Daniel 10: Highly Esteemed - Darren Rowse
Think about the last time someone called you something that stuck. Not your legal name, the other kind. The word a teacher used once in front of the whole class. The label a partner reached for in the middle of an argument. The quiet verdict you deliver to yourself in the mirror on a bad morning.
Most of us are carrying a name we never chose. And most of us have very little idea how much of our lives we are living out of it.
On Sunday, Darren Rowse preached from Daniel 10 as part of our series Resisting Babylon: Faithfulness in an Age of Decadence and Death. It is one of the strangest chapters in the book, full of visions, an unnamed messenger and a war we cannot see. But at the centre of all that strangeness is something surprisingly tender: an exhausted old man face down in the dirt, and heaven bending down to tell him who he really is.
You can watch the full message in the video above, or listen to the audio version below.
The Daniel we are not used to
The first half of Daniel gives us a man who is almost impossibly impressive: standing up to the king's official at fifteen, standing before kings, interpreting dreams, and by chapter six walking into a lion's den with something close to calm. Darren was honest about how hard that Daniel is to relate to. Inspiring, certainly. But would any of us walk into a furnace?
Then something shifts. From chapter seven onwards a different Daniel appears: troubled, physically unwell, fasting, wearing sackcloth and ashes, and by chapter 10 mourning.
"In today's passage we see a different side to Daniel. And it's a side that I can strongly relate to."
This is the Daniel most of us actually are. Not the man in the lion's den, the man on the floor.
A grief with a reason
The chapter opens in the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia. That detail does a lot of work. Almost every other story in Daniel happens under Babylonian kings. This one places us seventy years after Daniel was taken, in a different empire, near the end of a very long life.
Cyrus had decreed that God's people could go home and rebuild the temple, and Ezra tells the story: fifty thousand returned in the first wave and began digging foundations. Then it stalled. The neighbours around Jerusalem lobbied Persia to have the work stopped, and succeeded. For roughly sixteen years the site sat dormant. Daniel had been praying towards Jerusalem three times a day for seven decades, and many commentators believe this is what he is grieving: the one thing he has prayed for his entire adult life has ground to a halt, and he is old enough now to know he will not live to see it finished.
The mourning is not metaphorical. He eats no choice food, no meat, no wine. He uses no lotions at all, which is an ancient way of saying he did not bathe for three weeks. The Hebrew word for his mourning is the word used for grieving someone who has died. And the date in verse four places those three weeks squarely across the month of Passover, the festival where families sit down and celebrate God bringing his people out of Egypt.
"Anyone who's ever grieved through Christmas or Easter or a day like today, Father's Day, knows that special kind of grief that you feel when you look around and see everyone else celebrating. And you were grieving."
Twenty-one days of praying and fasting, and heaven says nothing. That silence is unusual for Daniel. One chapter earlier the angel Gabriel arrives while the words are still on his lips. He is a man used to being answered quickly. Not this time.
Darren named the shapes this takes for us. Some know Daniel's grief, and on a day like Father's Day they know it more sharply than usual. Some know his red tape: a council permit for a build that should have started months ago, a visa application sitting in a queue while a family lives in two countries. Some know the stall: a relationship stuck for decades, a diagnosis that will not improve. And some know the silence: you have prayed, and there has been nothing.
The name the empire gave him
After three weeks, a vision finally comes. Standing on the bank of the Tigris, Daniel sees a man unlike anyone he has ever seen: dressed in linen, a belt of fine gold, a face like lightning, eyes like flaming torches, arms and legs gleaming like burnished bronze, a voice like the sound of a crowd.
The figure is never named. Scholars have argued for centuries about whether this is an angel or the pre-incarnate Christ, and Darren was upfront that the text simply does not tell us. What we are told is that he is a messenger from God.
He has come carrying an enormous vision, the one that unfolds across chapters 11 and 12. But before he delivers any of it, he greets Daniel by a name: "Daniel, you who are highly esteemed."
It reads like a flourish, the sort of politeness you skim past. But that phrase appears twice in this chapter and once already in chapter nine. Three times heaven says it. When Scripture repeats itself like that, it is worth slowing down.
To feel the weight of it, you need to know that Daniel has two names. His Hebrew name means "God is my judge". But when Babylon took him as a teenager they stamped another on him: Belteshazzar, built on Bel, the chief god of Babylon. Daniel 4 says so outright, where Nebuchadnezzar calls it the name of his god.
And the book keeps using both. Even Daniel does. The first verse of this chapter has him writing about himself in the third person: "a revelation was given to Daniel, who was called Belteshazzar." Seventy years on, he still feels the need to tell us he is both. He lived only fourteen or fifteen years in Jerusalem as Daniel. Every year since has been lived in a foreign land, answering to a foreign name.
"The Babylonians took his name away from him and attempted to stamp a new identity on him. That's what empires do."
The name heaven gave him
Now, at the end of his life, heaven answers the question of which name is his. And the answer is neither of them.
The Hebrew behind "highly esteemed" is chamudot, and it is a remarkable word to find here. In the Old Testament it is never used of a human being except Daniel. It is a word for precious treasure. Earlier in Daniel it describes the temple vessels, the priceless things Babylon looted and misused. The root turns up again in the tenth commandment, in the word we translate "covet".
The ESV renders it "O Daniel, man greatly loved". The New Living Translation puts it "Daniel, you are very precious to God".
So the message to this grieving old man, face down and unwashed and out of strength, is this: you are not the name the empire stamped on you. You are precious. You are treasure. You are something I desire to have.
Scripture does this repeatedly. Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, Simon becomes Peter. Which led to the question the whole sermon turns on: what name are you answering to?
Not the one on your licence. The other one. Most of us are answering to several. Some were given by other people, sometimes cruelly: a teacher, a parent, a partner, someone in a schoolyard decades ago. Some are stamped on us by our culture: what our work calls us, what our bank balance calls us, what our bodies call us in the mirror. And some we carry because of something that happened to us that we had no control over.
Darren told his own story here. In his early twenties a first romantic relationship ended badly, with rejection and betrayal. A few months later another ended the same way. Then a friendship, in the same year, in the same way. At the time he understood it as a run of hard experiences and nothing more.
Years later a pastor praying for him said he sensed Darren was living with names that were not his: rejected and betrayed. These had stopped being things that happened to him and had become the thing he was living out of, shaping how he showed up in every new relationship: anxious, insecure, jealous, in ways that had never been true of him before.
The pastor also told him the name God had for him instead. It was Beloved Child.
Three touches
There is a second repetition in the chapter, and this one is not in what the messenger says but in what he does. He touches Daniel three times.
Daniel begins flat on the ground: no strength left, face deathly pale, helpless. In verse 10 a hand touches him and sets him trembling on his hands and knees. He does not get himself up. He is lifted. And only then is he told to stand: raised first, then invited to join in the upward motion himself.
Then he is bowed down and speechless again. The messenger touches his lips and he can speak. What he says with his restored voice is not praise.
"I am overcome with anguish because of the vision, my lord, and I feel very weak. How can I, your servant, talk with you, my lord? My strength is gone and I can hardly breathe."
He simply tells it like it is. And he is not rebuked for it. Not corrected for being weak. Not treated as a failure for being exhausted. There is not a word of "you should have more faith". The response is a third touch, and with it strength: "Do not be afraid, you who are highly esteemed. Peace! Be strong now; be strong."
All of this happens before Daniel receives a single word of the vision he spent three weeks asking for. He came looking for answers, for why this and why now. What he is given first is a name and a hand.
"God actually wants to minister to us. And he wants to start by giving us a new name and giving us a touch to strengthen us so that then we are able to hear."
The war behind the red tape
Only then does the curtain lift slightly on what has been going on.
The messenger tells Daniel that from the very first day he set his mind to gain understanding and to humble himself, his words were heard and the messenger was sent. Day one, not day twenty-one. The silence was never absence.
Verse 13 gives the reason for the delay: "the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me twenty-one days. Then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me." Later he mentions returning to fight that prince, and a prince of Greece still to come.
Something is going on beyond what Daniel can see, and some of it is hostile. It is never explained. Darren was frank about spending three weeks reading commentators argue about who these princes are, then noticing that Daniel puts no energy at all into working it out. He does not name them, address them or rebuke them. He is simply told they are there, and told twice not to be afraid.
Paul says something similar in Ephesians 6:12: our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Helpfully, Paul goes on to give the instruction Daniel never gets: put on the armour of God, stand your ground, pray in the Spirit, stay alert.
Darren was equally clear about the other ditch. We should not go looking for demons behind everything that has stalled or every moment of pain. He described growing up around a wave of Christian fiction about unseen battles over suburban towns, novels that frightened him and trained him to find a spiritual explanation behind everything.
The chapter holds two accounts together. Ezra tells us what was stopping the temple: hostile neighbours, lobbying, a decision in a distant court. Daniel 10 tells us there was resistance of another kind as well. Both are true, and we are not told where one stops and the other starts.
The hand that lifts you
Daniel never finds out who the figure by the river was. But six hundred years later another man has a vision so similar it is impossible to miss. John is on Patmos, a prison island, in a low place himself. He sees a figure in a robe with a golden sash, eyes like blazing fire, feet like bronze glowing in a furnace, a voice like rushing waters. And John does exactly what Daniel did. He falls flat on his face.
Then a right hand touches him, and the first words are the same: do not be afraid. And in the very next breath, unlike anywhere in Daniel 10, this figure says who he is.
"I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One. I was dead, and now look, I am alive for ever and ever, and I hold the keys of death and Hades."
It is Jesus.
Darren's invitation was simple. Put your life in his hands. You do not need to have it sorted out first. You do not need to be in a good place. Daniel was not. John was not. You only need to open yourself to him.
And for those who have already prayed that prayer but still see themselves in Daniel, tired and grieving and weak with silence all around, the encouragement was to come again, and to come to a bigger picture of Jesus than we usually carry. Most of us imagine a Middle Eastern man in a robe two thousand years ago, which is a good image. But the Jesus of Revelation 1 is the ascended, resurrected, reigning King of heaven.
And that is the one who names you. That is the hand that reaches down to touch you, that lifts you up, that gives you back your breath and your voice, that gives you strength and offers you peace, that tells you not to be afraid.
One way to live it out this week
Darren gave the church something specific to do: put on a name each day. Seven of them, one for each morning, each one something God actually calls his people. Monday, I am dearly loved. Tuesday, I am a child of God. Wednesday, I am known. Thursday, I am a friend. Friday, I am free. Saturday, I am not forgotten. Sunday, I am chosen.
Say it out loud when you get up, before the day starts naming you itself. Paul tells us in Colossians to clothe ourselves, which is deliberate, physical language: this is something you put on. If it helps, write the seven names somewhere you will see them. And if you already know the name you have been living out of, the one a person or a season or a failure stamped on you, name it honestly to God at the start of the week and ask him to tell you what he calls you instead.
A short prayer for your week
God, we come as we are, not as we wish we were.
Some of us are tired, some of us are grieving,
some of us have been praying about one thing for years
and have heard nothing back.
Thank you that you hear us from the first day.
Thank you that you come to us before you explain anything to us.
Help us to put down the names we were never meant to carry,
and to live this week as people who are loved, known and chosen.
Amen.
Personal Reflection
What name are you currently answering to, and where did it come from? Be as specific as you can: a person, a season, a failure, a comment.
Daniel told God plainly that his strength was gone, and was not rebuked for it. What would it look like for you to be that honest with God this week?
Of the seven names Darren listed, which one is hardest for you to say about yourself? Why do you think that is?
Small Group Discussion
Read Daniel 10:1-9 together. What stands out to you about how Daniel is described here compared with the Daniel of the earlier chapters?
Daniel is grieving something that has stalled after seventy years of prayer. What does it do to your picture of faithfulness that the Bible includes a portrait like this one?
The messenger gives Daniel a name before he gives him any answers. Why do you think that order matters?
Read Daniel 10:10-19, paying attention to the three touches. What do you notice about what Daniel is able to do after each one?
Daniel says he has no strength left and is not corrected for it. Where do we get the idea that we need to be doing well before we come to God?
What names has our culture, or your own history, stamped on you? Which of those has been hardest to put down?
Daniel is told that unseen resistance is real and is also told twice not to be afraid. How do we hold both of those without tipping into either fear or dismissiveness?
Spend some time praying for one another. Ask God to name the person on your left the way he named Daniel, and pray specifically for the situations in the group that have stalled.