The Lord is still sovereign over human history, so His people should be faithful in their duties and enjoy the privileges that they have as God’s covenant people. Throughout it all, they should trust in the Lord of their salvation and know that one day He will restore them. Just as the righteous remnant of Israel must continue in spite of the ebb and flow of history, the followers of Messiah today should find hope in the prophecies of Daniel.

The book of Daniel is unique in the Old Testament due to its content and the pivotal role it plays between the Old Testament prophecies about the restoration of Israel and the New Testament fulfillment of those prophecies in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. The book is rich in complexity and depth, a richness that makes it hard to summarize in brief. There are, however, three aspects of the book that open it up to the modern reader.

1. The Opening Stories (Chs. 1–6) Give Credence to the Later Prophecies of the Book (Chs. 7–12)

The stories in the opening chapters of Daniel, written mostly in Aramaic, paint a picture of a generation of young Judahites who are taken into captivity in Babylon in 605 BC. There they face terrible persecution from their captors as well as incredible successes at the hand of the Lord, in whom they put their trust. The story about Daniel and his friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego makes clear literary and linguistic connections to the story of Joseph in Egypt. For example, both are described as good-looking (Gen. 39:6; Dan. 1:4), both involve the interpretation of kings’ dreams that create distress for these kings and reveal God’s plan for the future, and many of the same Hebrew words are used throughout each story to link them together. Like Joseph, Daniel and his friends are faithful to God’s call while serving in a foreign court, and as a result, they are lifted up to positions of incredible affluence, even receiving a gold chain around the neck (Gen. 41:42; Dan. 5:29).

Their faithfulness in the face of persecution bolsters Daniel’s prophetic message about the restoration both to the Israelites in the diaspora and the returnees who had gone back to Jerusalem in 536 BC after the fall of Babylon to the Medo-Persian coalition. This would have been particularly important in light of Daniel’s primary message that the restoration from exile is going to be postponed sevenfold (Dan. 9:24).

2. The Sevenfold Postponement of the Restoration of Jerusalem, Announced in Daniel, Creates a Bridge between the Events of the Old Testament and Those of Jesus’ Ministry

Ever since the time of Moses, a national exile and restoration of some kind was held out in front of Israel (Deut. 28:64–68; 30:1–10).

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