The Aftershock of Revelation Text: Daniel 7:28
Introduction: The Weight of Glory and Terror
We live in a trivial age. Our celebrities are famous for being famous, our news cycles are driven by manufactured outrage, and our personal anxieties tend to orbit around matters of supreme unimportance. We are, to put it bluntly, a people unaccustomed to dealing with weighty realities. We want a God who is manageable, a future that is predictable, and a faith that is comfortable. We want a Christianity that has been thoroughly domesticated, declawed, and made safe for suburban living.
But the God of Scripture is not safe. He is the sovereign Lord of history, and His plans are not trivial. He deals in the rise and fall of empires, the clash of cosmic dominions, and the inexorable advance of a kingdom that will grind all others to powder. When this God pulls back the curtain of ordinary history to show one of His prophets what is really going on, the result is not a warm, fuzzy feeling. The result is terror. The result is a man so shaken to his core that his face changes color.
The book of Daniel is about the universal sovereignty of Jehovah over all the nations of men. It is a book about the long defeat of paganism and the ultimate, triumphant victory of Jesus Christ. Daniel has just been given a front row seat to the highlight reel of the next several centuries of world history. He has seen four monstrous, ravenous beasts emerge from the sea of nations, representing the successive empires of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome. He has seen the fourth beast, dreadful and terrible, with its iron teeth and its blasphemous little horn making war against the saints. It is a vision of raw, satanic power, of persecution, and of the apparent triumph of evil.
But then, the scene shifts to the courtroom of heaven. He sees the Ancient of Days take His seat, and the books are opened. Judgment is passed, and the beast is slain. And then, coming with the clouds of heaven, Daniel sees one like a Son of Man. This is not the second coming at the end of time; this is the ascension of Jesus Christ. He approaches the Ancient of Days and is given dominion, glory, and a kingdom that will never be destroyed. This kingdom is then handed over to the saints of the Most High. The vision is one of terrifying conflict followed by absolute victory.
And after all this, after seeing the ultimate triumph of God, how does Daniel respond? He is a wreck. He is undone. And in his response, we learn a crucial lesson about the nature of divine revelation and the proper posture of a man who has truly seen the terror and the glory of the Lord.
The Text
“At this point the matter of this revelation ended. As for me, Daniel, my thoughts were greatly alarming me, and the splendor of my face changed, but I kept the matter in my heart.”
(Daniel 7:28 LSB)
The End of the Matter
The verse begins with a simple, almost abrupt, statement:
"At this point the matter of this revelation ended." (Daniel 7:28a)
The curtain comes down. The vision is over. The angel has given the interpretation, and there is nothing more to be said for now. God is not a chatterbox. He reveals what is necessary for His people to know, and no more. He gives us enough light for the next step, enough information to foster faith, not to satisfy every last bit of our idle curiosity. We always want the full blueprint, the detailed itinerary for the next thousand years. God gives us a lamp for our feet, not a searchlight for the entire county.
This finality is important. The revelation was a coherent whole. It was a complete thought, a finished word from God. It was not a fragment to be pieced together with other religious notions or philosophical speculations. It was a self-contained, authoritative declaration of what was to come. This is the nature of all divine revelation. It is not offered as a suggestion for our consideration. It is the unalterable word of the living God, and it lands with a weight that we, in our flippant age, can scarcely comprehend.
The end of the vision is the beginning of Daniel's personal struggle with it. The objective word from God has been delivered; now the subjective processing begins. And this is where we must pay close attention. It is one thing to read about Daniel's vision in the comfort of our study. It is another thing entirely to be the man who actually saw it.
The Prophet's Panic
Daniel's reaction is not one of detached academic interest. It is visceral and violent.
"As for me, Daniel, my thoughts were greatly alarming me, and the splendor of my face changed..." (Daniel 7:28b LSB)
His thoughts were not just troubling; they were "greatly alarming" him. The word carries the idea of being thrown into a state of terror and confusion. This is a man who stood down kings and faced a den of lions without flinching. But a vision from God undoes him. Why? Why would a vision that ends in the total victory of Christ and His saints be so terrifying?
First, we must understand that Daniel saw the cost of that victory. He saw the teeth of the beasts. He saw the little horn "making war against the saints and prevailing over them" for a time. He saw the immense suffering, the martyrdoms, the persecution, and the sheer, bloody-minded arrogance of pagan empires that God would permit to rise and rage against His people. He saw the long, hard road that had to be traveled before the kingdom was fully possessed by the saints. Knowing the end of the story is a comfort, but it does not erase the horror of the middle chapters. Daniel was being shown the price of redemption, and it was staggering.
Second, the glory itself is terrifying to mortal man. We are used to thinking of glory in sentimental terms. But biblical glory, the manifest presence of the holy God, is a terrifying thing for a sinner to behold. When Isaiah saw the Lord, high and lifted up, his response was not "how lovely," but "Woe is me! For I am lost!" (Isaiah 6:5). When John saw the glorified Christ on Patmos, he "fell at his feet as though dead" (Revelation 1:17). Daniel has just looked into the control room of the universe. He has seen the unshielded sovereignty of God, and the sight is overwhelming. It is too much for his created frame to bear.
His internal turmoil had an external effect: "the splendor of my face changed." The color drained from his face. He grew pale with fright. This is not the tranquil countenance of a mystic who has achieved some inner peace. This is the pale face of a man who has seen a ghost, or rather, the Holy Ghost orchestrating the violent collisions of world history. This is a holy terror, a righteous fear. It is the beginning of wisdom. If your theology does not, at some point, make you tremble, it is a theology that has not yet wrestled with the living God.
The Steward's Secrecy
Daniel's final response is one of faithful stewardship. He is overwhelmed, but he is not irresponsible.
"...but I kept the matter in my heart." (Daniel 7:28c LSB)
He did not run out and start a podcast. He did not immediately try to form a political party based on his new eschatological insights. He treasured it. He pondered it. He kept it close. This is reminiscent of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who after the visit of the shepherds, "treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart" (Luke 2:19).
But there is another crucial reason for this secrecy. Daniel is told later in his book to "shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end" (Daniel 12:4). The full meaning and application of these visions were not for his immediate audience. The events he foresaw, the rise of Greece and Rome, the coming of the Son of Man, were still centuries in the future. The prophecy was to be preserved, sealed up, until the generation that would see its fulfillment.
This stands in stark contrast to what the apostle John is told in Revelation. An angel tells him, "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near" (Revelation 22:10). This is one of the clearest signposts for a preterist understanding of eschatology. Daniel's prophecies pointed to events far in his future, culminating in the first coming of Christ and the establishment of His kingdom. John's prophecies in Revelation concern the judgment on first-century Jerusalem and the Roman empire, events that were to happen "shortly." Daniel sealed his book because the time was long; John left his open because the time was at hand.
Daniel's keeping the matter in his heart was an act of profound faith and obedience. He was entrusted with a revelation that was bigger than him, a word that would not come to full fruition for many generations. His job was not to understand every detail, but to faithfully record it and preserve it. He was a steward of the mysteries of God, and he understood that some mysteries are to be pondered in quiet reverence and fear before they are to be proclaimed from the housetops.
Conclusion: The Proper Weight of Prophecy
So what do we take from this? What does Daniel's panic and subsequent silence teach us here at the far end of history?
First, it teaches us to approach the prophetic word with humility and a holy fear. We have the completed canon. We can see how Daniel's vision was fulfilled in the rise of the empires and, most gloriously, in the ascension and enthronement of Jesus Christ. We are the saints who have been given the kingdom. But we should not let this familiarity breed contempt. The historical realities that this vision predicted were brutal and bloody. The spiritual realities it depicts are of a God whose power and sovereignty are utterly terrifying. We should not treat eschatology as a game of pinning the tail on the Antichrist or a hobby for chart-makers. It is the revelation of the awesome and terrible plan of God.
Second, it shows us that true spiritual insight is unsettling. A genuine encounter with the living God will wreck your composure. It will disturb your comfortable assumptions and alarm your thoughts. If your faith has never cost you a pale face, if it has never sent you to your knees in trembling awe, then you have to ask if you have encountered the God of Daniel or a more manageable idol of your own making. The gospel is good news, but it is good news about a holy God who judges sin and topples empires. That is not a tame reality.
Finally, we learn that the proper response to overwhelming revelation is faithful stewardship. Like Daniel, we are to keep these matters in our hearts. This does not mean we are to be silent, for we live in the age of the unsealed book. We are to proclaim the crown rights of King Jesus over every beastly empire of man. But we must do so from a posture of deep, internal reverence. We must let the Word dwell in us richly. We must ponder it, tremble before it, and let it change us from the inside out. Only then can we speak of these things with the gravity they deserve.
Daniel was undone by a vision of things to come. We are the beneficiaries of the fulfillment of that vision. The Son of Man has come on the clouds. The kingdom has been given to the saints. The beasts still rage, to be sure, but their doom is written. Therefore, we should not be alarmed as Daniel was, for we know the outcome. But we should be sobered. We should be weighty. And we should keep the matter in our hearts, treasuring the terrible and glorious truth that our God reigns.