Like the Stars Forever
By Caleb Chung ‘27
Teachers on Christian living devote more attention to the opening chapters of the Book of Daniel than the closing—and understandably so. The narrative chapters about Daniel and his friends resonate with Christians attempting to live in but not of this world, and Daniel’s story provides a blueprint for the exilic life. Yet, the apocalyptic close of Daniel should not be cast aside, for it is from Daniel’s final chapter that we receive a lucid glimpse into Christians’ intended existence. In particular, Daniel 12:3 foretells, “and those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above, and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever.” The end of Daniel prophesies the future of God’s faithful.
As one of the first chapters to hint at life after death—the ultimate Christian hope—Daniel 12 is recycled regularly in later religious texts. The Wisdom of Solomon, written as the Jewish community first began to develop a clear conception of an afterlife, draws on Daniel 12:3’s language in its depiction of the eternal destiny of the righteous. Echoes of Daniel 12:3 appear in Jesus’s parables and New Testament epistles; Daniel’s apocalyptic vision captured the imaginations of many subsequent writers. It planted the seed for what grew into the Christian vision of eternity.
The foremost feature of apocalyptic visions like Daniel’s is their subversion of observable reality. Our physical senses communicate to us a world that is cyclical and, taken collectively, static. The sun charts a course that arrives again at its origin each dawn. The wind blows to the north, then to the south, always turning and returning. The fruits of trees can sprout nothing but the same, and each species produces according to its kind. Into a seemingly fixed reality, Daniel speaks of apocalypse: time takes direction, and moves man along with it, loosening him from the seeming treadmill of creation.
The modern reader may struggle to appreciate Daniel’s vision—we are born into a culture that already assumes a linear sense of time—but the significance of these prophesied days to Daniel’s contemporaries was that they allowed for the new. Even though the bodies of the righteous will collapse into the dust from which they came, the righteous themselves shall become like the brightness of the sky. Man is literarily transported from the dry ground of the third day of creation to the expanse of the second, from the earth below to the skies above. Our life, which Ecclesiastes describes as vapor, assumes the physicality of the firmament. The spatial ascent reflects a greater grandeur awaiting man. The Christian may trust that their life is an ascending arc rather than a circle.
Each piece of an ascending arc builds upon those beneath it. Similarly, for Christians, shining forth is not a foreign fate. Our end is produced by our prayers and desires, our acts and choices; our end entails aspects of our worldly existence perfected. When Daniel invokes the stars, he draws on the Bible’s symbol for the revelation of the Creator. It is hard to think of a more natural comparison for the evangelists who had turned many to righteousness. Their destiny is to become like the heavens that declare the glory of God and the stars which are the visible work of His fingers. For the faithful to shine forth is to continue their purpose on earth: testifying to the glory of God.
But this hope is not consigned to the next life. Too often, we fall guilty of mistaking the Bible’s writings on the end as distinct from its commands on daily living. We consider God’s plan for restoration as completed by the cross and imminent with the second coming, rarely unfolding in the present. But Heaven is not a distant place; Heaven is the Kingdom coming here on earth. The Christian who is satiated by passive daydreams of a second earth misses the fullness of what God is doing on the first. The fulfillment of God’s promises happens with our every breath.
Daniel’s vision, then, is also one for our contemporary age, triggered by the coming of the Messiah. He prophesies of a time in which believers shine as lights in this world, a time in which the faithful participate in creation’s eternal song of praise. He prophesies of life in its fullness.
When Christ declared that the time had come and “the Kingdom of God is at hand,” He ushered in that newness of which the prophets speak. We have the privilege of shining forth.
Contributed by Caleb Chung. Caleb is a junior at Harvard College studying Economics with a secondary in Comparative Religion.
