Daniel 12: Those who Stand - Tim Horman
Imagine you were handed a letter today that told you, in detail, what the next five hundred years held for your country. Invasion. Occupation. One violent regime replaced by another. Your children's children living under rulers who despise everything you believe.
You would probably not respond with a polite nod and a cup of tea. You would grieve. You would be frightened. You would want to know when it ends.
That is roughly where we find Daniel. And it is why the last chapter of his book is not really about calendars and timelines at all. It is about how to stay awake.
In the final message of our Resisting Babylon series, Tim Horman brought us to Daniel 12, the chapter that closes the book and opens the horizon: the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, the judgment of the beast, and the renewal of all things. You can watch the full message in the video above, or listen to the audio version below.
Where we are in the story
Before opening Daniel 12, Tim walked us back through the ground we had covered.
In chapters 7 and 8, Daniel receives visions of beastly empires that will rise, violently oppose God's purposes and terribly persecute his people. Not for a season. For centuries. By chapter 9, Daniel is on his knees, reminding God of a promise: Jeremiah had said the exile would last seventy years. Sixty-seven of them have passed. Three to go. And Daniel wants to know whether the promise still stands.
His prayer is raw. "Lord, listen. Lord, forgive. Lord, hear and act for your sake, my God." Sackcloth, fasting, ashes. As Tim put it, this is serious prayer.
The answer Gabriel brings is both yes and no. Yes, the exiles will go home and the city will be rebuilt. You can read about it in Ezra and Nehemiah. But no, the exile is not really over. Gabriel speaks of seventy sevens, which most commentators understand as roughly four hundred and ninety years, broken into segments rather than one unbroken stretch. Near the end of it, two things will happen: the Messiah will come and be put to death, and the city and the temple will be destroyed a second time.
We know how that turned out. About forty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, a Jewish revolt against Rome was crushed so violently that Jerusalem and the temple were levelled and the people were killed, enslaved or scattered. Jesus himself wept over the city and said it would come, "because you did not know the time of your visitation."
Tim's point was not that we should be impressed by prophetic accuracy for its own sake. It was simpler and more unsettling than that. Gabriel was right. And Gabriel also said that after the Messiah and the destruction of the temple there would come a very long stretch of conflict before the final seven years and the end of all things.
That long stretch is where we live. We are in the in-between.
We are still in exile
This was the line that reframed everything.
The exile in Babylon ended. But a different kind of exile was only beginning, and we are still in it. Babylon, and everything Babylon represents across Scripture, has not gone anywhere.
Melbourne is Babylon. So is San Francisco. Or to put it a different way, Babylon is in Melbourne, and it's in San Francisco, and it's in New York, and it's in Beijing, and it's in Tehran, and it's in Washington DC, and it's in London, and it's in Beirut. It's in every city in the world. Babylon is everywhere.
That is the hard news. The hopeful news sits right beside it: this will not always be the case. Christ will return, the dead will be raised, the beast will be judged, and everything will be healed and made new.
Daniel 12 is honest that the road between here and there is not a gentle upward slope. Things get harder before they get better. But the chapter refuses to leave us in fear. Twice it says the same thing: those who are wise will understand.
What we are not meant to understand
Daniel asks the obvious question. How is all this going to happen? Explain it to me. And the answer he receives is not an explanation.
"Go your way, Daniel, because the words are rolled up and sealed until the time of the end."
Tim drew on John Lennox's commentary here. So much of biblical prophecy is understood in hindsight, not foresight. If and when the Lord needs us to understand something, we will understand it. Until then, the invitation is to hold the mystery without forcing it.
This matters, because the temptation when people open Daniel or Revelation is to get lost in the detail. To chart it, decode it, speculate about it, and in the process miss the whole point.
They get caught up in the minutia of all these things that are difficult to understand, but then they miss the point.
The point is not that we will work out the timetable. The point is that we would be found among those who are wise. Which raises the question Tim spent the rest of the morning on: what does wisdom actually look like when you live in the middle of Babylon?
Babylon is not a place, it is a power
Jesus gave his disciples a picture of it in Matthew 10. "I am sending you out like sheep among wolves, therefore be as wise as serpents but as innocent as doves. Be on your guard."
Wise. Innocent. On guard. Eyes open, but not hardened.
Then Tim made the move that gave the whole message its shape. Reading through Daniel, notice how the powers actually came at Daniel and his friends. There are no demonic visitations. Nothing flies around the room. The pressure is always indirect, and it always arrives through the political, religious, social and technological systems of the day.
We have a word for the sum of all those systems. We call it the culture.
And the pattern is completely consistent. It starts as social and peer pressure: take the new name, eat the food, adopt the customs. When that is refused, it hardens into legal and political pressure. And eventually, if it must, it becomes violence.
Babylon is not a place, it's a power.
Tim traced that power from the Tower of Babel, where technology and cultural systems were bent toward reaching heaven and becoming like gods, through the Babylonian empire itself, all the way to the beast of Daniel 7 and Revelation 13 called Babylon the Great. These powers rarely announce themselves, because if they did we would recognise them. Instead they organise themselves into cities, nations, institutions, ideologies and worldviews. They work to resist and distort God's rule over creation, and then to subjugate and degrade human beings made in his image.
He quoted Paul Kingsnorth, the former atheist environmentalist turned Christian, who calls the whole thing "the machine":
The machine manifests today as an intersection of money power, state power, and increasingly coercive and manipulative technologies which constitute an ongoing war against roots and against limits. Its momentum is always forward and it will not stop until it has conquered and transformed the world.
And then the line that landed hardest: the motto of the machine is endless growth, which is also the modus operandi of cancer.
This is what Scripture means by a principality. Not simply an individual's bad choice, but a coalescing of power, control and ambition that becomes a system, an ideology, an institution with a life of its own. Tim noted how often good people inside such systems end up doing things they would never have done alone, because eventually there seems to be no other conceivable way to live. That, he said, is essentially what was heard over and over at the Nuremberg trials: I was just doing what I thought was right.
Babylon has its administrators, its laws, its economics, its propaganda, its schooling, its rituals of allegiance. The beast is personal, but it is also systemic.
The principalities are legion
Tim then read a long passage from the American lawyer, theologian and civil rights activist William Stringfellow, warning us first that it would put hairs on our chest.
Stringfellow's list of principalities takes in all institutions, ideologies, movements, causes, corporations, bureaucracies, traditions, races, nations and idols. Writing in the 1960s, he named the Pentagon, the Ford Motor Company, Harvard University, the Olympics, the Methodist Church. Tim added a few of our own: Meta, Amazon, Tesla, Nvidia, Goldman Sachs, the progressive left, the conservative right. Then capitalism, communism, humanism, astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, patriotism, sport, sex, technology, money, even the family.
The point is not that these things are evil in themselves. Tim was careful here. The point is that everything operating inside a fallen system ultimately serves itself, and what it wants from you is your allegiance.
People end up besieged on all sides at every moment simultaneously by these claims and strivings of the various powers, each seeking to dominate, usurp and take a person's time, attention, abilities, effort, each grasping at life itself, each demanding idolatrous service and loyalty.
Anything in this world, even a genuinely good thing, can become an idolatrous principality in our lives if we let it dominate and usurp our time, attention, abilities and effort, and draw them away from our loyalty to Christ.
And here is exactly how the enemy likes it. We are hit by so many of these at once, daily, that we cannot possibly process them, let alone respond. So we feel overwhelmed. And overwhelmed slides quickly into powerless, which is where resistance dies.
You also cannot simply opt out. You could go and live off-grid, Tim allowed, but most of us have families, jobs and responsibilities. And it would not work anyway, because wherever you go, Babylon goes too. This is the water we swim in. We meet it at home, at work, at school, at university, in media, sport, politics and the arts.
And these days, mostly, we meet it through the device in our pocket. Tim held up a phone and admitted he uses one himself, no judgement intended, but said it seems so uniquely designed to assault us constantly with the spirit of the age and remake us in its image that you can almost smell the sulphur coming off it.
Because Babylon always says the same thing: you cannot possibly live without me. That is the deal every idol makes. It promises freedom and empowerment. What it delivers is slavery and control. We can already see the same bargain forming around AI. Whatever it does or does not do to the world, we will probably hate a great deal of it, and yet once it is everywhere we will struggle to imagine life without it.
Deciding to fight back
Tim's third point was the turn: despite the overwhelm, despite not knowing where to start, we still have to decide it is time to fight back.
He set two famous futures side by side, using Neil Postman's summary in Amusing Ourselves to Death. Orwell feared an oppression imposed from outside. Huxley feared we would come to love our oppression and adore the technologies that undo our capacity to think. Orwell feared those who would ban books. Huxley feared there would be no one left who wanted to read one. Orwell feared the truth would be concealed; Huxley feared it would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
Tim's read on our moment is that both are happening at once. We love our devices and we fear what they are doing to us. He mentioned buying a washing machine that required an AI-powered app before it would wash his clothes, which got the laugh it deserved, and then made the serious point underneath it: this is creeping everywhere, and the right response is not conspiracy but wakefulness.
Then he took us back to Daniel and his friends, teenagers under an empire so vast that resistance should have looked pointless. They did not see it that way. They saw that small acts of obedience at the beginning gave them the courage for large and life-threatening obedience later. They decided it was worth it.
They were living in Babylon, but they determined that Babylon would not come to live in them.
One more thing, and Tim was emphatic about it. Not once did Daniel treat his rulers, or the Babylonians around him, as his enemy. If you follow Jesus, there is no person in this world you are allowed to call your enemy. The fight is not against flesh and blood. It is against the rulers, the authorities, the powers of this dark world. And they almost never come at you directly. They come through the culture.
His concern, stated plainly, is that the church is asleep. That we have shrunk the principalities down to a list of private temptations, when what Scripture is describing is the forces shaping the very culture we live in. Many of us, he suggested, have been lulled to sleep by distraction, trading our attention for convenience and our mental health for dopamine.
But he does not think it has to stay that way. He has noticed among younger people a growing disgust at what our technology is doing to our minds and hearts. They can see it happening to their friends. People are waking up.
One way to live it out this week
Do not try to take on all of Babylon this week. That is the overwhelm talking, and it ends in doing nothing at all.
Instead, take Tim's question seriously and get specific: what is the one thing in your life right now that is quietly taking your time, attention, abilities and effort away from your loyalty to Christ? Most of us know the answer immediately, and most of us are skilled at not naming it. Name it this week. Say it out loud to God, and to one other person who will ask you about it.
Then choose one small act of obedience in response, the Daniel-sized kind: a boundary on the device, a habit of prayer at the start of the day, a conversation you have been avoiding. Small obedience now is what builds the courage for costly obedience later.
A short prayer
Lord, we live in Babylon, and most days we barely notice.
Open our eyes. Wake us from our slumber.
Show us the things we have let take your place,
the loyalties we have handed over without meaning to.
Give us the wisdom to see clearly and the innocence to stay tender.
Keep us from fear, and keep us from sleep.
You know our names, and you will not lose us.
Hold us until the day when every knee bows and all things are made new.
Amen.
Personal Reflection
Where do you most feel the pressure to conform in your everyday life: at work, among friends, online, or somewhere else? What does that pressure actually ask of you?
Tim said that anything, even a good thing, can become a principality if it takes your time, attention, abilities and effort away from Christ. What is the honest answer for you right now?
Daniel's small obediences prepared him for costly ones. What small act of faithfulness is in front of you this week that you have been treating as too minor to matter?
Small Group Discussion
Read Daniel 12:1-4 and 12:8-10 together. What stands out to you? What confuses you?
Daniel is told the words are "rolled up and sealed until the time of the end." How do you sit with parts of Scripture you do not understand? What is the difference between healthy curiosity and unhelpful speculation?
Twice in this chapter we are told that "those who are wise will understand." Based on the sermon and the rest of Daniel, how would you describe the kind of wisdom being talked about?
Tim argued that Babylon is not a place but a power, and that it works through culture rather than around it. Does that ring true to your experience? Where do you see it?
Read Ephesians 6:10-18. Paul says the struggle is not against flesh and blood. Why is that distinction so important, and why is it so easy to forget?
Tim said that if you follow Jesus there is no person in this world you are allowed to call your enemy. Is that hard to accept? Who comes to mind?
Huxley feared we would come to love our oppression. Where do you see that pattern in your own relationship with technology, comfort or convenience?
Share one small act of obedience you want to take this week, then pray for one another: that God would keep your group awake, unafraid, and anchored in Christ until he returns.