Thoughts on Daniel 11

Today’s reading: Daniel 11; 1 Timothy 1-2

My thoughts on Daniel 11 this morning are mostly just musings on the nature of God based on the chapter. 

I don’t remember if I’ve talked about this on the blog before, but over the last couple years I’ve been wondering whether or not God knows the future. I was brought up with the understanding of God that, because He is outside of time, He necessarily sees/experiences all time; past, present, and future; simultaneously. This is why, I was taught, He is able to declare the future, because He can see what is going to happen just as clearly as what has already happened. Something made me stop and consider how contrived that assumption is, that just because He exists apart from time, He necessarily experiences/interacts with it in that particular way. It seems just as plausible to me that, though He is not bound by time Himself, it does not change the fact that only the present currently “exists,” meaning He wouldn’t actually know the future.

This actually seems, to me, to make a lot more sense of a lot of things. Spiritual powers pushing back and believing they can successfully rebel against God, for example, makes almost no sense if they know that God knows the future and there is nothing they can do about it. But God’s declarations of power throughout the Scriptures also come off differently if this is the case. From the beginning, God’s claim, when He declares the future, is not that He uniquely exists outside of time, but that He is uniquely powerful to make happen whatever He declares, and there is no other power, human or divine, that can successfully thwart His plans. This is why, He says, His promises can be trusted, not because He can see that He has already kept them in the future, but because nothing and nobody can stop Him from fulfilling His word.

I have been reading the Word, over the last couple years, with this question at the back of my mind, keeping an eye out for passages that would either strengthen, weaken, or fully invalidate the idea, and Daniel 11 is the first (and maybe only) passage that has really given me any pause in this regard. It mainly gives me pause because of the specificity of the prophecies made. Now, on the one hand, nothing in here would put this in the realm of impossibility for God to declare that He is going to make it happen. In fact, if that is what is happening, then this is actually a massive flex on God’s part. Not only is He declaring how things are going to go, but He is talking about nations and kings outside His own people, nations under rebellious gods (as we’ve talked about in other posts), and declaring how He is going to exercise His power, despite those other beings trying to thwart Him, to bring about His purposes in some very specific ways. If this is prophetic, and God can’t “see” the future, then this would be a massive flex. But the other side of it is that there’s a chance this isn’t actually prophetic, and I have to be honest with myself about that one as well. I talked a bit about the dating of the book when we started reading it, but the fact of the matter is that if Daniel was written late, there’s a chance this is all looking back, and being written in the apocalyptic genre, isn’t about declaring the future so much as teaching something of the nature of God and history. That’s outside my personal expectations of modern literature, but I don’t honestly know enough about ancient apocalyptic literature to say what the original audience would have understood and expected based on this. It’s common to hear Christians say today that if this is written after the fact, but presented as though it was declared beforehand, then that would mean the Scriptures are lying, but that fully ignores the question of genre and intentions of the writer, as well as the corresponding expectations of the people. For example, we don’t consider the writer of a satirical new article to be a liar because we expect, based on the fact that it is satirical, that they are skewing truth to make a point and to draw attention/highlight some issue or topic they are wanting to address. I’m just not really sure what the intentions/expectations of the Jewish people around this type of literature were at the time it was written.

So maybe Daniel 11 doesn’t really help me answer this question one way or the other, but it is definitely the passage that has most made me stop to think about it’s implications one way or the other on the topic.