Daniel Lesson 37
Angelic Interference in History – Daniel 9:20-23
Daniel 9, we have been discussing the principles of prayer and we have obtained eight principles of prayer from this chapter. We have discovered that Daniel was not a dime-store Calvinist, that he did not buy fatalism, that what would happen would happen irregardless of means; Daniel understood that if you go from point A to point B you have to take a road to go from point A to point B, namely there are means that are involved in reaching God’s goal. Therefore one of the means involved is prayer, and therefore this knocks out Calvinistic fatalism. There’s a whole raft of this dime-store Calvinism in fundamental circles. Calvinism is a very healthy, in fact it’s the only theology that has ever come to grips with portions of the Word of God that have been neglected down through history, so we’re Calvinists but we’re not the dime-store fatalist type of Calvinists. It’s that kind that is very detrimental and some great Bible churches are leaning into this fatalistic type of framework and it shows up in their prayer life and their inactivity.
The second principle that we have seen is that there will be those times when you have to take time out for crisis praying. That leads me to answer a feedback card: don’t we have to be careful in our vigor not to accuse God of negligence or wrong doing? That’s in this vigorous type of petitioning that goes on in Daniel 9, and I showed you in the Psalms. Yes, these kinds of vigorous petitions are given by extremely mature believers under very special conditions. So normally our prayers will not be this vigorous, for the reason we don’t have the confidence that what we are praying is precisely the same caliber as Daniel’s prayer. He was praying for the city of Jerusalem and the temple. So this is a special kind of prayer; the principle remains the same but it’s a problem of degree, not of kind. So yes, you do have to be careful not to accuse God of negligence.
The third principle of prayer is that prayer builds upon the immutability of God. God keeps His promises.
The fourth principle of prayer that we have studied is that crucial prayers may often be written out. And in our circles written out liturgical prayers are somehow out of vogue. And yet in the Bible it appears that most of the great prayers were all liturgical prayers for the reason that they’re set to rhyme; we gave Hannah’s prayer, Mary’s magnificat, and Daniel 9. The principle being that when you write your prayer out you have thought it out better, it’s a better more tightly reasoned prayer.
The fifth principle that we have studied is that genuine confession of sin and accompanying prayer always involves an understanding of what sin is, not the do’s and don’ts and the taboos that are usually encountered in religious, I don’t drink and I don’t chew bubble gum, I wear long skirts and all the rest of it. Sin, according to Daniel 9, has a lot more to do than just the trivia and that depth is shown by his confession.
The sixth principle of prayer is that the ultimate objective of all mature prayer is God’s glory, not the immediate petition at hand. The immediate petition is only a means to a greater end, that end being a vindication of God’s character.
Seventh, the basis of all praying is God’s continuing grace. And this leads us to answer another feedback question. During your message you mentioned the need for Christ’s continual intercession on our behalf to keep the believer saved. Realizing that the doctrine of imputation and justification give us Christ’s righteousness and show that the Father also approves of Christ’s work, how can we also need Christ’s continuing intercession? First let me say I didn’t invent the doctrine of Christ’s continual intercession. I would just simply refer you to Romans 8:34 and Hebrews 7:25. I didn’t teach those and I didn’t write those verses, they’re just there in the text and they’re there in the present tense. You see the problem is, and the Reformation had a more balanced presentation of eternal security than what we have. See, the point is that God’s plan encompasses the past, the present, and the future. Now, let’s use Israel as an illustration; maybe we can get this point across by just forgetting about salvation and looking at something else entirely different.
In the past God elected Israel. So it was 100% certain that Israel would certainly survive in history; it was 100% certain that Israel would never be defeated in the sense that she would be eliminated physically from all the races of men. So we have that guarantee in time past that such would be the case for all moments of history. We furthermore have promises of Israel’s glorification in the future. That is a point promise. Now what happens is we focus on the past and the future and we start getting the fatalistic error creeping into our doctrine of eternal security. The point is that yes, it is absolutely certain that Israel in the past, Israel had been elected in Abraham, that Israel would go on to have a glorious future, but isn’t it also true that had Jehovah God not preserved her on a moment by moment basis that that past promise and the future promise would go right down the drain. Of course. Why do we forget the present part of the plan of God? The plan of God has a past, a present and a future. Don’t just get a fixation on the promise of what God is going to do and forget what God is going to do, that is, He is going to maintain that promise down through history, and He does so by a means.
Now let’s transfer that to the Christian. The Christian in the past, by the doctrine of election and justification, is promised a successful conclusion to the Christian life. But those doctrines express a promise of what in fact is going to happen; it hasn’t happened yet. Justification is a promise of what is going to happen, it is looking at Christ’s imputed righteousness credited to our account and it is the source and the means of God’s working in our lives. But Christ’s righteousness that is credited to our account includes all that Christ does for us and part of what Christ is doing for us as our high priest is praying for us at the present moment. So yes, it’s true, our eternal security is grounded on the doctrine of justification, but not just on the doctrine of justification, it also includes Christ’s ever present intercession for us. And again I say theoretically this would never happen, but conceptually if you can visualize it to just balance yourself, if Christ stops praying for us, we go to hell. That is the corollary to the doctrine of the high priesthood of Christ. Now Christ isn’t going to stop praying because He promises to do a work which God has in advance recognized in the doctrine of justification.
Don’t confuse this with the Roman Catholic dogma of the incomplete work of Christ on the cross; Jesus in heaven is not continuing to re-sacrifice Himself. The sacrifice was once and for all complete at the cross. But that sacrifice is continually applied to our account by the doctrine of the high priesthood of Christ. So there’s no problem with eternal security, it’s just visualizing all of what is involved in eternal security. The doctrine of eternal security is not just the doctrine that applies to the past; the doctrine applies to the present, Christ keeps the believer saved continually. There is, in other words, means involved.
Finally we have the eighth principle of prayer and that is grace praying always betrays the pray-ers knowledge of the Word. And the way Daniel has gone through his prayer here in Daniel 9, you can see it time and time again by the vocabulary, he is a great student of Jeremiah and Deuteronomy.
Now let’s look at Daniel 9:20, today we’ll deal with verses 20-23, the interrupted prayer. Daniel is continuing to pray, and in verse 20 his petition is interrupted, and this has to be one of the most mind-blowing passages that a man, thoroughly imbued in 20th century thought, can ever read because our entire culture is against this kind of thing. You have been educated not to believe this is true; you have been programmed since you were children to reject this kind of a view of history. So what you’re going to see in verses 20-23 is a type or a view of history that goes in complete conflict with everything you’ve ever learned outside of the Word of God. This is a view of history that is not taught any place at the present hour. There is no philosophy of history now currently available; the nearest person that has this kind of philosophy of history would be Solzhenitsyn, and of course the media and Kissinger are doing their best to assassinate his character at the present time. So apart from Solzhenitsyn there is no great thinker in the 20th century that is nationally recognized, that holds to this concept of how history moves. So we just warn you as you start here, it’s going to be tight. This kind of doctrine is not going to go down easy because it’s just like swallowing something that’s too big and gets caught in your throat. This kind of a thing is very, very hard to take for a person brought up in the 20th century.
Reading it first: Daniel 9:20 And whiles I was speaking, and praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before the LORD my God for the holy mountain of my God; [21] Yea, whiles I was speaking in prayer, even the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly, touched me about the time of the evening oblation. [22] And he informed me, and talked with me, and said, O Daniel, I am now come forth to give thee skill and understanding. [23] At the beginning of thy supplications the commandment came forth, and I am come to show thee; for thou art greatly beloved: therefore understand the matter, and consider the vision.”
So we have an angelic interference into history, and this week and next week will be spent on studying the role of angels in the historical process, looking particularly at the great moments of history and watching how there has been actually unseen, from the standpoint of men, an unseen hand that has been interfering with the international scene, causing movements to come out just in a certain way. And these unseen powers are exposed in the book of Daniel because Daniel is not a book of prophecy; it is a book of wisdom. Daniel is not a prophet, he’s a statesman and thus the book of Daniel is not put in the section of the prophecies of the Old Testament, it is put in a section along with Psalms, Proverbs, and The Song of Songs because these are books that deal with skill in life. Daniel is a book that deals primarily with politics and history, and it’s the book from which we get, or ought to get, Biblical political theory.
All right, Daniel 9:20, “And whiles I was speaking, and praying,” Daniel has begun his petition, verses 15-18 started the petition off, but he never had a chance to finish it because as he was speaking, the Hebrew indicates an interruption, “while I was in the course of” mouthing this petition, suddenly something happened. So God never allowed Daniel to finish the petition, we have no idea how this petition would end. He said “I was speaking, and praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel,” the confession part of this prayer was verses 3-10, that’s when he dealt with the whole sin problem and confessed; in verses 11-14 he dealt with God’s character. So he says I just got through, which is what is indicated here in the text, I had just gotten through the confession part of my prayer and had just begun my petition, just started the thing and this thing happened and then he’s going to go on and relate it.
Now in the original language there is a very picturesque thing here which I’ll try to translate literally so you can understand how they conceptualize this, “I was speaking, and praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people, Israel, and presenting my supplication,” the presenting of the supplication in verses 15-18. So you have the first part, verses 3-14, that’s the confession, and I had just begun to present my supplication, that’s your petition section, verses 15-18, “before the LORD my God” now in the Hebrew the way it literally reads is “I caused my petitions to fall in front of God’s face,” so the idea is that in terms of international diplomacy he has submitted his brief, or what he has written before God. So he pictures himself walking into a room, there’s a man seated at the desk, and he puts his petition on the desk in front of this man who is sitting there. Now that’s the mental picture of the prayer that’s going on here. I “presented my petition in front of the face of God,” the word “before” in the Hebrew is the word from which we get the word “face,” “presenting my supplication before the LORD my God.”
Then it says, “for the holy mountain of my God,” notice the petition concerns Jerusalem, the temple and the people. Notice verse 12, “bringing upon us… under the whole heaven nothing has been done as has been done upon Jerusalem.” So you’ve got Jerusalem, then verse 16, You have brought Your people out of the land of Egypt, that’s the people, verses 15-16, “Jerusalem and Thy people have become a reproach,” and then verse 17, “…cause Thy face to shine upon Thy sanctuary.” Now why do I bother to point that out? Isn’t that just a lot of detail? No, because if you note this we’re going to come back to this when we have an interpretation problem on the seventy weeks of Daniel. And it’s one of the most technical passages in all of God’s Word that’s coming up in future verses. So we have to prepare ourselves with the vocabulary in context. So there’s one thing we want to note, just put away some place in memory, when we get down there we’re going to use it, and that is in Daniel’s prayer the city of Jerusalem, the sanctuary in the city of Jerusalem, and the people Israel are all linked together conceptually. This is going to come out when Gabriel starts adding to the revelation, because Gabriel isn’t going to bother with all these three things, he’s just going to mention one here and one there, but just because he doesn’t mention them doesn’t mean that they are disjointed. In Daniel’s prayer the three are linked together. So that’s one thing we want to be careful of.
So he says I “was presenting my supplication before the LORD, my God, for the holy mountain of my God. [21] Yea, while I was speaking in prayer, even the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning,” now here is the interruption. Notice verse 20 begins with a resumption; verse 20 said “I was speaking,” verse 21 says, “while I was speaking,” so the fact that Daniel has repeated Himself in verse 21 shows that he wants to emphasize the interrupted nature of this whole thing. The thing he’s trying to communicate is that I literally didn’t get the prayer all the way out of my mouth and I was interrupted. So repetition, God’s Word repeats for emphasis. “While I was speaking in prayer, even the man, Gabriel,” now Gabriel, the word “Gabriel,” the last part of his name, “el” is the Hebrew word for God, and Geber here is the word for hero. It was used of a soldier who was honored for his acts of bravery, the Congressional Medal of Honor winner, this concept. And so he is called the military hero of God. That’s what the name Gabriel means. It’s his formal name but the name has content to it. Gabriel is one of the two named angels in Scripture. Extra-Biblical evidence has four names, but Michael and the Gabriel are the only two angels that are named in all Scripture. They are named apparently because of their rank; the angelic creation that exists in the unseen realm around us, which we will study more next week, has rank in it. At least four ranks occur; Paul gives you the ranks in Ephesians. We don’t know what this means, all we know is that these beings that occupy outer space have a certain rank to them. Gabriel and Michael are some of the top commanders in this unseen host. They are called an army which means they have military structure. Tsaba’ is the word for host in the Scripture, “the Lord of hosts,” Yahweh tsaba’. So Gabriel is a commander, a high commander in God’s army of unseen beings.
So, I was speaking in prayer, even the man, Gabriel,” now he calls him a man because the angel shows up in the form of a man. Gabriel and Michael always show up in human form; that is not true of all angels. We know from the book of Hebrews that angels often appear as inanimate physical phenomenon, they appear as men and they can appear as fire; they do not have to appear as people. They can show up and you see an angel and you’d never recognize him because you would think it was just a physical phenomenon. The burning bush and the burning on the top of Mount Sinai was not normal fire; that what looked like fire and it’s described as fire in Exodus 20 was not fire at all but millions and millions of angels that were just kind of congregating around the top of Sinai like flies.
So Gabriel is one of these angels, and he is one who shows up as a man. So when you see the word “man” in verse 21, don’t think it’s denying his angelic nature, it’s simply citing his appearance. “I was speaking in prayer, and the man, Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly….” Turn back to Daniel 8:15-16, remember that Daniel chapters 7 and 8 are a combined vision, the first vision actually Daniel had. The book of Daniel, the first 6 chapters of Daniel deal with his experiences as a chief of state of one of the greatest powers on the face of the earth, the Babylonian Empire. And during these six chapters he interprets other men’s visions, but beginning in chapters 7-8 Daniel has visions of his own. So here’s where his vision starts. And chapter 7 was in the first year of Belshazzar; chapter 8 the third year of Belshazzar, and collectively they are known as the vision of the evening and the morning, even though they are separated by three years they are collectively viewed as a unit, the vision of the evening and the morning; one was a night vision, one was a day vision.
And it was in the day vision in Daniel 8:15, “And it came to pass, when I, even I, Daniel, had seen the vision, and sought for the meaning, then, behold there stood before me one as the appearance of a man.” Now there’s your context that defines the use of m-a-n in connection with Gabriel. This is the first usage of it and that defines it for later uses of it. So he’s not teaching that Gabriel was a man, he’s teaching he appeared as a man. Notice too in verse 15, when does Gabriel show up? Gabriel shows up when something happens. What is it that happened? When Daniel seeks meaning for the Word of God. He didn’t sit there and have some sort of quivering jelly-like ecstatic experience. Daniel realized that God is intelligent and man is intelligent and when the two communicate they communicate intelligently. Daniel was not slain in the Spirit, he did not roll in the aisle; he did not come the aisle or roll down the aisle. Daniel stayed in one place and thought through what is the content of the message God is trying to tell us.
And when he did that, again this Gabriel showed up. Daniel 8:16, “And I heard a man’s voice between the banks of the Ulai, who is called, and said, Gabriel, make this man to understand the vision.” The voice he apparently hears in verse 16 is God’s voice, and God says all right Gabriel, you are the commander, you know what the order says, I want you to explain it to Daniel. You see, the reason why we have this communication which is going to come out here is that Gabriel, from the time of the Gentiles, the times of the Gentiles began in the year 586 BC with the collapse of Israel, since the year 586 BC in history there has never, never been a political manifestation of the kingdom of God. The Church is not the kingdom of God, the Church is the royal family of God, it’s being trained for the future kingdom, but the kingdom of God has not and never has appeared physically so people could see it since the year 586 BC. Since 586 BC the world, according to Daniel has been ruled by four great cultures: the Babylonian culture, the Medo-Persian culture, the Greek culture and the Roman culture.
The Babylonian culture was responsible for introducing worldwide banking, the concept of a banking house and government control of economics began with Babylon. It’s a satanic concept; the concept that the government can decree the worth of a dollar by manipulation of the currency is satanic. It is one of the characteristics of the times of the Gentiles. Systems like the Federal Reserve System are in total collision with the Word of God on its teaching of economics, but we live in the times of the Gentiles and it’s par for the course. Ever since Babylon you have had world inflation; it’s been getting worse and worse with each era. The Medo-Persian Empire was responsible in history for inventing and making popular the concept of internationalism, of getting all different cultures and all different backgrounds together under the same roof. That has come to fruition in our own day with the one-world movement. Then the Grecian culture, Greece was always known for its autonomous reason, and so the Grecian contribution to the times of the kingdom is that man will without the aid of God conquer his environment by reason alone. And so the great philosophers of history have tried, beginning with an exclusion of the Word of God in their systems, to make sense out of the universe. And finally we have the Romans, and the Romans gave administration, bureaucracy and law to the world. The Romans were geniuses when it came to organization.
So all these characteristics have been given, so you see, since 586 BC the world has run along a certain line with a certain shaped program. Now in this program Israel is no longer the mediating nation. She was the mediating nation, she theoretically could have ruled the earth before 586 BC, but since 586 BC she has not been able to and will not be able to until her Messiah returns. So Israel is in a position of subordination, which now means that history is being run largely by angelic forces and this is going to be taught more clearly in Daniel 10, just how carefully history is being run by angelic forces. We’re going to discover truths that indicate that apparently each major national entity has a sphere of angelic beings correlated to its geophysical boundaries. So the angelic forces operate in history, they are the prime movers behind history.
Therefore, in this book of Daniel, Daniel’s revelation is different from three other men who also wrote at this same time in history: Zechariah, Haggai and Malachi. Those are the last three books, the last three prophets, of the Old Testament era before revelation shut off. See, in the fourth century God turned off the facet and since that time apart from Christ and the apostles there has been no further revelation to man. But before God turned the facet off and cut off revelation, these three men had the last word, but when they taught the Word of God it was always “the word of the Lord came to Zechariah,” “the word of the Lord came to Haggai,” “the word of the Lord came to Malachi,” it was a direct prophetic revelation to the man. But with Daniel that is not the case; with Daniel something different happened; it’s mediated through an angel. So thus in this passage God’s voice speaks but God does not directly speak to Daniel; He speaks to Daniel by and intermediary, the angel Gabriel.
So after God gives the commission, He says Gabriel, go ahead and explain it; we have Daniel down here with another method of revelation. The direct, these prophets had to do with Israel; the indirect method, Daniel, because Daniel is a statesman and is involved in a Gentile power structure, and the mediating force between the Gentile power structure and God is always the angelic forces. So even the mode of revelation fits itself to this modus operandi of history. God mediates His will to nations by means of angelic beings today.
So let’s go back to Daniel 9 and since we have studied the previous acquaintance of Gabriel, now we’ll understand what it means when he says “I have seen” this. He says, “the man, Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning,” you understand that, that is a reference of Daniel 8:15-16. Gabriel occurs whenever there is a major change of history. For example, it is Gabriel in Luke 1:19 who comes to Elizabeth and announces the birth of John the Baptist. It is Gabriel in Luke 1:26 who comes to Mary and announces the birth of Jesus, and it is Gabriel here who announces that history will proceed according to a new way here. So Gabriel is always in the fore front of announcing.
So let’s see what happens here with Gabriel. We’ve got a problem immediately with the next phrase, “being caused to fly swiftly.” Down through the centuries men have thought and thought and thought over what these words mean; the reason is the Hebrew has two verbs which much alike, one is “fly” and one is to “be weary.” And you could say that’s possible, “be caused to fly swiftly,” but it’s better to take these verbs as having to do with weariness, “being wearied with weariness.” And if you interpret the phrase as “being wearied with weariness,” then you have got to say who is weary, Gabriel or Daniel? And since we have no other precedent for saying angels are wearied it’s best to say that this refers to Daniel and to take it back to the vision.
So what he is saying is “this is the man, Gabriel, whom I saw in the vision at the beginning, when I was wearied to find out what it was,” Gabriel came to my rescue. He “touched me about the time of the evening oblation.” It means he reached me, he arrived, “at the time of the evening oblation,” this is the second big notice we want to just note in passing for later on, it’s going to help us in our interpretation, and that is that “time” is mentioned here as referring to temple Jewish time. There has not been an oblation given since 586 BC; that means offering. Now the year here is 538 BC, 48 years later. There has not been a sacrifice given for 48 years. And yet Daniel and Gabriel both are using Jewish temple time. This is about 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon when Daniel is making this prayer. We know that from converting from temple time to our time. That is just a note of passing, we’re going to use that information later. Daniel uses temple time, and he speaks of a city, a sanctuary and a people together. Now when it says the angel arrived, this is kind of interesting as far as our place in the universe goes, and we’ll comment on as we get to verse 23.
Verse 22, “And he informed me, and talked with me, and said, O Daniel, I am now come forth to give thee skill and understanding.” So what is the “skill and understanding?” It goes back to how our soul is made, God has made our souls a certain way. From creation we know that they are formed, first God made the body, then He made the spirit and the soul is the result. The soul has a mind, the soul has emotions. Now what happens is that mind is normally used to think with in most normal people, it’s used to emote with in abnormal people, and we have conscience. Conscience is the foundation for your mind. Conscience is the storehouse for the absolutes. Conscience gives you the right/wrong, the true/falseness of a proposition. Dogs and animals have minds, comparative psychology can train that. Dogs can think, animals can think, but they can’t think in terms of absolutes because they lack conscience. And this is where the theory of evolution has never been able to bridge the gap between man and animal. There is no ape that has half a conscience plugged in somewhere; there’s no transition. On one side there is a complete mind without a conscience, and on the other side of the barrier, the created kind, you have mind with conscience. So man has conscience and he has mind.
Now the object in the Christian life is to take doctrine into the mind, anchor it in the conscience, and then the mind reflects on it. And as the mind begins to reflect on doctrine it builds up the divine viewpoint framework and you begin to organize your soul so you can handle experiences in life, you have direction and purpose in your life. That’s the whole name of the game in Christian sanctification. It’s not having one hyper spiritual experience after another, that’s not it at all. The point and where the real changes are made are over a long, long time of taking in the Word of God and training yourself in using the Word of God.
No one has ever become a mature believer over night. And yet we have people that resist this, oh do they resist the concept; always there has to be something else to take the place of the teaching of the Word of God. Always there has to be a fellowship this, or a fellowship that, or we have to get together and do this thing, that thing or some other thing. Always nice sounding and sometimes very good, but it always has one characteristic in common; it destroys or hinders or reduces the teaching of the Word of God. And it’s tragic the kind of pressure that’s being put on pastor-teachers across the country to stop the teaching of exegesis. Some men at Dallas who ought to know better are now giving twenty minute sermonettes because the congregation wants twenty minute sermonettes. I’m not going to give twenty minute sermonettes, that’s for Christianettes. You need instruction and that’s what’s going to happen. And the proof of the case is that only instructed believers know what to do when the chips are down. There is no substitute for day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out teaching. And all these extra local church organizations never get the idea that the roll of a local church is primarily to teach the Word. That is what you ought to go to church for and if your church doesn’t do it, you’ve got a problem. The church is to give you something, not take from you; it is to give you teaching. You need skill.
Gabriel, when he comes to Daniel says Daniel, you need skill and I am come to you “to give you skill and understanding,” I don’t want you to be stupid. You are a statesman in one of the greatest kingdoms on earth, and we don’t want stupid believers in high places. That’s one of our problems in this country. We have believers who have never studied and now they are making some of the most foolish decisions our country has ever seen; some of the top people in Congress who are making the most unbiblical decisions are born again Christians. So here we have a believer and Gabriel wants him to understand the matter. “I am come forth,” come forth means to break out, I have left the throne room of God to come all the way to planet earth “to give you skill and understanding.” That’s what the angel is saying. Why? Verse 23.
Daniel 9:23, “At the beginning of thy supplications the commandment came forth,” now if you go back and read from verse 4 down to verse 15, it’ll take you about six minutes, so over six minutes has elapsed from the time that Daniel began his prayer until the time Gabriel showed up. We know in those 6 minutes he traveled from point A to point B, point B being planet earth; point A is the throne room of God. This is part of what I told you that’s going to be hard to take because you’ve got a lot of Greek ideas and you never knew it. You’ve got this Greek idea that God is somehow in the F dimension, spiritual dimension some place, and you’ve confused His omnipresence with the throne room. The throne room is the place where the resurrected Christ is right now. Jesus Christ is resurrected humanity as well as deity and since He has humanity He has a body and since He has a body it’s located at a point in space. So Jesus is located at a point in space and wherever He is located in space, that is the throne room of God. And when He approaches the planet earth again for the Second Advent, the book of Revelation says that men are going to see all over the world the sign of the Son of man in heaven approaching. Which means obviously He is going to take some time and it will be a visible approach.
Now as Gabriel came we can’t tell the distance, but whatever it was it took six minutes to traverse this distance. In our day we’re used to thinking in terms of millions of light years in space. But I’ve met very few people that understand that the term “light year” does not refer to time or speed. “Light year” refers primarily to distance given a certain theory of light transmission. But the term “light year” is a term of distance, not a term of time. And people who are not clear on this argue well, the universe must be millions and millions of years old because we observe stellar evolution out, say 500,000,000 light years in space, and it took 500,000,000 years for that light to come here, therefore the universe must be at least 500,000,000 years old. Now besides having a few flaws in it from the concept of the expanding universe, that also has some very serious flaws when it comes to Scripture. The universe is not 500,000,000 years old because God tells us it isn’t, so there must be something wrong with the way we’re analyzing light transmission.
To do this I refer you to page 358 and 370 of The Genesis Flood, for the footnotes there, I refer you also to Appendix B of the second Framework pamphlet, in which it is pointed out that on another theory of light there is no point in space, if this is the whole universe you can always pick point A and Point B such that the distance or the time to travel between those points for light transmission is no more than 15.7 years. And this is using different kinds of geometry more suited for this kind of phenomenon, geometries that aren’t the Euclid kind that you learned in high school. So using different theories of velocities of light and their transmission, it is perfectly conceivable that Gabriel moved from the most outward part of the universe to the planet earth in six minutes or less. It shows you how high speed these angels are. Now in the next chapter it’s going to take the angel three weeks to do the same trip, because when he comes in to planet earth he meets resistance, and we’ll deal with that resistance, but here we know that it took Gabriel six minutes to traverse from the throne room of God to where Daniel was.
And he said, in verse 23, “At the beginning of thy supplication, the commandment went forth,” the word “commandment” went forth means that I was sitting in the throne room of God, he says, I was on the chief of staff of the universe, and the Commander in Chief gave an order. The word “going forth” is an idiom which was used in the ancient world for a king giving a decree. So he says I was sitting there at the command post, and all of a sudden God, from His throne, gave an order, and he doesn’t say God does, he just uses “the word went forth.” So he says from the time… and here’s a picture of prayer that’s fantastic. Think of this now, millions and millions of light years distance from the throne room of God, Daniel, the believer trapped in a very complicated political situation, trying to pray his way and his nation’s way out of this mess, the instant that he starts to pray, because that’s what the angel says, Daniel, the moment you opened your mouth to pray, the very moment you opened your mouth to pray the Word of God went forth, the Commander gave His Word, and it’s taken me six minutes to get here but I want you to know Daniel, that six minutes ago the commandment went forth, there was no delay between the time you petitioned God and the time He did something about it. There was a delay time in the answer getting here, but there wasn’t any delay time in originating the answer.
So he says “At the beginning of thy supplication, the commandment went forth,” God the Father declared the order, “and I am come to show thee;” now we’re going to skip the next phrase and come back to it in a moment, “therefore understand the matter and consider the vision.” Again we emphasize in this passage God wants you to understand His Word. Ephesians 3:18 says every Christian ought to know every doctrine. Now God never tells you to do something for which He hasn’t given you the equipment to do it. Wouldn’t it have been unfair of God to say hey believer, I want you to know all this doctrine, and then not give you the mental equipment to be able to understand it. Wouldn’t that be unfair of God? Obviously. So if God has given us a command and if God is fair, and we know it’s God’s will that every believer understand every doctrine, it must be that every one of you who is a believer has the necessary equipment, and if you do not know every doctrine, if you do not understand the contents of Scripture, either it’s because you’re not trying or you just haven’t been in it long enough. God’s aim in your life is to make Himself known to you and He’ll use all sorts of means to thrash you around until He gets your attention. If you don’t know things because you’re just picking it up gradually, don’t be discouraged, just stay with it and keep moving. God wants all believers to know.
Now we conclude with that clause in the middle of verse 23, and this is one of the spectacular words that were ever uttered in history, Daniel, “for thou art greatly beloved,” now that’s the translation. In the original Hebrew it reads Daniel, “you are a treasury of precious things,” you have things inside you that are highly valued by God. Now here is the question. We asked at the very, very beginning of this prayer what is it inside Daniel’s soul that turns God on. What is it about Daniel that God admires so much that He orders one of the chief generals on his staff of the entire universe to make a six minute high speed trip to planet earth to the point where Daniel is making the prayer to give him a special order? Now that’s picking out a believer and saying God really admires that man. What is it about Daniel that God so deeply admires that He says “you are a treasury of precious things.”
Well, let’s look at what it can’t be. It can’t be that Daniel is mighty in physique. He’s an old man at this point. It’s not because of his physical appearance that makes Daniel a treasury of precious things. What else is it? Well, it isn’t because of his phenomenal education; Daniel was a well-educated believer but his education wasn’t the precious things that were in his soul. Is it his moral perfection? No, because we know from the doctrine of depravity that all beings are fallen creatures so it can’t be that Daniel is perfect.
Well then what is it in Daniel’s soul that is the treasury of precious things? The only thing we conclude is that it’s his grace oriented wisdom toward life. Daniel is a man that understands grace, he understands that since the fall God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is gracious love, God loves the unlovely, God love him and Daniel has responded to God’s love and in the response we call that grace orientation. Daniel recognizes that everything Daniel has is by God’s grace. Daniel has position. How did he get that position? He was a little teenage kid that was kidnapped as a political hostage in the year 606 BC or thereabouts. He was brought thousands of miles to this new homeland; he didn’t have a chance to do anything. He was a kid, a noble kid but he was a kid, teenager in a Babylonian jail. He was a hostage, held in case Judah revolted against the Babylonians. From that very humble beginning Daniel worked his way up through the power structure until he was number three in the world power of the time. And Daniel looks upon that career of going up through the power structure as a series of promotions that he did not personally arrange. He has a grace attitude to his life. Whatever the promotion was God gave him that promotion. And wherever he was Daniel continued to recognize his sin because here as late in life as this is, chapter 9, Daniel has not got a fat head over his promotions. He confesses his sin even more vehemently and clearly as an old man than he did as a young teenager in a Babylonian jail.
Daniel has maintained his grace orientation. That is the only proper attitude that any believer can have toward life; it is that which makes Daniel the man who is the “treasury of precious things,” because Daniel was so beloved of God, because dispatched one of His chief angelic beings, a six minute trip to the earth to tell him something, it’s not any surprise that we are, next week, going to begin one of the most complicated passages in the entire Bible. It is an order that only a man of the kind of skill, wisdom and grace orientation of Daniel could have understood.