Daniel Earned It

Reading Daniel makes you think about how God makes us work for revelation.

Spiritual promptings can come as a whisper right at the edge of what you can hear

As dream symbols that have to be unpacked

Or signs and portents that also have to be unpacked.

God seems to want you to work for it.  Well, why not?  He wants us to grow, and growth requires work and help.  Providing us inspiration we have to strain for a bit accomplishes both.

Most of the fuss about faith and works and earning salvation disappears when you realize that you do indeed have to work for it, but you earn it in the same sense a child “earns” an allowance by doing his chores.

Daniel’s inspiration seems pretty effortless in the Bible, if you overlook the parts about being threatened with death all the time, but I believe that Daniel had done the work before hand.  It’s there, just offscreen, in the form of deep study of symbolism.