By David ReayFriday 10 Feb 2017LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 0 minutes
Transcript:
Read Daniel 10:19-11:1
19 “Don’t be afraid,” he said, “for you are very precious to God. Peace! Be encouraged! Be strong!” As he spoke these words to me, I suddenly felt stronger and said to him, “Please speak to me, my lord, for you have strengthened me.”
20 He replied, “Do you know why I have come? Soon I must return to fight against the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia, and after that the spirit prince of the kingdom of Greece will come.21 Meanwhile, I will tell you what is written in the Book of Truth. (No one helps me against these spirit princes except Michael, your spirit prince. 11 1 I have been standing beside Michael to support and strengthen him since the first year of the reign of Darius the Mede.) (NLT)
A passage like this puts us in touch with a dimension of reality that we often ignore or dismiss. Our earthly struggles with earthly adversaries and threatening circumstances are reflections of a much wider struggle. A spiritual struggle carried out in the spiritual world by spiritual entities. The book of Revelation describes this. The prologue to the book of Job suggests it as well.
Here we have Daniel being visited by an angelic being who tells him of the ongoing battles he has with other spiritual beings. Daniel’s battles are earthly reflections of these other battles. There is much going on behind the scenes. This world is not all there is.
We dare not dismiss all this as merely weird ancient superstitions. Reality is far more than the material world of here and now. There are spiritual beings who defy definition, spiritual battles that we cannot grasp.
Then again, we dare not become fixated on such mysteries and build elaborate speculative schemes on the basis of one or two texts. We dare not assume our earthly struggles are the full story nor over spiritualise these struggles. We simply recognise that our lives are played out as part of a much larger story. We grasp only part of it.
Blessings
David Reay