Apocalyptic news

Because US elections always happen around this time of year, the lectionary always has me reading the book of Daniel in the mornings.  I strongly recommend reading Daniel before reading the news; and then maybe reading it again after the news if you need to.  Daniel is a book of apocalyptic, which does not mean that it is all dramatic and disastrous - that wouldn't make it very much different from the BBC news website (or whatever other news source you're currently using).  Daniel is apocalyptic because it peels back the surface level of the apparent churn of human events to show the deeper spiritual significance of what is going on.  It doesn't deny the reality of the human level - as if history is just an illusion, or a mere mask for something else - but it gives a revealed insight into what is going on from the divine perspective, which is often very much at odds with the human perspective.

Perhaps the key revelation in Daniel is this: whilst there is constant flux in human affairs, and no human state has the stability and permanence to which it pretends, there is a divine plan which lies beneath everything and which will be brought to light as the meaning of it all.  So in chapter 2 this morning we were being reminded that kingdoms - even Nebuchadnezzar's apparently unmovable kingdom - will come to an end, the Most High is overseeing the succession of human states with the intention of bringing to eternal dominance the Kingdom of his own Son.  There is a lot going on at the human level, but when God desires he brings the whole thing - not just an individual kingdom but the whole succession, the whole constant movement of human rise and fall - crashing down, to be replaced by an unshakeable Rock.

I've been mulling some applications.  Firstly, it's so important to remember with Daniel that it is God who "changes the times and seasons; he removes kings and establishes kings."  I think we can be prone to imagining a sort of 'providence of the gaps', where the Lord is in charge of things we can't quite explain or quantify, but where there is a process, an ordered system which we can understand, for getting something done, God is an unnecessary hypothesis.  In an ordered democratic system, surely voters and not the Most High choose the leaders.  But the biblical vision of providence is much more thoroughgoing than this.  Nothing falls outside of God's control, even things which are eminently within our control.

Second, knowledge of providence does not blunt the horrors of history.  Consider that the whole book of Daniel happens within the context of exile, a result of brutal invasion and destruction.  The kings featured are not good characters.  They are brutal imperialists.  Even in chapter 2, Daniel and his friends live under the threat of a capricious death sentence.  Everything is bad.  And yet...  I think we need to be willing to face how bad things are (although a reading of Daniel does helpfully remind us that things could be and have been much worse), and still say 'and yet...' without flinching.  God is in control.  That he allows these things, these terrible things, may be incomprehensible to us, but he has shown us that he is good, and he is after all the God of the cross and resurrection, in that order.

Third, I think it is helpful to admit a very high degree of uncertainty when we're thinking about reading human history.  There is no manifest and obvious storyline to human history, and although it is probably inevitable that we will try to frame events within a plot that makes sense to us, we have to admit that we don't really know what is going on.  Even for Christians, who 'know' the big storyline, we need to be cautious about assigning particular events in 'secular' history a role in that story.  After all, when God establishes his everlasting kingdom that doesn't come from within the churn of human history, but from without, and takes down the whole human statue.