“And as for me, in the first year of Darius the Mede, I stood up to confirm and strengthen him.” – Daniel 11:1
In Daniel 11, we see five different rulers and around 150 years of human history predicted in advance by God, who, as we’ve seen throughout the book, knows everything that will happen in the future in perfect detail. The focus will go from Persia to Greece to Israel because God’s kids are in these foreign lands and are not all back home yet.
Bible teacher Charles Swindoll says, “Daniel 11 is one of the most remarkable chapters in the entire Bible,” and another Bible commentator notes that “in the first 35 verses, there are at least 135 prophecies that have been literally fulfilled and can be corroborated by a study of the history of the period.” (1) This is good news in our day and every day: we have a God who knows and rules the future, and our hope is in Him.
To start this chapter, we, once again, have a historical date that’s proven outside the Bible, as Darius the Mede has just begun his rule and reign over what was once Babylon.
A divine being, possibly the angel Gabriel, is telling Daniel what will happen. He talks about a succession of four kings, and the last one is King Ahasuerus, also called Xerxes, who was a prominent figure elsewhere in the Bible in a book called Esther. This king married Esther, who became a believer in God, and the entire book of Esther is about their relationship.
The whole point was to get the people of God from Persia to have the freedom to get back to Jerusalem, get the churches open, and worship God so that Jesus could come.
Gabriel’s message that he supports both Daniel, a spiritual leader, and Darius, a political leader, is a good reminder for us to pray for our political and spiritual leaders. We should pray for those in government, who are in authority, and who are making the decisions. Even if they don’t know the Lord, the Lord knows them, and the Lord can lead and guide them to make good decisions for us all.
In tomorrow’s devotional, we will see the historical overlap between the Israelites and Cleopatra.
Take some time today to pray for your political leaders, that God would draw them to Himself and that God would use them to accomplish His purposes.
(1) Miller, S. R. (1994). Vol. 18: Daniel. The New American Commentary (312–313). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.
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