The Son of Man Riding the Clouds

In the first year King Belshazzar ruled Babylon, years before the night with the lions, Daniel lay on his bed and saw a dream so strange that he wrote it all down.

"I looked," Daniel wrote, "and the four winds of heaven were whipping up the great sea."

Out of the water climbed four beasts. The first was a lion with eagle's wings. The second was a bear with three ribs sticking out between its teeth. (It had not finished its dinner.) The third was a leopard with four wings and four heads. The fourth was the worst: huge and terrifying, with iron teeth that crunched and smashed, and feet that stamped flat whatever was left. Then a little horn pushed up on its head, with eyes like a person's and a mouth that bragged and bragged. (Most horns cannot see or talk. This one could do both, and it used its mouth far more than its eyes.)

"I kept looking," Daniel wrote, "and thrones were set in place."

Someone sat down. Daniel called him the Ancient of Days, the one who has been alive for every day there has ever been. His clothes were white as snow, and his hair was white like clean wool. His throne was flames, its wheels were blazing, and a river of fire poured out in front of him. Ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him. (That is a hundred million. Shaking hands with each one, one per second, would take more than three years.) The court sat down, and the books were opened.

The horn was still bragging when the fourth beast was killed and thrown into the fire. The other beasts lost their power.

"I looked again," Daniel wrote, "and there, coming with the clouds of heaven, was one like a son of man."

After all those beasts, this one looked like a person. He was led right up to the throne, and there he was given power and glory and a kingdom. People of every nation and every language would serve him.

"His kingdom will never pass away," Daniel wrote. "It will never be destroyed."

Daniel was shaking. He asked one of those standing near the throne, "What does all this mean?"

"The four great beasts are four kings who will rise on the earth," came the answer. "But God's holy people will receive the kingdom, and keep it for ever and ever."

When Daniel woke, his face was pale. The dream had shown him the man on the clouds but never his name. Kingdoms rose and fell: Babylon, then Persia, then Greece, then Rome, each one stamping across the world for a while, and God's people waited.

Then a man came who called himself the Son of Man again and again. At his trial the high priest demanded, "Are you the Messiah, the King God promised to send?"

"I am," he said. "And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."

They said those words deserved death, and he was nailed to a cross and died. On the third day he rose. A cloud later carried him out of his friends' sight, and angels promised he would come back the same way. People of every language already serve him, and one day Jesus, the one like a son of man, will come riding the clouds.