Bible Commentaries

Daniel 12:3

I do believe the station of a popular preacher is one of the greatest trials on earth: a man in that position does not stop to soberly calculate how much, or rather how little is done when there appears a great effect, nor to consider how immense is the difference between deeply affecting the feelings and permanently changing the heart. The preacher who causes a great sensation and excited feelings is not necessarily the one who will receive the reward of shining as the stars for ever and ever, because he has turned many to righteousness.

—F. W. Robertson.

Daniel 12:3

Yonder stars are rising. Have you ever noticed their order, heard their ancient names, thought of what they were, as teachers, "lecturers," in that large public hall of the night; to the wisest men of old? Have you ever thought of the direct promise to you yourselves, that you may be like them if you will? "They that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars, for ever and ever." They that be wise. Don"t think that means knowing how big the moon is. It means knowing what you ought to do, as man or woman; what your duty to your father Daniel 12:3

Take as many to heaven with you as ye are able to draw. The more ye draw with you, ye shall be the welcomer yourself.

—Samuel Rutherford.

Reference.—XII:3.—T. Sadler, Sunday Thoughts, p212.

Daniel 12:4

It is written, Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. Surely the plain rule Daniel 12:4; Daniel 12:9

My book will await its reader; has not God waited six thousand years before He has created a man to contemplate His works?

—Kepler.

References.—XII:4.—H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxix. p291. XII:6.—J. Kerr Campbell, Christian World Pulpit, 1890 , p131.

Authority

Daniel 12:9-10

It is the manner of the Holy Spirit in sacred prophecy to pass rapidly from one future event to another foreshadowed by it. The Prophet in this Scripture having revealed the sufferings which the Hebrew Church and nation would endure in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, passes on by a quick transition to unfold the trials which await the Christian Church in the latter days. It is a subject for serious inquiry whether, in the history of the Church or world of late years, there has not been a gradual tendency towards a fulfilment of this prophecy.

I. In reviewing the past we may recognize a remarkable change in popular opinion concerning the origin and claims of authority, both civil and ecclesiastical. The belief taught by St. Paul and St. Peter that authority is derived from God, and that obedience is due to lawful authority in things not unlawful for the Lord's sake, has now been greatly weakened; and authority is commonly supposed to be derived from earth and not from heaven, and to have no other claim upon allegiance than that which depends on the voice of the people, and not on the will of God. Together with the change in popular opinion as to the claims of authority two other powers have grown up. Men crave protection, and admire strength. On one side some have almost deified the Roman Papacy, and on the other side some have been driven to defy all authority whether temporal or spiritual, and to cast away all belief in a Personal Ruler of the World, and in future rewards and punishments, and to place the people on the throne of God.

II. Our own duty in face of these events. We must endeavour to revive in the public mind a recognition of the Divine origin of authority. This feeling needs to be answered in rulers as well as in subjects. If parents, masters, and governors were resolved to act in the consciousness that their authority is received from God, and that He will call them to account at the Great Day, then they would use it as a sacred trust from heaven, and never abuse it to gratify their own selfish desires.

—Bishop Wordsworth, Clerical Library, vol. II. p262.

Daniel 12:10

God will not judge men by what they know; yet to have used knowledge rightly will be a staff to support and comfort us in passing through the dark valley.

—Jowett.

Daniel 12:10

Where, if not in Christ, is the power that can persuade a sinner to return, that can bring home a heart to God? Common mercies of God, though they have a leading faculty to repentance, yet the rebellious heart will not be led by them. The judgments of God, public or personal, though they ought to drive us to God, yet the heart unchanged runs the further from God. Leave Christ out, I say, and all other means work not this way; neither the works nor the word of God sounding daily in his ear, Return, return. Let the noise of the rod speak it too, and both join together to make the cry louder yet the wicked will do wickedly.

—Leighton.

Daniel 12:13

Nature in her grave nobleness is not less, but more dear now, when I remember that I shall soon bid her good even, to enter into the presence of her Lord and mine. New heavens and a new earth—I cannot sever my human heart from mine own land; and who shall say that those noble countries, casting off all impurity in the fiery trial that awaits them, shall not be our final heaven?

I love to think that it may be so; I love to think that the Lord, in His humanity, looks tenderly upon the mortal soil on which He sojourned in His wondrous life, and that here, perchance, in these very lands, made holy by His grace and power, our final rest shall be. It may be but a fancy; but it comes upon me with gentle might, like the whispered comfort of an angel. A new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness—a glorified humanity which, remaining human, is mortal no longer! with the judgment and the condemnation and the wars of the Lord overpast, and the earth and the heaven one fair broad country, and Himself over all, blessed for ever! These are the old man's dreams; and they shed new glory over the pleasant places in which my lines have fallen.

—From Adam Graeme of Mossgray, by Mrs. Oliphant.

Spare no deceit. Lay the sword upon it; go over it: keep yourselves clear of the blood of all men, either by word or writing; and keep yourselves clean, that you may stand in your throne, and every one have his lot, and stand in the lot in the Ancient of Days.

—Fox's Address to the Quakers, 1656.

Daniel 12:13

Jesus, that Flower of Jesse set without hands, getteth many a blast, and yet withers not, because He is His Father's noble Rose, casting a sweet smell through heaven and earth, and must grow; and in the same garden grow the saints, God's fair and beautiful lilies, under wind and rain, and all sunburned, and yet life remaineth at the root. Keep within His garden, and you shall grow with them, till the great Husbandman, our dear Master Gardener, come and transplant you from the lower part of His vineyard up to the higher, to the very heart of His garden, above the wrongs of the rain, sun, and wind.

—Samuel Rutherford.

Go Thou Thy Way

Daniel 12:13

If there be any deep prophetic sense in these last words of God to Daniel 12:13

These words are addressed to Daniel , now an old man, when his work is over, and little remains for him but to die.

I. For God's servants this present life is a time of labour, and in respect of it their time of rest is not yet. They are looking forward to their rest. This is the place of labour, with its accompanying measure of weariness and pain. Rest is an eventide blessing and comes when the day ends. True, the Gospel holds out a present rest, real and wonderful, to men believing, but it is true that called to rest in God, the Christian is also called to service: and this service has in it a laboriousness, a burden-bearing, an experience of weariness and an exercise of patience.

II. But this labour has its period. While He appoints to His servants their day of work, and amid the blessings of the life of faith disciplines them with their measure of toil and pain, He will certainly (and not too late) bring them into their rest. But what can we say of it?

a. One thing certain we may fix upon—its sinlessness. What exercise, what high employment, may be theirs, we do not know. But this wonderful rest goes through it. Sin and temptation come nigh them no more.

b. Here we live in a continual experience of change. But then how different. For want of constancy our rest here is unquiet and precarious at best—a brief snatch of breathing: but they possess it there.

c. We know how any great experience, religious or not, disquiets us here. The heart beats quick, and becomes too full, and joy itself becomes painful. Not so there: not so with those who are made conscious of the love that blesses them, and of the nearness of that uncreated and eternal nature.

III. At the end of the days God's servant shall find the work in which he bore a part perfected. And he shall find his own labour in it so, when God subjects His servants to that discipline which the most eminent of them, and those that have served most faithfully, have experienced, He is not sending them away as useless servants.

—R. Rainy, Sojourning With God, p37.

References.—XII:13.—C. Stanford, Penny Pulpit, No1033. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons (10th Series), p54. A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture— Daniel , p84. XII.—J. G. Murphy, The Book of Daniel , p199.