JESUS IN THE BOOK OF DANIEL
Daniel is not a book that rushes. It speaks in the language of exile, long nights, and patient faith. Its visions rise slowly, almost quietly, until you realize they are pointing somewhere far greater than Babylon, Persia, or Rome. They are pointing to a Person. The name of Jesus is not spoken, yet His presence presses in on every page.
Begin in the furnace. Three men are thrown into fire meant to erase them, and yet the flames lose their authority. What arrests the king is not merely their survival, but the Companion who joins them—a fourth Man, walking freely where death was expected (Daniel 3:25). Deliverance is not announced from heaven; it is embodied. Long before the incarnation, we are shown a Savior who does not rescue at a distance, but enters the suffering Himself.
Then there is the dream of the kingdoms. Gold gives way to silver, silver to bronze, bronze to iron—each impressive, each temporary. Into this fragile parade comes a Stone, not quarried by human hands, striking the image at its feet and growing until it fills the whole earth (Daniel 2:34-35, 44-45). The vision does not flatter human progress. It tells the truth: every kingdom built by ambition will eventually fracture. Only the Kingdom established by God endures. Jesus does not inherit the world by force; He replaces its false foundations altogether.
Daniel’s most arresting vision, however, comes not from the earth but from heaven. Amid the chaos of beasts and thrones, Daniel sees “One like the Son of Man” coming with the clouds, receiving dominion from the Ancient of Days—authority that cannot expire, a kingdom that cannot be voted out or conquered (Daniel 7:13-14). When Jesus later chooses Son of Man as His preferred name, He is not speaking modestly. He is identifying Himself as the figure Daniel saw—Heir of history, Judge of nations, Lord of all.
Even the cross casts its shadow here. Daniel is told that Messiah will come and then be “cut off, but not for Himself” (Daniel 9:26). No explanation is offered. None is needed. The silence around the phrase carries its own weight. The Anointed One will suffer, not for His own failure, but for the sake of others. Centuries before Golgotha, the logic of substitution is already in place.
The Book of Daniel does not ask us to decode charts or timelines; it asks us to trust the God who governs history while His people wait. It teaches us that Jesus stands with the faithful in the fire, rules above the rise and fall of empires, receives a Kingdom without end, and bears a wound that was never His own. Daniel does not merely point forward—it steadies the soul, reminding us that the future belongs to Christ, and therefore, so does the present.
BDD
