The remarkable vision of the book of Daniel involved a lot of giving and receiving. This redemptive-historical passing of the baton occurs with regard to great pagan kings who must learn that their dominion has been given to them, the stripping of imperial privilege from one pretender after another and its deliverance into the hands of a successor, and the Ancient of Days’ deliverance of a power that was apparently his to claim from the start into the possession of ‘one like a son of man’.
Yet matters do not end there, for this literature has endured as encouragement to hard-pressed believers. This is to say more than the simple claim—invigorating in its own right—that a just God will in the end be seen to possess what is rightfully his. Indeed, the book claims decidedly more than merely this.
In language purposefully redolent of the Ancient of Days’ own reception of dominion, the ‘people of the holy ones of the Most High end up as the vision’s culminating beneficiaries:
The kingship and dominion
and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven
shall be given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High;
their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom,
and all dominions shall serve and obey them.
Within the broad biblical tradition of turning tables, this is one of the most extreme depictions.
Religion of many kinds has taught Christian believers to manage only small expectations. Yet a resolute strain of biblical insistence—embedded most often in the extreme language of apocalyptic but evident elsewhere as well—urges them to think more grandly, even to wonder aloud about royalty and its eventual heirs.
Canter Bridge 
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