Week 37 - Daniel 7-9, Revelation 8 (Sept 10 - Sept 16)
Notes
Daniel 7-12: A different Genre
Thus far, Daniel has read like a historical book. However, Daniel is grouped among the prophets because of what we’ll read beginning this week. The same Daniel that we have met in these stories - the one with a remarkable gift for prayer, visions, and dreams - will be given visions by God for God’s people in exile, and these visions act as prophecy. You may notice a uniqueness to Daniel among the Old Testament prophets. The sensationalism of Daniel’s visions/prophecies is of a greater intensity than most of the other prophetic material; the images used are more grand and strange. In this sense, the second half of Daniel is a really comfortable reading companion to Revelation. As we have already discussed, Revelation is chock-full of Old Testament imagery and allusions - most importantly is seems to come from the voice of the OT prophets, especially Daniel which seems like the launching point for John’s vivid and sensational depiction of the vision that he was given on the island of Patmos.
Daniel 7: The Son of man
Daniel 7 is one of the most important Old Testament passages for understanding the Gospel. Jesus frequently refers to himself as the “Son of man” who is depicted in this chapter as approaching the Ancient of Days. You can not adequately understand what Jesus believed himself to be accomplishing without connecting this vision to the story of the Gospel. This “son of man” is the victor in the judgment of God over the beasts of the world, and then the leader of the “holy people of the most high” whose kingdom will never end (v.27). This is the larger story that the gospels and New Testament ‘fit’ into. The Bible Project has made a fantastic video about the role of the Son of Man in Daniel’s vision and the rest of the Bible, you can see it here:
Daniel 8-9: Visions of the future
Daniel’s visions in chapters 8-9 largely point to historical events that occur between the eras of the Old and New Testaments, These visions continue through the rest of the book, so we’ll link these visions to their historical correlations in the study notes next week.
Revelation 8: The prayers of God’s People
In Revelation 8, we get the second remarkable passage about prayer in John’s vision.
Revelation 5:8 And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people.
Revelation 8:3 Another angel, who had a golden censer, came and stood at the altar. He was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all God’s people, on the golden altar in front of the throne.
The depiction of prayer in both of these passages is an incense constantly burning before God in his throne room. In chapter 8, prayer receives additional significance as it seems to be the launch point from which the seven trumps of God’s judgment disembark.
The main point, however, is that the seven trumpets and what they bring will be part at least of God's answer to the prayers of his people. The sequence of divine judgments, necessary for evil to be conquered and God's glorious new world to emerge, is not a mechanical plan which will grind forward irrespective of human agency. God, as we have seen, is committed to working in the world through human beings. Prayer, even the anguished prayer of those who do not Understand what is going on, is a vital element in this mysterious co-operation (see Romans 8.26-27).
If prayer from on earth is presented by means of the golden censer, the immediate answer is given in the same way. The angel, having offered the incense, now fills the censer with fire from the altar and throws it on the earth. Until evil has been judged, condemned and radically uprooted from the earth, the only word that earth as a whole can hear from heaven is that of judgment.
- NT Wright, Revelation for Everyone, P. 79
Revelation 8: The Seven Trumpets
Revelation 8 begins with the resumption of the unsealing of the 7 seals of the scroll held by the almighty by the Lamb who was deemed worthy to do so. Seals 1-6 were loosed in chapter 6, then chapter 7 was an interlude of security and worship for God’s people. However, the unsealing of the seventh seal is no simple matter, in the course of its loosening we are told of seven trumpets and (later) seven bowls of wrath. These trumpets and bowls symbolize (I think it is a mistake to require them to actually/historically depict) God’s drastic action to confront wickedness by purifying the world through judgment by which he will severely prune/cut it back as one would with a tree that had become dangerously diseased. We get 4 of the 7 trumpets in chapter 8. NT Wright makes an important connection between the trumpets and bowls of revelation with the 10 plagues in the Exodus story:
In the trumpets and bowls, we are seeing a major rerun of the plagues with which God afflicted the Egyptians at the end of Israelites’ four hundred years of slavery. In Exodus 7-12, there are ten plagues, which strike both the people and the land, functioning as a warning to the Egyptians of the power of the God of Israel, and finally, as the dramatic means by which, at Passover, Israel escapes (and then only because of the shed blood of the lamb). The plagues which John now envisages would resonate, in the minds of his hearers, with the ancient Egyptian plagues, and assure them of the same result.
We have already seen that Passover plays a significant part in the story John is telling. Indeed, the lamb himself is who he is because he is the true Passover lamb. We should not be surprised, then, that just as Egypt was smitten with plagues as both a warning and a means of liberation, so the whole world is to be smitten with similar plagues in order to warn its inhabitants and to deliver God's people.
The ten plagues of Egypt were as follows. First, the waters were turned to blood. Then there were frogs, then gnats, then flies, each of them inflicting damage and destruction. (Each time, too, Pharaoh hardened his heart and would not let the people go.) Then a deadly pestilence struck the Egyptian livestock; then the people were afflicted with festering boils; then thunder and hailstorms devastated the crops; then came a plague of locusts; and then, building up to the final terror a plague of darkness came over the whole land for three days.
Last came the judgment of Passover night, when the angel of death passed through the land, and the firstborn of every family (and every herd) was killed, while the Israelite firstborn were spared, because of the lamb's blood on the doorposts of the house. That was the final straw, and Pharaoh drove the Israelites out of the land - only then to change his mind and pursue them, leading to the second great act of rescue, when the Israelites walked dry-shod through the Red Sea but the pursuing Egyptian army were drowned (Exodus 14).
John has all this in mind, and expects his readers to do so too, as he describes the plagues, both here and in the chapters that follow. He is not repeating them one by one, but we cannot miss the echoes. When, eventually, we find the rescued people 'singing the song of Moses, and the song of the lamb' in 15.3, we ought not to be surprised. This is perhaps the major key to some of the most difficult passages in the book.
The particular plagues which come at the blast of the first four trumpets (following one another in quick succession, like the four horsemen) begin with two which echo the Egyptian plagues, but which obviously apply much more widely. This is the serious divine warning, not just for one country but for all humankind. Hail and fire devastate a third of the earth and its vegetation. A third of the sea, not just the river Nile, turns to blood. The poisoned waters of the third plague likewise remind us of Egypt. The fourth plague echoes the ninth Egyptian one, bringing darkness for one-third of the time when before there had been light. Imagery from other sources crowds in as well: the idea of a huge mountain being thrown into the sea is an image used by Jesus himself on occasion, for example, Mark 11.23, and was familiar from other Jewish writings of the time. So, too, the picture of a giant star falling from the sky has resonances with the old story of a fallen angel being cast out of heaven (Isaiah 14:12), In Isaiah, this ancient picture has been freshly applied to the king of Babylon. John, well aware of this, sees the fall of the great start in this passage as an advance signpost towards the great denouement at the end of his own book.
But for the moment the point is that the fire cast upon the earth, following the prayers of God's suffering people (8.3-5), begins the long process of catastrophic events which are meant to function as warnings to the 'earth-dwellers' (verse 13). There is nothing wrong with being an earth-dweller. But the point John is making, again and again, is that there are many who have lived on earth as though there were no heaven, or as though, if heaven there be, it was irrelevant. His whole book is about the re-establishment of the rule of heaven on earth itself. As with all radical regime changes, those who profit from the present one will need dire warnings if they are to realize the seriousness of their plight.