“Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. 3 Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.
One of the enemies that has intruded into God’s good creation and has caused untold misery for God’s people is death. This enemy will also be overcome in the final victory. Genesis chapter 2 teaches us that “God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (verse 7). Genesis chapter 3 teaches us that when God’s first children rebelled against their Creator, one of the consequences was that they would once again return to the ground from which they came. In every generation since Adam, as someone has said, “the death rate has remained the same—one per person.”
This dominance of death will be broken when God brings the history of the world to a conclusion. Then “multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake.” Who these multitudes are Jesus tells us in a statement made to his Jewish opponents: “All who are in their graves will hear [the voice of the Son of God] and come out” (John 5:28,29).
Death is “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Corinthians 15:26). It will be destroyed by him who, at his resurrection, broke the power of death. In the great resurrection on the Last Day, God’s people will rise to everlasting life. They will live with God in an existence that is perfect and never-ending.
Those who spent their earthly lives evading God will experience a different fate in the great resurrection of the Last Day. They will hear God say, “Very well, you wanted to be without me; now be without me—forever!” And they will be sentenced to perpetual divorce from God—a neverending existence of “shame and everlasting contempt.”
This idea goes down hard for many people who picture God as a lovable but spineless being who wouldn’t do anything worse to a person than a slap on the wrist. But that is not the picture the Bible paints of God. The same God who at the time of Noah threw oceans of water over the mountain tops, drowning a whole world of screaming people, the same God who once scorched Sodom and Gomorrah in a hurricane of fire, the same God who fed wicked Queen Jezebel to the dogs—that same God still reigns in heaven. And he has told us that what he has done before, he will do again. Those who on judgment day are sentenced to shame and everlasting contempt will not be thrown out on some cosmic junkpile, where worn-out human beings are discarded. They are, after all, human beings, and God would never dishonor a human being by treating him or her as a thing. For all eternity they will retain their ability to experience God’s eternal rejection.
In sharp contrast to the damned are the believing children of God, for whom judgment day will be a triumph. They are described as “those who are wise.” From God’s Word they have learned to recognize their sinfulness as well as their only Savior from sin. It isn’t easy in times of persecution to remain wise, to show sober and sound judgment. One of the outstanding ways to show Christian wisdom is by word and example—to be a light in the world, helping others to find the way into God’s family and ultimately to a place at God’s side.
They will live in glory forever, as they shine like the brightness of the heavens. In the pages of the New Testament, God gives us a fuller revelation of what Daniel prophesied. We know that on judgment day we will not only stand before God and be inspected, but we also have the promise—almost unbelievable!—that through Christ we will actually survive that examination, that we will find approval, that we will please God. Through faith in Christ’s perfect life and his innocent death, we will not only be pitied by God but delighted in, as a father delights in his own child. To be sure, there’s trouble ahead, but there’s triumph too.
4 “But you, Daniel, close up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end. Many will go here and there to increase knowledge.”
Daniel had written down each of the revelations God had given him. This most recent revelation (10:1–12:3) was the last one God gave him; with this the prophetic message to Daniel was complete. “This last revelation formed a conclusion, and the entire body, i.e., the book, was now to be sealed. Daniel . . . has now completed his prophetic ministry and is, as one of his last acts, to lay away the book that it may be preserved” (Young, page 257).
When the famous Dead Sea Scrolls were accidentally discovered in caves west of the Dead Sea in 1948–1950, they had been wrapped in linen and placed into large sealed jars for protection. Although most of these valuable documents were of brittle, centuries-old leather, being wrapped and sealed preserved them for two thousand years. God commanded Daniel to close up and seal the book not so that it would be hidden, but so that it would be preserved for future generations of people who would need to hear this message.
In years to come, people would need just such a prophecy in order to have reliable information about what lies in the future. It’s tragic, however, that many in our day who reject God’s revealed truth are busily searching for truth elsewhere, running here and there in an attempt to find what makes life worth living and death worth dying. In them the tragic prediction of the prophet Amos is being fulfilled:
Men will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east,
searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it. (Amos 8:12)
Through faithful servants like Daniel, God has shared some of his secrets with us, even putting them down in writing. Some of the information he gave us through Daniel refers to the time past; some refers to the present; some of this information refers to the future and extends to the very end of time, when our Lord will return. Jesus has assured us, “If you hold to my teaching, . . . you will know the truth” (John 8:31,32).