The Lord is still sovereign over human history, so His people should be faithful in their duties and enjoy the privileges that they have as God’s covenant people. Throughout it all, they should trust in the Lord of their salvation and know that one day He will restore them. Just as the righteous remnant of Israel must continue in spite of the ebb and flow of history, the followers of Messiah today should find hope in the prophecies of Daniel.

The book of Daniel is unique in the Old Testament due to its content and the pivotal role it plays between the Old Testament prophecies about the restoration of Israel and the New Testament fulfillment of those prophecies in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. The book is rich in complexity and depth, a richness that makes it hard to summarize in brief. There are, however, three aspects of the book that open it up to the modern reader.
1. The Opening Stories (Chs. 1–6) Give Credence to the Later Prophecies of the Book (Chs. 7–12)
The stories in the opening chapters of Daniel, written mostly in Aramaic, paint a picture of a generation of young Judahites who are taken into captivity in Babylon in 605 BC. There they face terrible persecution from their captors as well as incredible successes at the hand of the Lord, in whom they put their trust. The story about Daniel and his friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego makes clear literary and linguistic connections to the story of Joseph in Egypt. For example, both are described as good-looking (Gen. 39:6; Dan. 1:4), both involve the interpretation of kings’ dreams that create distress for these kings and reveal God’s plan for the future, and many of the same Hebrew words are used throughout each story to link them together. Like Joseph, Daniel and his friends are faithful to God’s call while serving in a foreign court, and as a result, they are lifted up to positions of incredible affluence, even receiving a gold chain around the neck (Gen. 41:42; Dan. 5:29).
Their faithfulness in the face of persecution bolsters Daniel’s prophetic message about the restoration both to the Israelites in the diaspora and the returnees who had gone back to Jerusalem in 536 BC after the fall of Babylon to the Medo-Persian coalition. This would have been particularly important in light of Daniel’s primary message that the restoration from exile is going to be postponed sevenfold (Dan. 9:24).
2. The Sevenfold Postponement of the Restoration of Jerusalem, Announced in Daniel, Creates a Bridge between the Events of the Old Testament and Those of Jesus’ Ministry
Ever since the time of Moses, a national exile and restoration of some kind was held out in front of Israel (Deut. 28:64–68; 30:1–10).
Read More
Related Posts:

How should those united with Christ face the reality of waiting on the Lord? We should wait with acceptance (forbearance). We should wait with confidence (steadfastness). We should wait without anger (patience), because the God of abundant life will not fail us. We should wait with the knowledge that the wait is worth it (hope). We should wait with compassion for those who are also waiting, whether they know it or not (mercy). We should wait with the full realization of what has already been accomplished for us, the blessings that are not waited for but are enjoyed in the present (gratitude).

Waiting has fallen on hard times in the modern world. People are in a hurry in just about every area of life, and what time is spent in waiting is filled with snippets of communication, video clips, memes, and hot takes. Most of the great technological innovations in recent history are conspicuously designed to cut down on the amount of time that we have to wait to get to the desired goal. If we can’t do something online in a matter of minutes, is it worth doing? If a package can’t make it to your door in two days or less, is the product worth ordering? Even movies are getting with the program as they are edited into tighter and tighter story beats. Have you watched a movie from before the year 2000 recently? They are so terribly slow compared to the movies made in the twenty-first century.
No matter how hard we try, we will never eradicate the need to wait, though I do fear that we will become increasingly unhealthy in the way that we spend our hours in the queue.
The thing is, to wait is human. Waiting is a part of being a human made by God for His glory. In fact, the theme of a humanity that waits on God is returned to over and over in Scripture, and here we find the context of our own time spent waiting.
God made time and called us to experience Him in it. One of the incommunicable attributes of God is His aseity, or His independence and self-sufficiency. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism reminds us, God is “infinite, eternal, and unchangeable” in His being (Q&A 4). In other words, while God has created time, He is not bound by it as we are. When God spoke the cosmos into existence, He created it as time-bound, and we are no different. We are dependent on the passage of time and cannot imagine our lives apart from it. Every thought that we produce, every word that we speak, every conscious moment exists in time. That means that waiting is a crucial part of being created in time. It is all around us whether we are aware of it or not, moving unstoppably forward into the future. Contrary to other religions’ claims or instincts, waiting is not an illusion, a trick of the mind, or even a result of humanity’s fall into sin. Waiting is a part of humanity’s creaturely nature. We wait because we are human.
God made us for a story that is not yet complete. Yes, we are time-bound, but time is not a random progression toward no end; it is not, as Macbeth asserts, “a tale told by an idiot, . . . signifying nothing.” The story of human history is the story of God’s creating and redeeming the world, or what John Calvin calls the “theater of divine glory.” Divine glory is complete in the Godhead, but we experience it in time. God is unchangeable, but our experience of His revelation is in time, developing and growing through the ages until its fullness in the new heavens and new earth. This is what we wait for, the divinely desired end toward which all creation is moving, that beatific vision that we see now in part but that we see in the fullest human sense possible when Christ returns.
Read More
Related Posts:

Our sins are atoned for, our alliance with the King is restored, we share a hospitable meal between friends, the defilement is purified, and our debt is repaid in the person and work of our Lord and Savior Christ Jesus. We can rejoice that our High Priest is at work to accomplish all these blessings of redemption (Hebrews 10:1–18).

Every Christian should seek to sit under the whole counsel of God. This means, in part, meditating on the entire expanse of the biblical Word. Toward this goal, we all find ourselves naturally attracted to some biblical books and, if we are honest, not as attracted to others. One commonly avoided book of the Bible is the book of Leviticus. Located right in the middle of the Pentateuch, the book of Leviticus is written in such a way that many modern readers find it a difficult book to crack. Yet, despite its seemingly obscure interest in the tabernacle worship of ancient Israel, we should not miss what this book has to offer us.
Here are three things that every reader of the Bible can take away from the book of Leviticus.
1. God goes to great ends to meet with His people.
The tabernacle of the Lord is exactly what the Scripture says it is: the house of God. It’s His sanctuary, His palace, and as such, it is the place where He receives His guests (Ex. 25:8–9). God’s house reflects His character, holiness, glory, perfect righteousness, and role as primary creator. Those who enter the tabernacle, therefore, must be prepared for an audience with the King. Without such preparation, they cannot hope to survive the visit. Leviticus reminds us, however, that no amount of fallenness or finitude can keep our God from us. He made us to dwell in communion with Him, and His will is bent toward that communion. This desire for reconciliation and restoration is, of course, the backdrop to Scripture’s entire story of redemption.
Read More
Related Posts: