were happening around 164 BC right around when Daniel was written.  The four beasts symbolized  the four kingdoms of that time: Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece.  The lion was Babylon, bear is Medes, leopard is Persia, and the fourth terrifying beast was Greece which wielded the most power at that time.  Greece was terrifying because they had elephants in their military and so the stamping could refer to that.  The horns represent the empires that the Greeks had under their control.

It is tempting to try to fit these interpretations into future events but that simply cannot be done.  We have to see the author of this Scripture providing and interpretation for that day.  What  then is the take for us?  We see that throughout history people of faith have found themselves in situations where life events, and specifically political events for Daniel here, leave them bewildered and not sure about where their God is in the midst of all of this.  Daniel’s vision doesn’t answer the question of where is God in the midst of this, but does, according to vs.28, leave him terrified.  A little terror can go a long way in putting us back into the fold of the Lord.