DanM6 — Transcript

I am glad that I can welcome you to module six now.

And for some reason, I like this title and I have it here, you will see it in the modules, the title of this module is Suffering is not forever.

An important promise is found in the material that we are studying this week, and let me offer a prayer for you and me as we are about to talk about this week's material.

Heavenly Father, oppression, suffering is very often part of our lives on this earth, and in the hearts of each one of us, there is a desire that everything that is negative in our lives would soon come to an end.

And we have those precious promises that are found in your word, and for this week we are studying one important passage that deals with that topic, so I pray that you will help my friends during this week and that we will feel your hand present in our lives and may we learn important lessons from this module too and be willing to apply the messages from this module in our everyday walk with you and also in our ministries to others.

When I think of Daniel chapter 7, I cannot help but remember that many students of the Bible have called this chapter a pivotal chapter in the Bible, because it talks about a God who is not passive to the sufferings in this world, but he is a God who is active, and that attitude of God and that action of God to go into action and that actually the going itself, the Bible calls judgment.

So this chapter talks about judgment or it describes God in active terms, God may seem silent, appeared silent and even absent to some of us in certain difficult situations of life, and yet the Bible promises that that time will not last for long, but that God will step into our lives, step into our world again and that he will act in behalf of those who love him and for the sake of his own glory and reputation.

There is something that is unique about Daniel chapter 7, we are still dealing with a chapter in Daniel that is written in the Aramaic language, so the message basically is universal for the whole world, and yet, although in Aramaic, this is not just a story, but it is a vision, prophetic revelation that Daniel received, so we have here a vision that is presented in Aramaic and in that sense, Daniel chapter 7 is somewhat unique in the book.

When you read the material for this week, you will learn a little more about the importance of the date of this chapter, because the chapter is dated to the time of King Belshazzar, you may think that with Daniel 6, that now we are at a time after the fall of Babylon, the time of Medo-Persia, and that we are through with Babylon, but the the first two visions that are presented in chapters in chapter 7 and 8 of Daniel, they take us back to the time of the Babylonian Empire, because the two these two chapters are dated to the reign of the last king of Babylon, Belshazzar, and this is important because of the symbolism that is found in this chapter and also because of the topic that is discussed here.

So somewhere in the middle of this chapter, you will find a summary of the revelation which Daniel received, and that summary basically consists of a verse or two, and it simply says that powers, oppressive powers, one after another, are and will be rising in the history of our world, but ultimately that power will be taken away from the oppressive powers, because they were given, I'm sorry, these powers were given to the oppressive powers of this world, God's power was given to them in the first place, so God can now take back that power, that dominion to rule, that authority, he will take back and he will give it to someone who will have it forever, because he is not an oppressive ruler, he's going to be a righteous ruler.

And what is important about this power is that when the one in the likeness of human beings, the Son of Man, once he gets that power, he does not crave for yet more power, but instead he shares that power with his subjects, he makes them even more powerful and he elevates their status to something higher, and he shares that power with them.

In this sense, the the agent of God's kingdom, the Son of Man, is different from the oppressive powers who had only one ambition and that is to accumulate more strength and bring in more oppression, and this is done, this is nicely shown in the book of Daniel at two levels, because the agents in this world, they act first of all horizontally, there are political conflicts, turmoil because different powers of this world would like to grab that power, but then sooner or later there is the vertical element with a religious component brought into the picture when the earthly powers, they try to challenge God himself, and then God has to act and transfer the power from the entities of this world to the Son of Man and the saints who follow him, and that beautiful promise is found in Daniel chapter 7, and it was a source, great source of encouragement to Jesus Christ, you you can right away relate the terms Son of Man and the coming kingdom of God and and and other terms that are found in this chapter to Christ's ministry and the vocabulary which he used.

There is no doubt that Jesus Christ found a great inspiration for his ministry in this or from this chapter, and that is why I believe that this week, in this module, as we study Daniel chapter 7, that we also can be inspired to be more faithful to God and to understand that in the end everything is in God's hands and that God's own emissary, Jesus Christ who came into this world as an agent of God's kingdom, he promised the complete establishment of God's kingdom on the face of this earth.

So I'm asking you to read Daniel chapter 7 in one sitting, and also I would like to remind you to read the assigned pages from the textbook, please remember to do the discussion postings, both the original and at least one threaded posting, prepared for the test, the same format we will still have, and I also would like to remind you not to neglect the your work on the expository paper that you are working on, which is an important component of this class, so Daniel 7 is one of the best known chapters in the book, and I can tell you that numerous scholarly articles and some books have been written on that chapter, especially because of the link with Jesus Christ through the expression Son of Man, but the message that that chapter contains is is one of the strongest coming from the book of Daniel, so I hope that you will feel greatly blessed as you study this chapter and find ways of applying its message in your life and also in your ministry to others, so may God bless you in what you do and and also may you find enough time to focus on this study so that the study of the book of Daniel during this class may be a success, God bless you.