These 2 chapters really go together, so I am not going to break them into 2 different readings.  Now, at the onset, I am going to go ahead and say that this is a very controversial chapter.  Scholars have wrestled with this material for a while now, trying to figure out the dates and events and timelines.  Most Christians are taught that the Bible is ‘the infallible Word of God’, and that there can’t be any mistakes in it.  I don’t want to trample on that idea, so we can only really say that this chapter has challenged scholars in that they haven’t been able to put the timelines and events into place yet.  That being said, it seems that time has tended to synchronize the seeming randomness and our understanding, so it wouldn’t shock me if this occurred one day as it related to this text as well.

A word on that infallibility principle - I think it is important, as followers of Jesus, that our faith doesn’t hinge on the infallibility of the Bible.  The Bible isn’t really even necessary for our faith...it is a helpful resource, and it is certainly a God-given resource, but the church as we know it, the followers of Jesus, were well-established and flourishing long before the Bible was ever assembled as a book.  It is the events of the resurrection on which our faith should hinge, and the Bible should be viewed as a prop, not the main element of faith.  I think that is lost in many cases today, and we end up concerned with defending the Bible rather than exploring it, living it, and using it as a way to experience God.

At any rate, I digress...back to today’s reading, the conclusion of Daniel.  Instead of plowing deep into these events and timelines (which you will notice I have mostly avoided already), I want to point out the dates at the end of the chapter.  I don’t really know what Daniel is specifically getting at with these numbers of days, but I can say this...there is a pattern of long-term timelines all throughout his writings.  As I was reading this, the thought that coming to mind is just how long God’s timeline is compared to mine.  It is so hard to maintain the perspective of eternity in my daily life.  For me, the older I get, the shorter life seems to get, and the more I tend to appreciate these longer stretches of time God sees our lives through, but I still can’t fathom God’s work spanning over thousands of years.  It is a time horizon for which I have no real frame of reference.  I am reminded once more, as Daniel has done repeatedly, that I have to live my life with my wagon hitched to God’s, otherwise, there is just no way to create meaning in my life.  I have heard it called ‘significant insignificance’, this idea that our only hope for finding hope, is placing our hope in the One who is orchestrating eternity.

So, to close our time in Daniel, the big themes I am taking away from these readings are the ideas that faithfulness in the small things adds up, and that through continued faithfulness we will experience greater levels of understanding as to what God is doing in the world around us, and we’ll experience a stronger relationship with Him.  I also have come to appreciate on a higher level that God really is in the driver’s seat; that He has a plan that spans generations, and that He is going to work that plan out with or without me, and my best life, my greatest fulfillment, will come in partnering with Him.  In that partnering, I can have the most significant life possible, all while realizing that I am just incapable of truly understand how big and how great our God is.