My First Bible #12: Daniel 10:18-19

Once more he took hold of me, and I felt stronger. He said, “God loves you, so don't let anything worry you or frighten you.” (GNT)


This is one of those moments when the Good News Translation and others like it use language that evokes so much more meaning and speaks much more powerfully than translations like the NIV. The NIV says: Again the one who looked like a man touched me and gave me strength. ‘Do not be afraid, you who are highly esteemed,’ he said. ‘Peace! Be strong now; be strong.’ I like the repeated 'be strong' - and it's all taken from the original Hebrew. The NIV is, of course, faithful to the words, but the GNB illuminates how we might make this our own.  God loves you.

The context is Daniel.  The now-elderly prophet is standing on the banks of the Tigris and sees an awesome but alarming angel, who the proceeds (in Daniel 11) to give him a message of the things which are to come.  But he's so overwhelmed by this experience and his own weakness that the angel needs to reassure him before he goes on to deliver the message.  Suffice to say, I was not standing on a river bank seeing an angel, or bringing to mind any other similar experience, when I wrote down this verse for future reference.

And yet this simple interpretation of these words, which I believe do convey the meaning being the angel's words to David appropriately, and yet expressed in a way me might speak to each other today, brings to mind this simple but profound truth that it's so easy to forget: it's the same God, with the same love, walking with Adam and Eve in the Garden, appearing to Moses as Yahweh in the burning bush, sending messages to Daniel through an angel on the banks of the Tigris, and saying 'Saul, why do you persecute me?' on the road to Damascus.  It is 'the Lord, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love' (Exodus 34:6).  

And in parallel, we all face fears and need reassurance.  People like Daniel - tired, overwhelmed, probably low blood sugar and low protein after his three-week fast - the same human beings.  Some, like Daniel, are set aside as prophets to recieve these visions and write them down, as a foretaste to God's final word and revelation in his son.  The mode of the message, the specific activities of our vocation, our lives and cultural contexts: they might not be universal, but the human nature and frailty is.  And although there are differences in the mode of the message, God speaks to all of us - through the words of scripture, and it's illumination by the Holy Spirit as we look at the world, and our lives, through it's lens.   And sometimes the message may feel like it's too much to take: the weight of fallenness around us, or the fallenness in our own hearts, or just our great inadequacy in the face of an eternal God.

But we can take heart.  Behind the angel that spoke to Daniel, is Jesus.  The one about whom these words were written:

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. (Hebrews 4:14-16, NIV)

And so we can, as I did, take the angel's words to Daniel into our lives too.  We share a common experience with saints down the ages - knowing that God loves us.  Knowing that because of his, we need not be afraid - that we can lean on his strength, that he will not let a hair of our heads come to hard, even in death, and that he rejoices over us.  No wonder I wrote this verse down.

The summer I was 17 years old I read my Bible cover to cover for the first time.  I was captivated and completed the whole thing in 4 months.  Although I clearly read it at quite a pace, I still jotted down passages that sprang out to me in my still relatively new faith.  I still have that Bible, and the scraps of paper are still there, bookmarking each verse.  So I decided to go through, 18 years later, and visit each of them.  They are from the Good News Bible.