Daniel 7 and the Eclipse of the Kingdom of God
by Anthony F. Buzzard
In order to lay before you my approach to getting at the Truth of the Christian faith I want to begin with a quotation from Professor A. Lukyn Williams, DD, Cambridge professor and Hebrew scholar, delivering a series of lectures on the Hebrew Christian Messiah (1916):
With the Lord Jesus, as with every Jew, the Old Testament was the court to which, in the last instance, all appeal was made. It was the head from which flowed the waters of spiritual life in unadulterated purity and strength. With him again, as with every Jew of Palestine, the limits of the Old Testament did not exceed those of the present Hebrew canon.
Within that canon Jesus of course must have been familiar with the Book of Daniel and it was in that book that he found the vision of the Son of Man and his investiture as sovereign in the Kingdom of God. (The same vision is found also in the Similitudes of Enoch, but we will not press the evidence of that document since it may have been written after the time of Jesus. At any rate it simply reflects the Danielic vision of the kingdom of God.)
Again I want to emphasize the critical matter of establishing Daniel as a “base of operations” for the study of Jesus and the faith. Howard Clark Kee points out most usefully that Mark’s account of Jesus shows a “disproportionate interest in Daniel.” He notes that in Mark, “Daniel alone among all the OT books is quoted from every chapter. Moreover, Daniel is of the highest level of significance for the NT as a whole as a result of its overwhelming importance for Mark. Mark has been influenced directly by Daniel in his representation of the career and intention of Jesus” (The Community of the New Age, 1983, p. 45).
The vision of Daniel 7 gives us a marvelously simple pattern of the development of world history, a veritable theology of world history out of which the NT works. Its scheme is not complicated. It speaks of the replacement of bestial governments by the government of the Son of Man, the ideal of humanity, what man was intended to be. We know that the book of Daniel was read avidly by the Qumran community and it is obvious that it leaves a clear imprint on what Jesus has to say about his own career in Palestine and in the future. The appearance of the Kingdom of God in Daniel 7 is placed only after the demise of the fourth beast, of which the last stage is marked by the appearance of a kind of chaos monster, the little horn who exhausts the saints for a brief period.
It is on the ruins of that last, fourth beast with its evil tyrant that the Kingdom of God arises. The Kingdom of God is clearly as much a government as the preceding beast powers. Its arena is obviously the earth, since it is to be set up “under the whole heaven” (Dan. 7:27). The Son of Man, as a corporate figure representing the saints, is unmistakably the agent of God for the administration of sound government on the earth. The nature of the Kingdom of God as Daniel foresaw it may not be subjected to the disastrous “spiritualizing” tendency typical of much commentary. The sober comments of the International Critical Commentary warn us not to sacrifice common-sense and sound mindedness in the interests of trying to force on Daniel some sort of abstract Kingdom or present social ideal. Nebuchadnezzar would have been amazed if anyone thought his kingdom was mainly an abstract idea. The empire which follows the demise of the fourth evil empire is clearly just as much a visible concrete worldwide rule. It is in fact God’s revolutionary government, a true theocracy, a regime destined to do away with all present human governments. The International Critical Commentary says (p. 178):
“The last Kingdom replaces the first Four in the dream, and is, in the idea of the scene, spatially bound as are its predecessors; the Mountain fills the whole earth and is not a ‘spiritual’ Kingdom of Heaven.”
John Goldingay in his illuminating commentary on Daniel (Word Biblical Commentary, state of the art in evangelical commentary) notes:
When God’s time comes, His Kingdom requires the destruction of earthly Kingdoms rather than his working through them. They are God’s will for now, but not forever; and when His moment arrives, His Kingdom comes by catastrophe not by development. Daniel promises a new future, one which is not merely an extension of the present. It is of supernatural origin. But it is located on earth, not in heaven…. Daniel envisages no dissolution of the cosmos or creation of a different world. His understanding of this Kingdom is more like the prophetic idea of the Day of Yahweh than that of some later apocalypses. The problem of politics and history can only be resolved by a supernatural intervention that inaugurates a new Kingdom, but this involves changing the lordship of this world, not abandoning this world. The new Kingdom fills the earth. History is not destroyed: other sovereignties are… Daniel has not turned the Kingdom into something individualistic (His kingship is to be realized in the individual believer’s life), or otherworldly (it is to be realized in heaven). He reaffirms the universal, this-worldly, corporate perspective of Isa 40-55. Daniel is talking about a reign of God on earth and that continues to be more and more an object of hope than of sight. We still pray, ‘May Your rule come’ (Luke 11:2) and — in the light of Daniel’s revelation — have to be referring to a rule which is temporal, worldly, and social. Precisely at moments when such a vision is difficult to believe, Daniel’s readers are urged, via his final declaration to the king (v. 45b) to take it with utmost seriousness (cp. 8:26; 10:21; Rev 19:9; 21:5; 22:6). (from pp. 59-61, italics are his).
These facts have enormous importance for the teaching of Jesus about the Kingdom, about the Gospel in fact. We should not forget that the Gospel as it fell from the lips of Jesus and Paul has a specific label. It is always “the Gospel about the Kingdom of God.” Jesus uses his Kingdom message (the reason for which he was commissioned (Luke 4:43) to recruit the saints whom he gathered around him. This is core of the subject matter of the Gospels. And the Old Testament text plot from which this matter is taken is certainly the book of Daniel and principally the seventh chapter of Daniel (along with the 2nd chapter which likewise teaches us about the Kingdom which is to supersede present nation-states, not by development but by catastrophe (Dan. 2:44). The Kingdom, it is quite clear, will not come by evolution but by revolution. But such revolution is appropriate only when the Messiah returns. The Kingdom of God was not set up in Acts when the spirit came, much less in AD 70, as is fantastically suggested by Preterists.
Of course Daniel 7 is not the only passage of Scripture to speak of the Messiah and His service for the Kingdom of God. We must include in the same picture the righteous sufferer in the psalms and of course the rejected prophets and the suffering servant of Isaiah. The thread which holds together all these “saints” (of whom Jesus is the chief) is their destiny. This involves temporary, if intense suffering, followed by vindication when the Kingdom of God becomes theirs. According to the pattern laid out in Daniel, that vindication comes only at, and not before, the demise of the final evil ruler, who arises out of the fourth and final beast power. The NT echoes this scheme when it summarizes the faith by saying; “Through much tribulation we are destined to enter the Kingdom” (Acts 14:22).
Daniel 7 and the Christian Gospel
What, then, is the importance of this for our understanding of the Christian Gospel? When Jesus came into Galilee and launched his opening salvo: “The Kingdom of God is at hand: Repent and believe in the Gospel, i.e., about the Kingdom.” It is a fatal mistake of interpretation to ignore the background to the Kingdom of God in Daniel 7. To do this is to distort the Gospel. Yet this is what so often happens in contemporary evangelism. When I recently inquired of the Atlanta Church of Christ what Jesus meant by the Gospel of the Kingdom (not that this term Kingdom appeared in their own account of the Gospel) I was handed a print out of all NT Kingdom texts. I then asked them to define the Kingdom from its Hebrew, apocalyptic background in Daniel 7. This, I am convinced, is the right hermeneutical thing to do. Jesus must be understood in his own context, not ours. The peril is too great that we simply impose on Jesus our own ideological agendas and construct a Gospel to suit ourselves. History shows that we human beings are fond of attaching the label Jesus to our own projects and ideals and thus baptizing them as genuine expressions of the will of God. This method must be avoided.
We cannot afford to misunderstand Jesus when it comes to the Gospel because “whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospel’s will save it…Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, in this sinful and adulterous society, of him the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when he comes in the glory of his Father” (Mark 8:35, 38). Notice how the Gospel is parallel to and defined as the words of Jesus.
The Kingdom of God Defined by Daniel 7 and a Standard Lexicon
The term “Kingdom of God” is perhaps the most important word in the Bible. As someone has said, the whole genius of the Christian faith is concentrated in the words “Kingdom of God.” Jesus said that the whole point of his mission was to proclaim the Gospel about the Kingdom of God (Luke 4:43; cp. Acts 8:12).
So what is this Kingdom of God? What, in fact, is the Gospel which Jesus commands us to believe (Mark 1:14, 15)? Sometimes Christians would do well to go back to a standard Bible lexicon to find a proper definition. Let’s look at the famous lexicon by Thayer for enlightenment. Under the entry “Kingdom of God,” the lexicon gives the information from Daniel which provides us with this idea of the Kingdom of God, the subject of the Christian gospel:
Daniel had declared it to be God’s purpose that after four vast and mighty kingdoms had succeeded one another and the last of them shown itself hostile to the people of God, at length its despotism would be broken and the empire of the world would pass over forever to the people of God (Dan. 2:44; 7:14, 18, 22, 27).
Thayer then speaks of the foundation of the Kingdom which has already been laid in the preaching and miracles of Jesus in his ministry on earth. Then he refers to the primary meaning of the Kingdom of God:
But far more frequently [i.e. than any references to the “presence” of the Kingdom] the kingdom of Heaven/God is spoken of as a future blessing, since its establishment is to be looked for at Christ’s solemn return from the skies, the dead being called to life again and the ills and wrongs which burden the present state of things being done away, the powers being hostile to God being vanquished: Matt. 6:10, “Thy Kingdom come,” 8:11, Luke 13:26: “When you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom,” “until the day when I drink the wine new with you in the Kingdom of God,” Luke 22:28: I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the Kingdom shall come,” Mark 9:1: a reference to the second coming (See vv. 2:2-9 and Peter’s interpretation of the transfiguration as a vision of the Second Coming (II Pet. 1:16-18), Mark 15:43: Joseph was waiting for the Kingdom of God, just as Jesus is still now waiting for his enemies to be put under his feet (Heb. 10:13); Luke 9:27 with its fulfillment in the transfiguration in vv. 28-35; Luke 14:15; II Peter 1:11,: “everlasting Kingdom”; also in the phrase “enter the Kingdom of God,” (Matt. 5:20; 7:21; 18:3; 19:23, 24; Mark 9:47; 10:23, 24, 25; Luke 18:24, 25; John 3:5; Acts 14:22; James 2:5: “heirs [not yet inheritors] of the Kingdom” (James 2:5): “inherit the Kingdom of God” (Matt. 25:34; I Cor. 6:9; 15:50; Gal. 5:21; Eph. 5:5).
Thayer speaks of the Kingdom of God as occasionally a description of persons (Christians) who are being made fit for admission into the Kingdom of God when it comes (Rev. 1:6). But it should be noted that the first and dominant meaning of the Kingdom of God is the one given us by Daniel 7, from which the whole NT idea of the Kingdom of God is derived.
Note carefully the time-sequence given us by Daniel. In the vision of chapter 7, there is a sequence of four beasts and a final tyrant (horn). Following these four beasts and the horn the Kingdom of God is introduced. It will be governed by the Son of Man (Dan. 7:13, 14). Note again most carefully the time sequence. Where does the Kingdom come in relation to the other events? The answer is very simple. First the Beast power is slain and his body is destroyed by being given to the flame [the lake of fire] (see Dan. 7:11; “I watched until the Beast was slain…”). At that same time the dominion of the rest of the beasts was taken away (Dan. 7:12). Only after this is the Kingdom given to the Son of Man.
Note now how the interpretation given to Daniel reinforces a proper understanding of the Kingdom in the sequence of events. First there are four Beasts (Dan. 7:17). After that, the Kingdom is given to the saints (Dan. 7:18). No less than three more times, this sequence is emphasized. First the 10 horns of the fourth Beast appear, as does the little horn (vv. 20:21). And then (and here we have our answer about the timing of the Kingdom of God) “the time comes that the saints possess the Kingdom” (Dan. 7:22). Again the same point is made: Verses 23-25 first describe the rule of the Beast power which culminates in the arrival of a final tyrant (horn) who persecutes the saints. But this is only for a limited time (v. 25). The dominion of the little horn is removed and he is consumed and destroyed (v. 26). Following the removal and destruction of the Beast the Kingdom of God on earth, “under the whole heaven, ” is given to the saints and all nations and languages serve and obey them” (Dan. 7:27, GNB; RSV, etc.)
From this essential background in Daniel, it is a very simple matter to understand that the Kingdom of God is, as Thayer says, “far more often spoken of as a future blessing.”
The Book of Revelation which of course develops the themes of Jesus’ teaching and particularly the matter of the Kingdom in Daniel, tells us exactly what we would expect from our study of Daniel 7. First the Beast is slain in Revelation 19:20 by being thrown into the lake of fire. This event happens when the rider on the white horse appears as a warrior king accompanied by the armies of heaven (Rev. 19:11-15). His arrival in these verses is, as all agree, his second coming which, of course, has not yet happened. He comes in fact to “rule [i.e. set up the Kingdom over] the nations with a rod of iron” (Rev. 19:15). This same event is the one also described in Rev. 11:15-18, when “the Kingdoms of the world will become the Kingdom of God and Christ.” This happens at the 7th trumpet, the trumpet announcing the resurrection of the faithful dead. If this has not yet happened, then obviously the Kingdom of God has not yet arrived.
This sequence of events — first four Beasts, culminating in final anti-Christ, then the Second Coming of Jesus to establish the Kingdom — is exactly the sequence laid out by Daniel 7, as we have seen. There are three critically important “inceptive aorists” telling us about the Kingdom of God in Revelation: In Rev. 11:17: “God has begun to reign,” at the time when the Kingdoms of this world become the Kingdom of God at a future crisis. So in Rev. 19:6: “Hallelujah, because God has taken up his reign,” at the time of the future marriage banquet. And again in Rev. 20:4 the saints “came to life and began to reign with the Messiah for the 1000 years.” As Mounce says (Comm. on Revelation, New London Commentaries, 1997, p. 354) Daniel’s vision of the 4 beasts, their judgment and the passing of the kingdom to the saints of the Most High is undoubtedly the background for much of John’s presentation.
Why does all this matter?
“What about consumers of the Gospel? Are they getting the pure untainted message? Or are they getting the gospel loaded with American or post-Constantinian additives?” The question was asked by Jim Reapsome, director of the Evangelical Missions Information Service and editor of Evangelical Missions (Christianity Today, Oct. 2nd, 1995). I would like to add: “Are consumers getting the gospel in a depleted form with essential nutrients missing? Jim Reapsome continues with words which call forth from me a hearty “amen.” He says, “As I look back over nearly half a century of work in world missions, no question worries me more. My greatest worry is not about money for missions, people for missions or the strategies and management for missions. It’s about the content in the package we call the gospel — the cure for people sins — and whether we have administered the right medicine.” I once attended,” he goes on, “a study conference where missions scholars and executives wrangled for a weekend, trying to define the meaning of conversion. But I have never been to one where the Gospel itself was addressed. We just assume we know. This can be a fatal assumption.”
Could it be that the single most valuable pearl has been lost from the string of ideas presented to potential converts interested in salvation in Jesus?
If I could leave you with a single point for meditation it would be just this question. Is it sufficient to quote 3 verses from Paul (typically I Cor. 15:1-3) to the effect that belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus is all that he taught as the Gospel? Can we afford to overlook the obvious fact that Jesus and the Apostles preached “the Gospel of the Kingdom” without at that stage saying a word about the Messiah’s death and resurrection? Can it possibly be right that the phrase “Gospel of the Kingdom” is not the way we describe the Gospel, though Luke insists that the Kingdom was the content of the Gospel which Paul (following Jesus) always took to the people both Jews and Gentiles? (Acts 19:8; 20:25; 28:23, 31. Cp. Acts 8:12).
Surely it must be the part of wisdom to adopt the “standard of sound words” recommended by Paul as a sort of creed II Tim. 1:13 by habitually using the very words of Jesus as the basis of our teaching? These words of Jesus Paul calls “health-giving words” (1 Tim. 6:3). Without the words and the Gospel of Jesus (Rom. 10:17; 16:25) we are as, Paul said, ignoramuses. And John could not have warned us more vigorously when, late in the NT period, he said, “Anyone who ‘progresses’ and does not remain in the teaching of Christ does not belong to God. He who remains in that teaching has both the Father and the Son” (2 John 7-9).
Revival and unity amongst believers will be under way when the Hebrew Bible again takes its place as the repository of divine truth lying at the basis of what Jesus believed and taught. When the doctrine of man as a whole person needing to acquire immortality through resurrection is reinstated believers will be able to identify with the Apostles for whom the hope of the Kingdom and immortality in it was the great driving force behind Christian living and evangelism. The re-orientation toward the future must not be blocked by arguments about the need for some other gospel in the present — often a plea for the reduction of Christianity to ethics. But the NT Christianity is not just ethics — its ethics are set in a very particular and Jewish setting which cannot be discarded. Calling the Danielic, apocalyptic setting of the NT a useless husk from which we must extract a valuable kernel of timeless ethics is dishonest practice, an excuse for unbelief. The teaching of Jesus is to be accepted lock, stock and barrel. Only then can we do what Jesus calls “doing well”: You call me teacher and Lord and you do well. For so I am” (John 13:13). Do we hear enough about accepting Jesus as Lord (meaning that we are to obey all his commands), and how seldom is there a plea to accept him as “rabbi/teacher” in all his splendid Jewishness and as the model preacher of the saving Gospel?
While the cry goes out that “doctrine divides” and ethics unite, we will not achieve unity. Let us indeed unite, not however to comfort ourselves with easy optimism that all is well with the status quo, but to dialogue and admonish one another to return to the basic teachings of Jesus, under the overarching theme of the Gospel about the Kingdom of God. Unity in the Bible is unity in the truth as it is in Jesus. This can be achieved when tradition (however long-standing) yields after careful inspection to the truth of Scripture. Opportunities for the necessary Berean exercise are available to all of us in this information-packed early 21st century.
Let me summarize. The basic teachings of Jesus are the basis for establishing a relationship between ourselves and God. Truth, not error, is essential if we are to serve God “in spirit and truth,” in the holy spirit, in fact, which is the “spirit of the truth,” and the operational presence of God, his vitalizing energy (Ps. 51:11), and the mind of Christ. The Gospel is the vehicle of that energy and must not be tampered with (Rom. 1:16; I Thess. 2:13). The Gospel is to be defined first by the words of the historical Jesus and not first from isolated texts in Paul. Jesus’ own example forces us back to the Hebrew Bible and especially the Book of Daniel in order to get our feet firmly planted on solid exegetical ground. Contemporary statements about the Gospel are in danger of promoting a vague gnosticism unless they are rooted in the Hebrew soil of the Bible. I think the Church is ready for a change of approach to Bible-study, one that sheds the unwanted accretions of Greek philosophy against which Paul warned. The Gospel as the technical term par excellence must not become a kind of wax nose to be bent into various shapes and defined in a myriad of different ways (Certainly not divided into 8 different gospels as Bullinger [Companion Bible] proposes!). The Gospel is in the NT, a fixed quantity understood by reader and writer.
When we ask how Paul went about creating faith and love in the Church, we find that it was often by pleading for a clear idea about the content of hope. He speaks about “faith and love which spring from hope” (Col. 1:4, 5 ). No wonder he prayed for the Ephesians to have their mental eyes opened to the hope of the future inheritance (Eph. 1:14-18). Paul recognized that it was because of future joy that Jesus endured the cross (Heb. 12:2).
The Jesuanic covenant, based on the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants made by God with Jesus, was the gift of the Kingdom of God (Luke 22:28-30: “Just as my Father covenanted with me… so I covenant with you to give you the Kingdom”). Ruling the world with Jesus is likely to provide a much better stimulus to good ethics now than Platonic promises of disembodied life in heaven! News about the Kingdom is anyway the heart of the Gospel as Jesus preached it, and the spreading of that news to the far corners of the world is the task of the Church until the Messiah arrives (Matt. 24:14). “Fear not, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom,” he had said earlier (Luke 12:32).
I finish now where I began with the fact that Kingdom of God, the heart of the Gospel as Jesus preached it, concerns a yet future world-order initiated by the future coming of Jesus. It will be God’s revolutionary government. That message must grab us in the present and the spread of that message is the church’s concern and commission. In no text of the NT does anyone say that we are now reigning with Christ, much less that the dead are. Paul urged the Corinthians not to believe that they had already become kings (I Cor. 4:8), while he wished the time had come (which it had not) when they would indeed become kings together (ibid.) In Rom. 5:17, as also in 2 Tim. 2:12, the “co-ruling” word (“we shall reign”) is again deliberately in the future tense” We shall reign in life” — “life” being a synonym for the Kingdom (see Matt. 19:17, 23). As Eric Sauer says so well, “The Church is the official administrative staff, the ruling aristocracy of the coming Kingdom” (From Eternity to Eternity, 1993, p. 93). Moffat caught the spirit of this astonishing teaching in his translation of 1 Cor. 6:2: “Don’t you know that the saints are going to manage the world, and if the world is to come under your jurisdiction…The unrighteous will not inherit the Kingdom” (1 Cor. 6:9). To inherit the Kingdom is parallel to managing the world with Christ. Why do Christians insist on obscuring the biblical hope with their vague talk about “going to heaven”? Jesus said that “the meek were going to inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5), and they will rule with him on the earth (Rev 5:10).
Is this not a beautiful, realistic, comforting and inspiring prospect for all believers — so easy and straightforward and asking only for a child-like acceptance on our part?
And in I Cor. 15:50 Paul says that apart from a new body at the resurrection it is impossible to inherit the Kingdom of God. Such is his fight with Gnostic attempts to move the future into the present and thus have no future. You can have June’s weather in April, but you cannot pretend that April is really June.
And finally, please may we do Luke the honor of noticing that early in Acts he sets up his scheme of redemption with precision. The spirit is to come in a few days (Acts 1:5) but the coming of the Kingdom is to be at a time unknown in the future (Acts 1: 6, 7). Therefore the Kingdom of God was not inaugurated at the ascension, though the spirit as a downpayment of that future kingdom was poured out. That fact is likely to have a profound effect on some received traditional understandings.
The following is a useful confirmatory quotation from a leading NT scholar (Edward Schweitzer, Mark, pp. 45-47):
The Kingdom of God. “When Jesus proclaims that the Kingdom of God is near, he is adopting a concept which was coined in the O.T…… [the Kingdom] is primarily God’s unchallenged sovereignty in the end-time (Isa. 52:7). Judaism spoke of the reign of God which comes after the annihilation of every foe and the end of all suffering…. In the NT the Kingdom of God is conceived, first of all, as something in the future (Mark 9:1, 47, 14:25, Mat. 13:41-43; 20:21; Luke 22:16, 18; 1 Cor. 15:50, et al. which comes from God (Mark 9:1; Mat. 6:10; Luke 17:20; 19:11. Therefore it is something that men can only wait for (Mark 15:43) [Had Joseph missed the boat?!], Matt. 6:33, receive Mark 10:15, cp. Luke 12:32 and inherit I Cor. 6:9; Gal 5:21; James 2:5, but he is not able to create it by himself.”
