God’s Word for You

Daniel 7:1-3 Four beasts

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Wednesday, November 12, 2025

The seventh chapter of Daniel begins the second half of his book, which is a series of revelations, visions and prophecies about future kingdoms, and especially about the kingdom of Christ. The other kingdoms that he describes are there to give us background or context so that we will see Christ’s reign more clearly and confidently, so that we don’t need to wonder, “Was that his kingdom?” or “Is this the way the Savior reigns?”

There are four visions:

First: Four beasts, four kingdoms, and an eternal ruler (chapter 7). This vision takes place in Belshazzar’s first year, which falls after chapter 4.

Second: Two frightening eras ahead for God’s people (chapter 8). This vision also takes place between chapters 4 and 5, in the king’s third year.

Third: Seventy “sevens” (chapter 9). This vision takes place at about the same time as Daniel’s time in the lions’ den (chapter 6), sometime after Cyrus took the throne personally (9:1-2).

Fourth: The coming of Antichrist (chapters 10-12). This long vision falls into three parts: Supernatural powers in conflict over God’s people (chapter 10), a future ruler foreshadows the coming of Antichrist (chapter 11), and a word of encouragement (chapter 12).

7:1 In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream. Visions came to his mind as he lay in his bed. Then he wrote down the dream, summarizing the matter. 2 Daniel said, “In my vision at night I saw this: The four winds of heaven were churning up the great sea. 3 And four huge beasts came up out of the sea, each one different from the others.

We already considered in chapter 5 that Belshazzar was not the supreme king, but a viceroy or underking, while his father Nabonidus was away on what amounted to an extended vacation. The first year of this arrangement was 553 BC, which was Daniel’s fifty-second year in exile. The prophet would have been in his late sixties.

Lying in bed and dreaming, Daniel saw a vision, and then rose and wrote it down. He says, speaking in verse 1 in the third person, that “he told the sum (Aramaic resh, “head, total, summary”) of the matter. The term for “matter” here occurs quite often in Job, usually translated “words” whether Job is speaking (Job 12:11, 26:4), or one of his friends (Job 18:2), or God himself (Job 38:2), more than a dozen times in all. This is not surprising since Job is written in an unusual form of Hebrew possibly influenced by Aramaic, Phoenician, or some other Northwest Semitic dialect.

In verse 2 Daniel switches to the first person, using “I” for himself. Why the unusual switch in person? It’s a little muddled as a way of speaking. Perhaps he turned to the notes he wrote and just copied what he had there. Or perhaps, all shaken and excited by the vision, his usage had to catch up with his thoughts, as if he were saying, “I have dreamed tonight; I’ll tell you my dream….”

He saw “the four winds of heaven churning up the great sea.” Most often in the Scripture, “the Great Sea” refers to the Mediterranean, the western coastline of Israel (Numbers 34:6; Joshua 1:4). Daniel couldn’t have seen the sea since he was a teenager, before the exile. Not every thought of the godly man is about the courts of the Lord or the beauty of the temple. He also considers the graceful loveliness of birds (Psalm 8:8), the joy of a simple meal (Genesis 25:34; Song of Solomon 2:5), or the kiss of his wife (Genesis 29:11).

But here, could “the great sea” simply mean “a large sea” and not the Mediterranean? We should begin right away to remember that in a vision we have visionary or figurative language. As Joseph and Daniel demonstrate with their interpretations of dreams, visions are figures of communication, and can or rather should be interpreted figuratively. Since the sea is part of God’s creation, the things Daniel sees are things that will appear in the world and be seen by mankind.

The “four winds” are what we would call the four compass points, but they did not yet use magnetized iron to find the poles. Jesus uses the same expression when he says, “He will gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth” (Mark 13:27). This way of talking begins in the Bible at this time (that is, the Babylonians exile), since the first authors to use it are Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and Zechariah.

The image of wind churning up the sea from every direction is a sure sign that this is a vision, since all four winds do not converge in the natural course of weather in the world. At most, two winds or fronts (as we call them) converge to create dangerous storms. Therefore what we see in the these four winds is probably the universal importance of this vision, for all the world. Later Daniel will see four beasts coming up out of the earth, and it will be practically the same thing. Therefore “the great sea” is shown to be not so much the literal Mediterranean, but the sea as opposed to the land; both are part of God’s creation, just as the sky and the heavens above the sky are part of the same creation.

Four huge (“great, large”) beasts appear, each one different. There are four of them, and four is generally the number that stands for the earth, the created world, in visions and figurative parts of the Scripture (Isaiah 11:2; Ezekiel 7:2).

This makes us sit up and pay attention. What the prophet is about to tell us is about the world, and the setting of important things that the Lord God wants us to know, otherwise he would have told the prophet not to write it down (Revelation 10:4). This passage, like most of the chapter, is a warning. Therefore there is both law and gospel here. As the law, it proclaims things that will transpire on account of sin. But there is also gospel here, because by giving his people this warning, God prepares them for things to come to lead them to give him glory, to repent of their sins, and to prepare their hearts and lives. And since this chapter is about the time of Daniel’s captivity until the coming of Jesus, it also proclaims the certainty of the Savior’s coming. God is holding up the calendar of the whole world, and pointing out to his people, “See, here, here, here, and here—all of these things will take place, and then my Son your Savior will appear. Prepare a place for him in your hearts!” And the Christian responds, “How like a dream is this I see and hear!” But it is not a dream to us; for Daniel’s dream is the word of God, the truth of God’s perfect plan, and the highway of our God.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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