God’s Word for You

Daniel 8:26-27 Be Still My Soul

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Thursday, December 11, 2025

26 The vision of the evenings and the mornings that has been told is true. But you—seal up the vision, for it is many days from now.” 27 So I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days; then I got up and went about the king’s business. But I was awestruck by the vision and I did not understand it.

Gabriel calls the vision of this chapter “the vision of the evenings and mornings.” Now, the detail of the 2,300 evenings and mornings (given in verse 14) is certainly strange and hard to understand, but it is unusual as a title for the whole vision. Gabriel might be using the phrase for one of these reasons:

1, It is the detail Daniel himself used as a name for the vision.
2, Gabriel wanted to emphasize the importance of that detail.
3, Since it would be paralleled after a fashion in Daniel 12:11-12, it is a convenient way to distinguish the two prophecies.

Gabriel assures Daniel that this strange prophecy, one of the first of its kind in the Scripture, is absolutely true. Why was this necessary? Moses had warned the people, “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously. Do not be afraid of him” (Deuteronomy 18:21). Since this prophecy was about something “many days from now” (indeed, many years away), there would be no way to prove whether it was true or not, and therefore the angel messenger added a statement about the pedigree of the message. “It is from God himself, and it is true.” This is similar on a very different scale to the word of confidence that John gives to a Christian named Demetrius in his third letter (3 John 1:12).

What does it mean to “seal up” the vision? It must not be to conceal the words (as in Revelation 10:4), but the reverse. Daniel was to keep the text of the vision intact and preserved for future generations (as in Revelation 22:10). Jerome points out that it would not be fully understood until the events actually came to pass, and his understanding agrees with the idea that the message needed to be preserved. Daniel obviously took this to mean that he should write it all down and preserve it along with his other remembrances from his captivity.

“Many days” here is many years. It can mean a lifetime (as in a marriage lasting a lifetime, Hosea 3:34), or a period of several decades, like the “many days” spent by the Israelites at Kadesh (Deuteronomy 1:46). It can also mean many generations, as in Exodus 20:12 (“many days in the land the Lord your God is giving you”). Here, it is centuries. The arrival of Antiochus Epiphanes would happen long in the future. He began his rule more than 375 years after Daniel received this vision, in the second century BC.

Daniel ends the chapter by describing how he felt. He got sick and lay ill in his bed for “some days.” The Hebrew expression is not specific at all, saying literally “I was ill for days.” Whether some or several, he gradually got better. But the illness was serious enough that the prophet records the event. He recovered and returned to “the king’s business,” meaning actual business, and not David’s general statement (not really a ruse) in 1 Samuel 21:8.

Daniel’s final comment is that he was “awestruck.” Unable to understand the message completely, or much at all, he recorded it and pondered it. But for all of the aging prophet’s experience and wisdom, he could not understand it any more than we would be able to fully understand a prophecy about the overthrow and complete downfall of America set some years in the future. The human mind simply cannot grasp what the world would be like with such a complete change that one’s present home, family, or memory, would be wiped away completely; to be “a man undone forever.”

Yet God comforts his people. Consider fallen Adam and his beautiful Eve. The first sinners, dwellers in a world we cannot imagine. The lord and lady of creation, telling lions and leopards to scoot with a nod, able to kiss the scorpion and pet the porcupine without hurt. But the world they knew is gone, long buried under the waves. No marker, no letter from Adam to his darling, no silk pair of slippers from Eve’s perfect feet are preserved. Yet their spirits are honored in Paradise, as ours will be, too, even after our world, our markers, our love letters, our slippers, are all gone and buried, and more than that, forgotten by all. But there awaits for us something beyond the blackness of oblivion. We have the promise of the resurrection. “For since death was by a man, so also by a man is the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ will all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:21-22). It is not only our spirits that will go on in heaven, but our raised bodies, too. We will rise, body reunited with soul, on the last day, and be carried into heaven by God’s holy angels, to live with Christ and to praise him forever and ever and evermore.

1. Be still, my soul! the Lord is on your side;
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;
Leave to your God to order and provide;
In ev’ry change he faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul! your best, your heav’nly friend
Thru’ thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

2. Be still, my soul! your God does undertake
To guide the future as he has the past;
Your hope, your confidence, let nothing shake;
all now mysterious shall be bright at last.
Be still, my soul! the waves and winds still know
His voice who ruled them while he lived below.

3. Be still, my soul! when dearest friends depart
And all is darkened in the vale of tears,
Then shall you better know his love, his heart,
Who comes to soothe your sorrow and your fears.
Be still, my soul! your Jesus can repay
From his own fullness all he takes away.

4. Be still, my soul! the hour is hast’ning on
When we shall be forever with the Lord,
When disappointment, grief, and fear are gone,
Sorrow forgot, love’s purest joys restored.
Be still my soul! when change and tears are past,
All safe and blessed we shall meet at last.

Catharina A. von Schlegel (1697-1752)
Tune by Jean Sibelius

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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