“Recalculating!”

A Sermon Based Upon Daniel 12

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

3rd Sunday of Epiphany, January 26, 2014
2014 Winter Bible Study Sermon Series, 4/4 

“…But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book.”

 (Dan 12:1 NRS)

Many people today rely upon GPS systems to get around these days.  Such devices have grown in sophistication and they can help us drive more safely, find gas stations, restaurants, and hotels.  Still, having a GPS is no guarantee that you won’t get lost or make a wrong turn.  Recently the news told of some people who, by listening to their GPS, took a wrong turn and drove right off a boat ramp into a lake.   In another instance someone turned right and did not realize that they turned too soon and drove into a house.  Even if you have a GPS you’d better keep your eyes on the road and use common sense.  But the systems do have a way to let us know that we’ve gotten off track: “Recalculating!”  That’s how my Garmin GPS tells me I’ve ventured off the planned route and gets everything back in sync. 

“Recalculating” is a good way to interpret the visions of the final chapters of Daniel (9-12).   Because Biblical predictions did not turn out exactly like Daniel had believed, he had to do a little recalculating.   In other words, he was lost!   He had a prophetic map in hand, but it wasn’t working just right.   God was doing things somewhat differently than the prophets had expected.   So what do you do when God changes the route?  What do you do, when for reasons of grace or reasons of judgment, God ‘recalculates’ the route from where we are to where he wants to take us?

STOP…. AND PRAY

Before we get to our text where Daniel says,  “At that time your people shall be delivered” (Daniel 12:1b), we need to go back to chapter 9.   There Daniel is trying to figure out the ‘time table’ of the end of political and religious and persecution and the coming of God’s eternal kingdom. 

Even already in chapter 8, Daniel is unable to ‘understand’ the significance of his these visions and requires help (8.15).   But the contents of the vision was so overwhelming, even when explained by a heavenly messenger, that it made him sick and he still could ‘not understand’ (8.27).   So what happens next?  Daniel does what anyone should do.  He prays (9.3).   He prays and asks God about the unfulfilled promise of 70 years of exile given in the prophecy of Jeremiah (9:2-3, Jeremiah 25:11-14; 29: 10-14).   But “Seventy years” have passed and nothing has changed.   While the kingdom of Babylon had come and gone, God’s people have returned to their homeland, they have rebuilt their temple, but now other oppressive Kingdoms are ruling in the place of Babylon; The Medes, the Persians, and now the Greeks.  Still, the end is not yet.  The promised ‘eternal’ kingdom that will be ‘built to last’ has not come.   They are ‘home’ but have only traded one form of bondage for another.  Exile has changed its physical location, but they are still a long way from the kingdom.   They have returned home, but still feel like they are lost.  Their spiritual GPS is trying to recalculate, but they still don’t know how to find their ‘location’ on God’s map. 

This is why Daniel 9 records one of the great prayers of the Hebrew Bible.   Daniel is trying to find himself and the location of his people.   This is why Daniel prays.  This is why Daniel turns to God in prayer.   We know that Daniel prays daily, but this prayer is on a different level.  He is desperately praying and seeking an answer.  He fasts.  He puts on sackcloth, and dusted himself with ashes (9.3).  This means he serious.  When I was dating my wife, and she gave took off her engagement ring because she had to think over what it might mean to be married to a preacher,  I rented a hotel room and fasted for 3 days.   This meant I was serious.  This meant I knew she was serious too.  This meant I wanted and needed God to give us an answer.   After those three days I was ready for whatever answer came, yes or no.  But until I had prayed, I don’t think I could have handled a ‘no’ answer.  But after I had prayed, I was ready and willing to wait on her answer, even though it came two weeks later.   I prayed and I got ready.  This is part of what Daniel is doing too.  We would all face life much better is we would ‘stop’ and pray before we rushed to an answer.   Think how many hasty decisions could be avoided!  Think how many angry tempers would have subsided!  Think how many of us could have listened and learned before we jumped into conclusions we could never get back!

Perhaps, the most important lesson we can gain about Daniel’s prayer is not the words he said, or the answer he got, but it is the ‘tradition’ or ‘habit’ he had to put prayer in the center of his daily life.   There is a lot in Daniel’s prayer that went on besides seeking an answer to a puzzling question about life.  Daniel’s prayer is filled with confessions of sin (9.4-15), seeking God’s forgiveness (9.16-18), worshipping God’s presence (9.4,7.), as well as, relating his feelings and questions to God (9.19-20).   The substance of Daniel’s prayer reminds us not only of God’s covenant and promise to his people, but it also reminds of the people’s promises made to God.  Daniel prayer helps us realize that the lack of fulfillment, emptiness, or confusion has as much to with our unwillingness to walk with God, than God’s unwillingness to walk with us.   From Daniel we learn that God is not so concerned how we pray, as he is concerned that we are a people who pray, and that we are a people who recognize our need for God each and every day when we pray.  As Bill Ireland has written, ‘whatever we make of Daniel’s reliance on tradition (to pray in sackcloth and ashes), the important thing to keep in mind is that God answers the person not the prayer’. (From Daniel: Keeping Faith when the Heat is On, Smyth and Helwys, 2012, p. 100).

THINK….. FIND NEW INSIGHT

Being people who pray is as much part of the answer to Daniel’s question about the end, as is the answer that Gabriel gives in the verses and chapters that follow (Daniel 9. 24ff).   At the conclusion to Daniel’s prayer, the angel Gabriel appears which causes Daniel to drift into a ‘trance-like’ state:  “Listen, and I will tell you what will take place…..”  The point being, if you want to know, first you have to listen and you have to be willing to learn something new, beyond Jeremiah, beyond the prophets, and even beyond the answer that you want to hear.  Are you willing to learn Daniel? 

Now, to learn a ‘new’ calculation or ‘answer’, Daniel must prepare himself not simply to talk to God, but to ‘listen’ to what God has to say through his messenger.   And what we find in the next couple of chapters is a lot of discussion about what actually happened in day of Daniel and beyond, as the remnants of Alexander the Great, and the Greek empire began to persecute Israel.   This was the time, as Daniel surveys it, after the kings of Babylon, Media and Persia have gone off the scene and the king of Greece (8.21) has his rule ‘broken’ (8.22) breaking it up into 4 parts (8.22,23).  It is ‘at the end of their rule’ when “transgressions have reached their full measure” (8.23) that the time of the final “transgression that makes desolation” (8.13; 9.26-27) takes place.  This is the time when the ‘end comes with a flood’ (8.26) and a “prince comes” who will “destroy the city and sanctuary” (8.26).  This is the time Gabriel recalculates Jeremiah’s “seventy years” (9.2) into “70 weeks” (9.24) of years”, or 490 years.   

We don’t have time to go into the historical details of what happens in these “weeks” of years which are being rehashed in Daniel chapters 8-11.   If you study carefully, you’ll see that much of the conflict being retold here is about Israel’s political and religious conflict with the various ruling kingdoms of the Medes (9.1ff), the Persians (10.1ff) and mostly with the Greeks (11.3ff).  It is with these remnants of the “Greek” rule that the rulers of the ‘south’ (11: 5ff) are eventually overthrown by the a remnant ‘king of the north’ (11.15).  And it is out of this northern kingdom that there rises up a ‘contemptible’(NRSV) or ‘vile’ (KJV) ‘person’ (11.21) who gains the kingdom through deceptive ways (11.21b) and conquers Israel’s leader (11.22) because he has his heart set “against the holy covenant” (11.28) and causes many of God’s “wise” people to “suffer” and “fall victim” (11.33-35) just before the ‘end’ (11.35).   But it is this “appointed’ ( 11.29) ‘time of the end’  (11.35) Daniel also names  a “period of wrath” (8.19; 11.36) which is “a time of anguish, such as has never occurred before” (12.b).   It is exactly at this ‘time’ (12.1) that “Michael, the great prince, the protector of your (Daniel’s) people shall arise(12.1a), and it is “at that time” that “your” (Daniel’s) “people shall be delivered (12.1c).

All of these dramatic, historical, terrible events, happening to God’s covenant people, are what bring us right up to the end of this most evil earthly rule (11.45) and ushers in the beginning of God’s eternal rule that has been promised all the way back in Daniel 7 (7.26-27).   But before we try to understand and learn what Daniel’s vision might mean for us, we need to grasp what this meant for Daniel.   We must remember that Gabriel was interpreting for Daniel’s time and right after his time, when the Greek empire (following on the coat tails of Babylon and the others) attempted to crush Israel’s faith with a new language, new religion, and a new culture.   We know the time today as the times when Antiochus Epiphanies desecrated the temple, when the Maccabees ruled and when Israel barely survived desolation into absolute darkness.   That this ‘end’ of Israel did not happen but the “end” of the remnants of the Greek empires did happen, this is what the celebration of Hanukah is about.    It is also what the book of Daniel was about, for it was the hero stories and visions in the book of Daniel, reinterpreted and recalculated, that enabled God’s people to keep the faith and not lose hope in a very dark time. 

But what about us?   Can we, should we ‘recalculate’ Daniel’s warnings, visions, and stories for our own time of struggle against evil, against empire, and against all kinds of threats to God’s people?   Should we reinterpret and recalculate the “times” we are living in?   My answer starts simple:  Jesus did.  Jesus took the message of Daniel’s “transgression of desolation” and directly read his own times, as times of the end of Jerusalem and the beginning of a whole new day for God’s people.   Remember how Jesus ‘recalculated’ Daniel’s vision for his own time, as he told his disciples in Matthew 24.15ff: "So when you see the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place, as was spoken of by the prophet Daniel (let the reader understand),

  then those in Judea must flee to the mountains;  the one on the housetop must not go down to take what is in the house; the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat. (Mat 24:15-18 NRS)....Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see 'the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven' with power and great glory. (Mat 24:30 NRS).

I know that I might sound like a “prophecy preacher”, but I’m not saying that you should take Daniel and predict the end, but what I’m saying is that you should do what Jesus did, you should understand from Daniel that the end comes many times, and so does new beginnings, beginnings which start right when it seems that the end is near.   This is how it was in Daniel’s day and how it was in Jesus’ day, and it is still how it is in our day.   Yes, we live in times that also ask us to ‘recalculate’ and ‘reinterpret’ what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus.   If we are going to follow Jesus, whether the final end comes, or whether it is doesn’t, if we are going to keep following by faith, we must learn to read the times and recalculate what it means to be God’s faithful people in every age.   This is always what happens when evil rises up and God’s truth and God’s people come under fire.  We will think the end is near, but it is just that, close, near, almost, but ‘not yet’ or is it?   Are we living in ‘near’ or ‘not yet’ period, or are we living on the edge of God’s final kingdom?  The truth is we’ve been on the edge of the ‘end’ ever since the vision came near in Daniel and the kingdom came near in Jesus Christ.  We are a people who have been taught to keep praying for the kingdom to come, but God has not yet decided it is ‘time’ to “give us the  kingdom.”   Since it hasn’t yet come, and may not yet come, no matter how bad it looks, we are called to recalculate our faith.   We are called to rethink what it means to be a people who believe, who follow, who trust and who call themselves faithful.  This is exactly what Gabriel was helping Daniel to do, but how do we do that?   How do we see what is happening around us, and recalculate our faith and faithfulness to God? 

OBSERVE… DECIDE HOW YOU SHOULD LIVE

Daniel’s final words in this final chapter give us lasting guidance by giving us God’s big picture of what matters most.   Here, through the angelic messenger, God says, we can recalculate our faithfulness to God, even in evil times, because the faithful “shall be delivered” and because “everyone who is found written in the book” shall “awake”---some to “everlasting life”----and others to “shame and everlasting contempt”.   Those who understand this “big picture” of what will come in the ‘end’ are called the “wise” who will ‘shine like the stars” because their lives and their living is based on how they ‘recalculate’ their lives  by faith in God.  It is this kind of faith and wisdom that will “lead many to righteousness” (12: 1c-4), no matter what time it is.  

Do you recognize this ‘wisdom’ which God is now revealing to Daniel, is the same as God ultimately and supremely reveals through Jesus Christ?    It is a kind of spiritual, eternal wisdom that is gained as we decide to live by God’s word toward what is in the ‘window’ of the future, rather than choosing to live living by what going on around us, or by what is already behind us, in life’s rear view mirror.    This kind of wisdom is the kind of ‘wisdom’ we gain by understanding words like wrath, judgment, like resurrection of the dead, and like understanding how our own destiny is controlled by how we live and who we trust.   How would you ‘calculate’ or ‘recalculate’ your life, if everything that Daniel sees is true;  or by knowing that everything the gospel says is also true?  How would this cause you to ‘calculate’ what you need to do or ‘recalculate’ what you are doing?  

You can’t really read and understand a book like Daniel without stopping, thinking and deciding something important about life and about your own destiny.   A message like Daniel not only challenges us to keep our faith alive in difficult and dark days, but it also can cause us to ‘change’ our way of living for our own good, and for the good of the world.   For you see, Daniel’s message  is about being a ‘visionary’ as much as it is about seeing visions.  Daniel’s message is about deciding how you will live, more than it is about figuring out what time in history you are living in.   Daniel’s message is certainly not about gaining some secret, hidden, knowledge about who the Anti-Christ is, or about when Jesus will return, or about deciphering a calendar for the final end of history.  No, Daniel is about gaining the kind of wisdom that enables you and me to live and die with the ‘end in view’ so that we can live righteously and also “lead many to righteousness” (12.3).   That is what you thought Daniel’s message was about, wasn’t it?  It’s about gaining the wisdom that will ‘purify, cleanse and refine’ (12.10) our lives.   

Let me stop and ask:  What does it mean for you to be living the ‘good life’?  A good meal, a meaningful conversation, a lovely stroll in the afternoon, or collecting some perfect moments?  That’s what a man named Eugene O’Kelly began to seek after he was diagnosed with brain cancer.  At age 53, he seemed to be in excellent health, traveling and working long hours as chairman and chief executive of a giant accounting firm. At one point in his skyrocketing career, he was so determined to impress a potential client that he tracked down the man’s travel schedule and booked the seat next to him on a flight to Australia. He chatted with the guy halfway around the world, landed the account, and then immediately hopped on a flight back to Manhattan.

But then a visit to his doctor revealed that he had glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive brain cancer that would kill him in 100 days.  So, what do you do when you receive such devastating news? “I had focused on building and planning for the future,” said Mr. O’Kelly. “Now I would have to learn the true value of the present.”  Being a goal-oriented, Type-A high achiever, he decided to write a book about his experience: Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life. We can be glad he did, because O’Kelly is a man of faith who gives us some tremendously valuable advice about preparing for the end of our days. He decides to “unwind” relationships with important people in his life, taking the time to have intentionally final conversations with those who have meant a great deal to him.  He also goes searching for “Perfect Moments” — times of lingering over a fine meal, enjoying a long and deep conversation, taking the time to soak up the beauty of nature over the course of an afternoon. “I marveled at how many Perfect Moments I was having now,” he writes in his memoir.

Eugene O’Kelly didn’t have much time, so he had to get it right. In many ways he did, turning ordinary experiences into Perfect Moments. Then he died, reports The New York Times, just as his doctors predicted.   The end is coming for every one of us, but so often we behave as though we are going to live forever. What does it mean for us to live with the end in mind, and learn the true value of living in the present?  (From www.homileticsonline.com, 11.26.2006).   

Some will gain that wisdom from Daniel, but sadly, some won’t gain any wisdom at all.   Some will only ‘continue to act wickedly’ and never ‘understand’ (12.10-11).   But those who will be ‘wise’ can trust even without ‘understanding’ everything (12.5-9) .   The wise learn to deal with the ‘secrets’ that ‘remain sealed’ because God gives them the ability to ‘recalculate’ faith, no matter the times.   They learn to base their lives on God’s wisdom that remains God’s, not based on wild guesses or human speculation.  

When we trust God, no matter what comes, we will always have the wisdom to re-adjust our watches and ‘rest’ in faith (12.13).   Speaking of the living toward the future we never fully know, there is another famous story about a man with a terminal disease who is in the examining room with a friend.   The dying man says to his friend, “I’m afraid to die. What do you think lies on the other side?” The friend says to the dying man, “I don’t know.” The man says, “We go to the same church. In your line of work, you’ve dealt with death a lot more than me.  Surely you have some idea.”  At that point there came a scratching on the examining room door. The doctor opened it and in bounded his dog. The friend says, “This is my dog. He’s never been in this room before. He had no idea what was inside. He just knew that his master was in here, and when I opened the door, he came in without fear.  I know little of what is on the other side of death, but I believe one thing — my Master is there, and that’s enough!”

The faith Daniel imparts can teach us how to live, how to wait, and how to keep hope alive, if we are willing to “recalculate” our living and our dying with God’s help?  What do you need to ‘recalculate’?   What do you need to stop and pray about?  What do you need to rethink?  What do you need to decide to do differently, knowing that only what God says is true and really matters?   Do you have anything you need to recalculate in your life right now?  Wisdom is waiting on you.  The future is coming.  It’s time to recalculate!  Amen.