Please notice four things that I think any one reading this chapter will readily admit.  This being talking with Daniel is plainly a spirit being.  He is opposed by some one.  This opponent plainly must be a spirit being, too, to be resisting a spirit being.  Daniel’s messenger is from God:  that is clear.  Then the opponent must be from the opposite camp.  And here comes in the thing strange, unexpected, the evil spirit being has the power to detain, hold back God’s messenger for three full weeks by earth’s reckoning of time.  Then reenforcements come, as we would say.  The evil messenger’s purpose is defeated, and God’s messenger is free to come as originally planned.

There is a double scene being enacted.  A scene you can see, and a scene you cannot see.  An unseen wrestling match in the upper spirit realm, and two embodied spirit beings down on their faces by the river.  And both concerned over the same thing.

That is the Daniel story.  What an acted out illustration it is of Paul’s words.  It is a picture glowing with the action of real life.  It is a double picture.  Every prayer action is in doubles; a lower human level; an upper spirit level.  Many see only the seen, and lose heart.  While we look at the things that are seen, let us gaze intently at the things unseen; for the seen things are secondary, but the unseen are chief, and the action of life is being decided there.

Here is the lower, the seen;—­a group of men, led by a man of executive force enough to control an empire, prone on their faces, with minds clear, quiet, alert, persistently, ceaselessly praying day by day.  Here is the upper, the unseen:—­a “wrestling,” keen, stubborn, skilled, going on between two spirit princes in the spirit realm.  And by Paul’s explanation the two are vitally connected.  Daniel and his companions are wrestlers too, active participants in that upper-air fight, and really deciding the issue, for they are on the ground being contested.  These men are indeed praying with all prayer and supplication at all times, in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication, and at length victory comes.

Prayer Concerns Three.

Now a bit of a look at the central figure of the pattern.  Jesus lets in a flood of light on Satan’s relation to prayer in one of His prayer parables.  There are two parables dealing distinctively with prayer:  “the friend at midnight,"[26] and “the unjust judge."[27] The second of these deals directly with this Satan phase of prayer.  It is Luke through whom we learn most of Jesus’ own praying who preserves for us this remarkable prayer picture.