Daniel 10

No, it's personal words that we're saying to God, pouring out our heart.

And you think of someone like Daniel in the Bible, his experience, he had a living testimony of a living relationship in which his human heart was seeking God earnestly and personally, and he was praying personally.

specifically for wisdom, and God gave him that.

So, you know, prayer brings divine power, doesn't it, Emily?

And Ellen White often talks about we should never, the Bible should never be studied without prayer, that we must have that prayer and to have the Holy Spirit enlighten us before we open the scripture.

To me, I like to think about it like my niece and nephew, Ezekiel and Caitlin.

Hello, Ezekiel and Caitlin and their mom and dad, Daniel and Carol.

um my brother uh they used to have or they still do i think have tutors in school so that they would just you know it helped them with their their language the chinese if they were learning that or mathematics or english so i like to think of the holy spirit being beside me like a tutor who's helping me to guide me to know what scripture to open and what does god want me to know today

So you, you get this flyer in the mail about some kind of a, a prophecy seminar.

A Daniel Revelation prophecy seminar.

And it, and it kinda sat on your counter for a while.

My kitchen counter.

Thank you.

You know, I just, [clears throat] I just wanna share this scripture before we get into some of the unique truths that you were confronted with recently at the Revelation seminar.

This is in the Book of Daniel chapter 10, and it's in verse 12.

The angel Gabriel comes, flies f- from a battle with the devil.

Daniel chapter 10.

Daniel 10.

In the third year of the reign of King Cyrus of Persia, Daniel, also known as Belshazzar, had another vision.

He understood that the vision concerned events certain to happen in the future, times of war and great hardship.

Israel, the one nation specifically set apart to represent the true God to the whole world, ended up chasing after the very gods of the nations they were supposed to remain distant.

And this idea of unseen spiritual princes standing behind visible earthly empires shows up later in Daniel 10, verse 13, where we read about the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me 21 days.

Then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me.

In this context, the prince of Persia is a real spiritual power connected to the empire of Persia, while Michael is presented as the spiritual prince associated specifically with the people of Israel.

Scripture itself only names three of these seven directly.

Michael, meaning who is like God, appears in Daniel 10 and 12 as Israel's own guardian prince fighting directly against what the text calls the Prince of Persia, and again in Jude 9 disputing with the devil over the body of Moses, and in Revelation 12:7 leading heaven's own armies against the dragon.

Gabriel, meaning God is my strength, appears in Daniel 8 and 9 interpreting visions, and famously in Luke 1 announcing both John the Baptist's birth to Zachariah and Jesus' own birth to Mary.

Raphael, meaning God heals, we've just heard from directly guiding Tobias' entire journey in disguise, healing both Tobit's blindness and freeing Sarah from the demon Asmodeus.

And I believe God showed me something that I've never heard anybody say before, and I'm sure that someone has because there's nobody that's a private interpretation of Scripture, and I don't claim to be the only one that has the revelation.

But before I show you this, I want to remind you about a man named Daniel.

Daniel's one of my favorite people in the Bible.

He's amazing on multiple levels.

His story is incredible.

He went through all that he went through in the Bible, even calls him a man of integrity that nothing was ever spoken bad about, okay? So he fought devils, he knew spiritual warfare.

Well, one of the great stories, I believe it's in Daniel chapter 10, deals with, he's praying for 21 days because he's just travailing over the visions that God is giving him about the last days, about, quite frankly, I believe, our time, the days of Noah, because he writes extensively about the Antichrist.

He writes about the end times, and we know about Daniel's 70th week.