Daniel 10
Vision of Jesus
The vision - Daniel alone and weak
Daniel 10:7-8
To go to Daniel 10:9-10:
https://somebodysayhallelujah.blogspot.com/p/daniel-109-10.html
Have you been alone and weak?
When we read the Bible from the beginning, we find that the God who created the whole universe and every creature in it, created us humans also. In Genesis 1:26-27 we read, "Then God said, 'Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground'. So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them".
Why did God create "male and female"?
Why not only male? Or only female?
There are many examples in the creation of God (plants and animals) which reproduce asexually, so they don't have any sexual differentiation. Our Almighty God, our Creator, is able to create us like them, but He decided not to do so. He created us man and woman, and even denied us the possibility of asexual reproduction - which He has given even to some animals who are male-female, but which can in some circumstances reproduce asexually.
Why would He do that?
God had said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him" (Genesis 2:18) If you compare this verse with the one written by the wise king Solomon in Ecclesiastes 4:9 and the promise of Jesus in Matthew 18:20, we can come to the conclusion that God didn't create us to be alone: "Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor". "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them". Even prayer, which is an issue between you alone and God, is more powerful if it is shared with others: "Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven" (Matthew 18:19) God created us for communion, not for loneliness. A great deal of commandments and promises in the Bible is destined to regulate relationships among humans (man and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters in faith, and others)
Then, why does He leave us alone sometimes?
Cain is the first segregated in the Bible. The reason is that he killed his brother and didn't repent, so God destined him to be expatriated, separated from his family and their land. We see the same things in our judicial system when criminals become prisoners, which are separated from society because they are a threat to others. Another example of segregated ones were the lepers (Leviticus 13:46) which were isolated in order to hinder them from transmitting the disease to others.
But not all examples of isolation are negative ones. God separate often those who are called to serve Him as leaders or prophets for many reasons that we are not going to explore here. Among those are Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, Elijah, Daniel, Jonah, John the Baptist, Our Lord Jesus, the apostles Paul and John and many others, who had to endure loneliness and meet God on their own as a part of their preparation form their future ministry, or because of the ministry itself.
The case we are dealing with is the prophet Daniel, who was left alone in his weakness, that wouldn't be certainly helped by three weeks of mourning and fasting. He was about to receive one of the most impressive prophecies about Israel and the empires which subjugated God's people, and this prophecy would come from the Lord Jesus Himself.
This is the text in Daniel 10:7-8 in the NIV:
"I, Daniel, was the only one who saw the vision; those who were with me did not see it, but such terror overwhelmed them that they fled and hid themselves. So I was left alone, gazing at this great vision; I had no strength left, my face turned deathly pale and I was helpless"
The Hebrew text is this:
וראיתי אני דניאל לבדי את המראה והאנשים אשר היו עמי לא ראו את המראה אבל חרדה גדלה נפלה עליהם ויברחו בהחבא. ואני נשארתי לבדי ואראה את המראה הגדלה הזאת ולא נשאר בי כח והודי נהפך עלי למשחית ולא עצרתי כח
It sounds like this:
"Ve raíti aní Daniél levadí et-hamará, veha-anashím asher hayú imí lo raú et-hamará aval xaradá gedolá niflá alehém, va-yivrexú behexavé. Va-aní nishárti levadí, vaeré et-hamará hagedolá hazót, ve-lo nishár-bi kóax. Vehodí nehepáx aláy lemashxít, veló atsárti kóax"
If you are like me, maybe you wonder also, "if Daniel was left alone and he was gazing at the great vision, how did he see that his own face grew pale?". But this phrase is not in the Hebrew text. הודי נהפך עלי למשחית ("hodí nehepáx aláy lemashxít") means in Hebrew "my vigor was destroyed", as it is rendered in the Tree of Life Version (literally, "my vigor was turned into destruction") Apart from it, the translation of the NIV is a literal one. The pale face can be a paraphrasis alluding to the external signs our body shows when we are weakened.
Why was Daniel left alone in his weakness?
As we have seen before, isolation and weakness are not always the outcome of sin or leprosy. It doesn't mean God is punishing you; rather, He is preparing you. Abraham was told to leave his country, his people and his father’s household and go to the land God would show him. Joseph was sold by his brothers as a slave and went even to prison for many years, with no crime commited. King David was alone with the sheep in his youth, when he developed his profound relationship with God, and experienced long periods as an exile in his adult life. Our Lord Jesus was led by the Holy Spirit to the desert in order to be tempted by Satan. The apostle John received the visions of the book of Revelation when he was in prison because of his faith.
The most important thing when you feel alone is to keep your relationship with God alive. God has not forgotten you, He has promised to lead you all the way until you're ready, as He told Jacob in Genesis 28:15.
How can we do that?
The prophet Habakkuk has an extraordinary answer to this question. An answer that caused the church to take a different approach to God than all of the previous ones, by being applied to us Christians. Habakkuk's revelation is not only the core idea of a relationship with God - what people call "religion" - in the times of the church's birth; it is the core belief and the rally cry of the Reformation as well. It is so pertinent today as it was when Habakkuk received it six centuries before Christ.
Habakkuk is contemporary with Jeremiah. He is a prophet from the final period of Israel's kingdom - by this time, the Kingdom of Judah, because the northern kingdom had been conquered by Assyria a century ago. The Jewish people had experienced a revival under Josiah's rule, but the morals in the country deteriorated under his sucessors. Israel's neighborhood was not in a better position; Pharao Necho - the one who killed King Josiah - was on his way to battle the raising Babylonians, in alliance with the Assyrian remnant that was left after the fall of Nineve (612 BC) and the battle of Harran (609 BC, when Assyria dissapeared as a kingdom) The Babylonian King Nebuchanezzar defeated Pharao in the battle of Carchemish (605 BC) and no one was able to stop Babylonia in its advances.
It is in such turbulent times that Habakkuk prays to the Lord for His intervention to bring justice, and the Lord's answer is that He was raising Babylonia, which would punish Israel. God's solution puzzled the prophet, who didn't understand how an utterly wicked people could be used against Israel, God's people; how could the Jews be punished by those Gentiles who were worse than them? And this is God's answer: "Behold, his soul is puffed up, it is not upright in him; but the righteous shall live by his faith" (Habakkuk 2:4, American Standard Version) The "puffed up" one in this verse (the proud, arrogant, haughty) is Babylonia, and the righteous ones are the Jews who were loyal to God.
"The righteous shall live by his faith" is by far THE verse connecting the whole Bible. It is quoted in Romans 1:17; Galatians 3:11; Hebrews 10:38. It is said in the Talmud that "Moses gave Israel 613 commandments; David (in Psalm 15) reduced it to eleven; Isaiah (in Isaiah 33:15-16 ) to six; Micah (in Micah 6:8) to three; Isaiah (in Isaiah 56:1) reduced them again to two; but it was Habakkuk who gave the one essential commandment "וצדיק באמונתו יחיה" (vetsadík beemunató yixyé) which is translated "the righteous shall live by his faith".
What does it mean "to live by our faith"?
There are many ways to live. Some persons live by their feelings, so if they "feel" they belong to the opposite sex, then they most be a person of the opposite sex - in spite of being born with all the biological signs of their real sex and the proper chromosome set. That's why women's sports are about to die, because women are being forced to compete with men (XY, testosterone producing, male sexual organs owning men) which is impossible for them in most cases. For most of mankind's history, when your feelings or perceptions were in contradiction with the objective reality, it was called "hallucination" (Wiktionary says it is "a sensory perception of something that does not exist, often arising from disorder of the nervous system, as in delirium tremens; a delusion") That's why the Bible says that Nebuchadnezzar was mad when he spent seven years believing he was a cow. There's something wrong with you if you "identify as a cow".
Other ones live by doctrines, philosophical or religious. That's why for many it is justified beating or killing people, theft, looting and rioting, because they are Marxists who think that private property or human life are not to be respected. Other ones think that killing people because of jihad is also justified. Mahathir bin Mohamad, a Malaysian politician who has served more than 20 years as Prime Minister, you know, the one who represents a whole country, hardly a "terrorist" by our idiomatic standards, has said that "Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past", commenting the terrorist acts that took place recently in France.
Let that sink in. Have the Israelis, Jordanians, Lebanese or Syrians the right to be angry and kill millions of Iraqis because of the Babylonian conquests? Have the Frenchmen, Spaniards and Portuguese, Israeli, Turks and the people of the Balkans the right to be angry and kill millions of Italians because of the Roman conquests? Have the Spaniards and Portuguese, the Berbers in North Africa and the autochthonous peoples of the Middle East the right to be angry and kill millions of Arabs because of the Muslim conquests in the Middle Ages? Why should Muslims have that "right"? Which is the state of mind of a person who thinks that way?
God doesn't want us to be sick, demon possessed or living in sin. That's why He sent His only begotten Son to give His life for us, and that's why He sent His Holy Spirit to guide us and finally to rise us up in the resurrection in order to meet our God and Savior and to live with Him eternally.
How does this activity of the Holy Spirit in us connect to Habakkuk 2:4?
The apostle Peter received this word from God (1 Peter 4:11) which is almost the same Habakkuk did receive, but with a certain development: "If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen". This is the "faith" (Greek πιστις, pístis) which we find as a spiritual gift in 1 Corinthians 12:9, in the passage where Paul is listing those gifts operating as the Spirit of God is manifested in the congregations. It means "faith, belief, trust, confidence", with the emphasis in our God-inspired activity. When we live "by faith" then we think, speak and do the things that belong in the realm of the Divine.
There is another aspect of this "faith, belief, trust, confidence" adding "fidelity, faithfulness" (Greek πιστις, pístis) that we can see in Galatians 5:22, where Paul is listing now certain virtues that the continuous presence of the Spirit of God form in the believers. Paul calls these virtues "the fruit of the Spirit" (Greek καρπος του πνευματος, karpós tu pniúmatos) and stresses here the transformation that the Holy Spirit causes in those who have a relationship with God. A "fruit" is something that takes some time to be formed, grow and mature. Because of the presence of the Spirit and His activity in us, the believers are called "new creation" in 2 Corinthians 5:17. We live "by faith" because we've been transformed by the Spirit of God.
It is by faith that Noah didn't worry about being mocked by the heretical sinners who didn't understand his ark. He completed it, filled with all animals as God commanded, and was saved from the flood, where all his detractors were killed. It is by faith that Joseph endured slavery and prison, and became the highest official in Pharao's court, who pardoned his brothers because he saw God's hand behind the story of his life. It is by faith that king David pardoned twice the life of king Saul who persecuted him in order to kill him. By his faith he was made king instead of Saul, who killed himself. It is by faith that our Lord and Savior endured forty days fasting in the desert, and in the human weakness it produces, confronted Satan and defeated him.
It is not God's purpose that we should be alone and weak. If you're in that situation, faith is the only thing that can support you. God is your loving Father, who will move heaven and earth to save you and lead you to victory, but you have to believe; your faith is essential. If you're alone because of sin, because of sickness or because of a higher call, God is the one who will reveal it to you. If you need repentance, healing, delivering, spiritual growth or just endurance, He will show you. He is the only One who knows the reasons of your loneliness and weakness, and the only One who is able to lead you to whatever steps you are suppposed to take to fulfill your destiny. Your loneliness will pass in God's time. The apostle Paul wrote to the Philippians that "He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus". God is working in you and He will work in you until Jesus comes.
He created you for communion!
If you have not yet received Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, don't wait any longer! He wants to save you, heal you, restore you and lead you in the purpose He had determined for you, before the world was created. He knows your strength and your weakness, your ableness or the lack thereof, your faith or lack thereof. Receive Him and be saved!
In the love of Christ, your brother
Israel Leonard
PS. Jesus is coming soon!
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