Canter Bridge

When biblical prophets and seers look to the future that lies still over their horizon, they peer though a wide lens. The scope and scale become vast.

As the Ancient of Days appears in the book of Daniel’s seventh chapter, we are told that:

A thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood attending him.

Soon the parameters that are employed to speak of the dominion that this white-haired Father Figure and the ‘son of man’ who receives the authority of his special ambassador shift to those that define ethnicities:

As I watched in the night visions,
I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
And he came to the Ancient One
and was presented before him.
To him was given dominion
and glory and kingship,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not pass away,
and his kingship is one
that shall never be destroyed.

It might seem curious in such an odd genre that Daniel should repeatedly report that his visions terrified and disturbed him. One might wonder whether smug satisfaction might not be the more obvious result, since Daniel indicates that the dominion of the Ancient and his ‘son of man’ will be established by just cause.

The key to understanding this small dilemma lies perhaps in the profound realism of this ‘apocalyptic’, or revelatory, literature. It is true that this genre traffics in symbols, dreams, and interpretations more than any other that is found in the biblical anthology, a matter that might make ‘realism’ seem the antithesis of its force and manner. Yet this is not so.

Apocalyptic literature frequently derives from historical moments of deep frustration with the status quo and the prospects of seeing it improved. Apocalyptic looks to divine intervention with a passion and focus that is shared by few other literary dialects.

Yet biblical apocalyptic is not, as is so often assumed with facile superficiality, a flight from reality. Its claim, which should be respected at least prima facie, is that it penetrates to the core of events, glimpsing there the confrontation of forces that less perceptive observers might only guess at if they think of them at all.

Deep beneath the surface of human and cosmic events, we are insistently urged to accept by the Bible’s apocalyptic visionaries, there is battle. Long-lasting, world-wrenching battle that leaves vast fields of human conflict strewn with the bodies of its victims. With disturbing regularity, these are the bodies of good men and women, those whom the seer considers to be ‘saints of the Most High’.

Daniel glimpses a moment of universal triumph, when ‘ten thousand times ten thousand’ stand ready to serve the Ancient of Days’, when a figure of grand nobility called merely ‘a son of man’ rules over all ‘peoples, nations, and languages’.

One might perhaps absorb the giddiness of it all, do a jig, allow oneself a triumphant snort.

Daniel will not do so. He is shaken, turned pale, profoundly troubled by it all.

He sees too deeply.