Weird Stuff in the Bible

One Strange Reason Your Prayers Might not be Answered
Daniel 10

Don’t Be Ignorant of Satan’s Devices
The devil really really doesn’t want you to listen to today’s episode, and I’ll tell you why.
There are 4 things Paul doesn’t want us “to be ignorant” of
Romans 11:25 - (GOD’S PLAN FOR ISRAEL)
1 Thessalonians 4:13 - (THE RAPTURE)
1 Corinthians 12:1 - (SPIRITUAL GIFTS)
2 Corinthians 2:11 - 11 lest Satan should take advantage of us; for we are not ignorant of his devices. (SATAN’S TACTICS)
Interesting that these are four areas that many many Christians hotly debate. They’re saved, the love Jesus they’re good people, they’re going to heaven, but they disagree. And most Christians, I believe, get them wrong.
I’ve learned that you always get a reaction when you talk about spiritual gifts, the rapture, or God’s plan for Israel. And I’m going to try to throw in that fourth one today: Satan’s tactics.
Today is going to give you one of Satan’s schemes that he uses to try and make us ineffective as Christians. But, I’ll also tell you how to overcome it.
In Daniel 10, it says that Satan actually has a way to stop our prayers. That God can even hear our prayers, send an answer, and that Satan can stop it before the answer comes to us. Believe it or not, that’s something the devil can interfere with.
I find this to be weird, and I’d like to explore why it’s in the Bible.
Turn to Daniel 10, and let’s get weird.
[theme music]

Daniel 10, Wrestling with Angels
Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and today we’re going to be talking about Daniel 10.
One of my pastor friends who was preaching through the book of Daniel recently came across this one. And he commented that he didn’t know how he was going to teach it.
And I was like, “what you do mean, how you’re going to teach it? You just teach it. You read what it says and make sure everyone understand it.”
But I understand what he meant. Daniel 10 is weird. It deals with something we don’t hear about a lot in the spiritual realm.
But just because we don’t hear about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen every day. It’s a weird thing to us, but a totally normal thing in the spirit. So we want to follow Paul’s advice and not be ignorant of Satan’s tactics.
In Daniel 10, the prophet Daniel has been living in Babylon for most of his life. As a teen, his home city of Jerusalem was destroyed. Daniel is now an older man, but he’s not quite sure that he understands his place in the world. He longs to return to the city of his childhood and see it again with his own eyes. He goes on a three-week fast to pray for spiritual insight and understanding. And boy oh boy, he’s going to get more of it than he even realized.
Daniel 10:2-3
2 In those days I, Daniel, was mourning three full weeks. 3 I ate no pleasant food, no meat or wine came into my mouth, nor did I anoint myself at all, till three whole weeks were fulfilled.
Now I tell you what, to pray and fast about one thing for three weeks straight would take quite a crisis in my life. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anything that could cause me to fast for that long, and to be honest, I don’t even want to think about that.
But Daniel is a man of deep prayer. Prayer has been a recurring aspect of his life all throughout this book. And right here, he’s praying to understand the times. Suddenly, after 21 days of this, an angel appears before Daniel.
As we go through this podcast, I plan to talk extensively about the characteristics of angels and the different types of angels we see in scripture. But for now, notice that he is described as a man. A man with some very fascinating features, but it’s not the picture of angels that we often see in most Christian art.
Daniel 10:4-6
4 Now on the twenty-fourth day of the first month, as I was by the side of the great river, that is, the Tigris, 5 I lifted my eyes and looked, and behold, a certain man clothed in linen, whose waist was girded with gold of Uphaz! 6 His body was like beryl, his face like the appearance of lightning, his eyes like torches of fire, his arms and feet like burnished bronze in color, and the sound of his words like the voice of a multitude.
Some believe this to actually be an appearance of Jesus, because He’s often said to have the voice of a multitude and some of these features. But I don’t believe it’s Jesus, because of what this man is going to say he’s been doing. Ill skip to
verse 12
12 Then he said to me, “Do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand, and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard; and I have come because of your words.
Reca[: How long has Daniel been praying? For three weeks. When was Daniel heard? Three weeks ago. So why is he just now getting an answer? It’ll tell us.
Verse 13
But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days; and behold, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I had been left alone there with the kings of Persia.
So the angel says that he attempted to get to Daniel for the past three weeks. And that he got into a wrestling match with this Prince of Persia the entire time that he was trying to get down to Daniel. And then finally, another Prince, named Michael, came to help out and let him on through. So this is a very strange passage, because we have to talk about the identity of this prince of Persia.
It is not the awful video game series from Playstation 2.
It is also not the even more terrible film adaption from 2010 starring Jake Gyllenhaal.
The prince of Persia is a evil spirit. A fallen angel, or what we might more commonly a demon. Something almost as terrible as the Jake Gyllenhaal movie.
Now, why would the Bible describe a fallen angel as a prince of Persia? Well, let’s break this title down.

The Prince of Persia
We think of the term “prince” as the son of the king, or the person next in line to the throne.
DYK: The word “Prince” never once means the son of a king in the Bible.
A prince means a chief ruler. The leader.
That’s where we get words like principal, which is the leader of a school. Or the other kind of principle, like the values we live our lives by. Your principles are the things that guide your life. The key root there is prince, which means the thing that’s on top, the thing in charge.
So the prince of Persia is the chief ruler of Persia. So we might identify this as a king, or an emperor or something like that right? Except that this is not talking about a human ruler. There is no human ruler who can jump up into the sky and stop an angel from coming to you and answering your prayers. No mere human being can do that. This is a spiritual entity.
This is the spirit behind the person. The spiritual power behind the human power. And this particular spirit is the spirit behind the leadership of Persia. This is the power behind the throne. The human leader of Persia at this time is Darius, I believe. But this is the power behind Darius. Darius doesn’t even realize how much he is influenced by this spirit.
Why “of Persia”? Because this spirit is the spirit that is assigned to the territory of Persia. Human rulers come and go, but this spirit- this principality- remains in charge.

Demons can stop your prayers
So while we’re praying, angels and demons are getting into conflicts with each other. We’re probably not thinking about that. When we pray, we probably imagine that God just snaps his fingers like Thanos and grants our wish- if He wants to. And to be honest, I wish it was that simple. I wish God would just snap His fingers and just make all my problems go away. But it’s not that simple; God assigns His spiritual beings the tasks of carrying out your prayers.
So you say, OK, if God wants to, He can send an angel my way with the answer to my problem. But again, there’s an additional layer of complexity. God might hear your prayer, decide to do it, dispatch an angel to help you- and then that angel runs into some interference.
See, this angel said that a demonic entity who is in charge of Persia- this would be modern Iran- met him in the air and held him up. Daniel was praying and the answer to his prayers was right above his head. And since he kept praying, God sent another angel to help the first angel out. And finally,
This is how spiritual warfare works. Angels and Fallen Angels battle each other all around us, fighting over the souls of men, fighting over God’s will, fighting over everything from geopolitics to the temptations you face every day. The effects of what is going on in the spiritual realm are seen in the physical realm.
We can’t see the spiritual realm, but we can influence it with our prayers. Daniel 10 is not weird; it’s normative. That means normal. it’s showing us the relationship between the spiritual and the physical. This is how things operate in the spiritual realm, and this is how we influence it. Let me read a little more of what the angel said.
Daniel 10:20
Then he said, “Do you know why I have come to you? And now I must return to fight with the prince of Persia; and when I have gone forth, indeed the prince of Greece will come.
I like this angel, he sounds like a real fighter. He’s saying, “I’ve just got done wrestling with the demon-angel of Persia for three weeks, now I’ve gotta give you this message, then I’m gonna go back to wrestling with the Persia angel some more, and after that I’ve got a fight scheduled with the Greece angel.” Angels have got interesting lives.
And that pretty much concludes where I’m going to leave things for today. I’ll share some closing thought here in a minute, but my idea for this podcast is to keep lessons short and to the point. I could always go on with more and more, but that’s what future episodes are for- we’ll dig deeper into these concepts down the road- so let’s leave it here for today.

Housekeeping/Mailbag
Next time on this podcast, I’m going to get into the divine council of God. Did you know that God has staff meetings up in heaven? And that these staff meetings are how the affairs of earth are conducted? The nations who go to war against each other, the decisions kings and presidents make, these are determined in the unseen realm, and the Bible gives us one of these staff meetings in detail so that you can see how it all works. Don’t believe me? You’ll learn all about it next time on this podcast.
Make sure you’re subscribed so you can get it!
What weird stuff in the Bible do you want to know more about? weirdstuffinthebible@gmail.com

Closing Thoughts
I will not attempt to do an application at the end of these lessons. I love spiritual applications, but this podcast is primarily for information. To inform you as a Christian. You can do what you want with the information, but generally speaking, I could go on for 10 or 20 minutes with applications. I don’t want this podcast to run that long. This time, the application that you need to remember is so blatantly in our face and it’s just too important not to mention.
Let’s say you’ve been praying for something, and you may have been praying for it for a while, but haven’t yet seen an answer…

So pray, and keep praying. Don’t give up. Imagine if Daniel had prayed and fasted for two weeks and six days and then shrugged his shoulders and gave up. We’d say, what a waste. The answer was so close.
How many times have we probably been praying for something, and the answer was closer than we realized, and then we gave up? We’ll get to heaven someday and probably find out how many good things God wanted to send us, how many prayers He wanted to answer, but that never made it to us because we didn’t persist in prayer.
Luke 18- keep praying and don’t give up.
And also, fast. As Jesus said after the disciples couldn’t cast out a demon in:
Mark 9:29
So He said to them, “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting.”
And then Jesus cast it out. Why? Because He was a man who regularly prayed and fasted. He said it would take both to get all the demons out of the way.
It didn’t say “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting” and then He went and prayed and fasted. No, He cast it out right then.
We kind of cavalierly claim that we have the Holy Spirit, so we can cast out any demon. That Jesus said His followers will cast out demons, but
But Jesus also said some can only come out by prayer and fasting.
Even Daniel- a friend of God- couldn’t get his answer by prayer alone. He also needed to fast. And not just pray and fast for a day or two, but for three weeks. Three weeks!
So don’t assume that just because you haven’t gotten an answer to your prayer that it’s because God has declined to help you. The answer might be just caught somewhere between heaven and earth, in the unseen realm, and you need to keep praying. And fasting. And don’t give up.
The Bible is not weird. WE are weird, because we don’t know about fallen angels who can disrupt and block our prayers. But now we do. And we know what to do about it. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time on WSITB.