The largest line running out of Daniel into the Gospels is the Son of Man. Daniel 7:13 shows one in human form coming with the clouds of heaven, approaching the Ancient of Days and being led into His presence, and 7:14 gives Him dominion, glory and kingship, served by every nation and language, in a kingdom that will never be destroyed. He does not rise out of the sea like the four beasts before Him. He comes down. Hippolytus of Rome, writing a commentary on Daniel in the early third century, quotes both verses and reads them of Christ. John Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament of 1765, reads 7:13 of the Messiah and of the ascension, where He received His royal investiture.
Jesus took that title for Himself more often than any other, and the place where the connection is put past argument is His trial. The high priest asked Him under oath whether He was the Christ, and He answered with this chapter: “I am,” said Jesus, “and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.” The court did not need the reference explained. The high priest tore his robes, which means the quotation was heard as a claim. Stephen sees the same figure standing at the right hand of God as he dies. Revelation 1:13 puts One like the Son of Man among the lampstands, and 1:14 gives Him the description Daniel 7:9 had given the Ancient of Days, hair white like wool, as white as snow.
The second line is the stone. In Daniel 2:34 a stone is cut out, but not by human hands, and it strikes the statue of the four empires; in 2:35 it becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth, and 2:44 says the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed. Irenaeus, in Against Heresies in the late second century, says it outright, that Christ is the stone which is cut out without hands, who shall destroy temporal kingdoms and introduce an eternal one. Gregory of Nyssa, preaching On the Baptism of Christ in the fourth century, reads the cutting without hands of the virgin birth, and that is his reading rather than the passage's plain sense. Honored teachers then differ about when the stone strikes. Adam Clarke reads a kingdom that spreads and prevails to the end of the world. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read a destroying judgment dealt by Christ at His coming again. Both readings are held by men this site honors, and the pages on last things carry the question.
The third line is the seventy weeks. Daniel 9:24 decrees seventy sevens for Daniel's people and his holy city to put an end to sin, to make atonement for iniquity and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and 9:26 says the Messiah will be cut off and will have nothing. The count lands on Messiah. This site's tradition reads the seventieth seven as still future, on the pre-tribulational premillennial reading it holds elsewhere. Five other readings are set out with the men who hold each, among them John Calvin, Sir Isaac Newton, R. C. Sproul, and Keil and Delitzsch. This page says where the count lands and sends the reader on rather than running the arithmetic.
Both deliverance stories were read early as pictures of Christ with His people. This site reads the fourth man in the furnace as the pre-incarnate Christ. John Wesley calls Him the Angel of the covenant appearing before His incarnation, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown call Him the messenger of the covenant giving a prelude to it. John Calvin reads the figure as a created angel, on the ground that Nebuchadnezzar spoke as the nations around him spoke, calling angels sons of God because something of God shines in them, and his reason is given below in his own words. He is honored here, and nothing on this page frames him as opposing anyone. Cyril of Jerusalem preached the lions' den as a lesson in faith in his fifth Catechetical Lecture in the fourth century. Adam Clarke and John Wesley both read the angel who shut the lions' mouths as the one who had stood in the furnace.
It ends in a resurrection. Daniel 12:2 is the clearest statement in the Old Testament that the dead will rise to two outcomes, some to everlasting life and others to shame and everlasting contempt, and Jesus uses its exact shape in John 5:28 and 5:29, where all who are in their graves hear His voice and come out to a resurrection of life or a resurrection of judgment. Matthew Henry makes that connection at 12:2 and notes that Jewish readers read the verse of the resurrection too. Basil of Caesarea quotes it in a pastoral letter to Optimus in the fourth century. Jerome, in his commentary in the early fifth century, reads the last verse spoken to Daniel the same way, and says the whole context has to do with the resurrection of all the dead, at the time when the prophet also is to rise. That is the last word Daniel is given: go your way, rest, and rise. One pattern lies under all of it, and the page states it once. The God who rules the kingdom of men kept His own people through the fire and the pit rather than out of them. The fourth man walks inside the furnace. The angel comes down into the den.
