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I did a little math today. You know how people say you'll never use math again once you're out of school? They're wrong. I use it all the time, in lots of different ways.
The kind of problem I did today was a simple percentage calculation.
I wanted to know, out of the 49 verses in Daniel chapter 2, how many were dedicated to Daniel's prayer of thanksgiving once he had the same vision Nebuchadnezzar had seen, and on top of that the interpretation of it.
The prayer begins in verse 19 through verse 23, which makes five verses. Therefore, out of the chapter's 49 verses, this prayer takes up slightly more than ten percent (a tithe, if you will) of the chapter.
While I'm certainly not here to offer a formula for how often and how much of our time we ought to budget for praising God, I do find it interesting that such a significant portion of an already lengthy chapter would be dedicated to heart-felt thanks.
Why?
Because if it were me, knowing that my ability to tell the king his dream and its interpretation directly influenced my immediate longevity and that of my colleagues, I would be tempted to say thank you later. You know, after I had gone to the king to save my life.
But Daniel doesn't. Death has already knocked at his door, but he's in no hurry. He gives thorough praise to the God who reveals secrets before he goes out the door to accomplish his mission.
In my own tendency to rush to and through the to-do list without stopping for breath let alone thanks, I could take yet another lesson from Daniel, don't you think?
There's a reason the word humbled sounds so similar to the word humiliated.
He wakes with a start, confused. There doesn't seem to be anyone in Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom who can help him straighten out his thoughts, or even remember what they were, until a brash young captive offers to take the case before the God of his fathers.
Put yourself in his place.
You agree to wait just one more night, because somewhere deep down you know if you can get to the bottom of this nagging dream, you'll have a piece of knowledge and wisdom worth more than anything else on earth.
Yes, you wait. Perhaps you pass another sleepless night in your wondering. You wait until daylight. You wait while Daniel takes time to offer praise to the God of heaven who revealed the secret. You wait while the young man hurries off to find your captain of the guard. You wait while Arioch in turn brings Daniel into your throne room, surpassed in earthly splendor by only Solomon's court itself.
You catch your breath as the Hebrew captive starts from the beginning of the dream, from this very moment in history, tracing the world's kingdoms and countries to the end of time.
Thou art this head of gold.
You're humbled by God's penetrating wisdom, given to a simple captive student on your behalf. Yet it would be hard not to let that go to your head. No one in the future of the world from you onward, except the King of the universe Himself, will surpass you in riches and glory.
You therefore begin to wonder how in the world they will overtake you, these lesser kings of silver, brass, iron, even clay. Certainly you will never be so weak as to be thrown down! No, it can't happen.
The more you think about it, the more convinced you become, until the miraculous circumstances surrounding the dream and the words of awe and praise that escaped your own lips slip into faded memories.
It's not a stretch at all now to make a giant image of gold as wide as Goliath was tall and point it up toward heaven as a symbol of your own enduring majesty, setting yourself directly in opposition to the only true King.
This time, you're humbled by a miracle.
Hebrews again. Captives again. The same God who delivered a visual prophecy covering the rest of the world's history delivered his servants from death when they refused to worship the mock prophetic image on the plain of Dura.
You're humbled, but a root of that pride-weed is still strong in your heart, and you let it grow.
You even start to believe that the entire kingdom of Babylon in all its glory is a product of, well, nothing short of you. It revolves around you, and you are the sole reason for not only its prosperity, but also its existence.
Hardly a memory remains of that God who could deliver a few Hebrew captives out of your hands, who was and is and shall be mightier than you throughout all the ages. From the outside looking in, it might be easy for those same Hebrew captives to think you were a hopeless case.
Maybe, though, they kept praying for you, and that's how you find yourself troubled over another dream. It's one more opportunity to break off your sins by righteousness, one more chance to show mercy to the poor instead of hoarding all the riches of the kingdom to yourself.
You, however, feel far too secure, and instead of taking a chance to change your ways, you settle back into your false security, letting that pride-weed grow a little bigger.
It takes more than a dream interpreted this time, more than a miraculous deliverance from a fiery furnace. And so you spend seven years living the simple life of an animal, eating grass, waking and sleeping with the sun, moistened by the dew of heaven.
Amazingly, when you come to your right mind again after those seven long years of deepest humiliation, you're not angry at God for putting you through such a strange and stringent trial. Instead, you bless Him. You praise Him. You thank Him. You honor Him.
Somehow this time, you've realized that pride only brings a multitude of curses, and anything that can be done to get that awful root out of your heart is worth the price, and you're grateful for that new and beautiful humble-plant growing in its place.
And those last words of your letter to the world?
...and those that walk in pride He is able to abase.
They're no longer a threat, but a promise.
Not just for you, the ancient king, but for anyone in the whole world, throughout history, down the ages of silver, brass, iron, and clay. Because humility of heart before God is the real treasure after all.
Anyone whose heart is so hardened with pride in all its forms of fear, anxiety, and self exaltation--yes, all these and more--that there's not even so much as the hint of a desire for humility can be entrusted to the same God who lifted Nebuchadnezzar up from the grass of the earth and restored him to a glorious kingdom when he could finally be trusted to bear a faithful witness to the world.
The same God who saved Nebuchadnezzar from himself can still save you. He can save those you love, too, and He is pride's only sure remedy.
One of the
reasons I love the book of Daniel is that it is such a profound mixture
of what I believe are the two important things to look for when we study the Bible. One without the other would make either lose its power.
First,
Daniel reveals truth in the large sense, theological truth, you might say. In one little book, we get God's plan for sacred history from
Daniel's days in college all the way down to the second coming in astonishing detail. Daniel's prophecies constantly point us toward that end goal God has been striving toward since the very first sin: the complete restoration of His good and pleasant kingdom on earth.
And
the second one? Daniel's stories overflow with practical, godly
examples and personal advice on how I can be a
better Christian and have vibrant faith no matter what I'm facing.
Right now, today. Which, step by step, day by day, keeps me striving right along with God Himself for His end goal. It's an awesome thing to be part of, no?
The book opens with one of the shortest war stories I've ever read: the king of Babylon comes against the king of Jerusalem, wins because God lets him, and takes captive some of God's people and some holy things out of God's temple. Off to Babylon they go.
Daniel and his friends perhaps stood in long lines as they got settled into their new home. College orientations can be that way. But theirs was different. They're attending college in a new country. They'll be learning a new language. For a lot of students today, that would be the biggest of dreams come true.
But for these guys? The word "captive" doesn't score high on anybody's list top fifteen hundred career goals. Yet it's a word that defines them for years to come, the rest of their lives, in fact, through multiple kings and governments.
Those captives of Judah...
They didn't choose the label, but it was there and it was true nonetheless. They were captives, and there wasn't anything they could do about it.
Nothing, that is, unless they could be taken captive by Someone Else.
That
first problem came up almost immediately: food. The king provided
generously for their nourishment, but eating the food on his table broke
God's laws. Daniel and his friends made no excuses, but they did make a
brash request. The prince of the eunuchs denied the request on the
grounds that granting it would cost his life.
Pretend for a second you haven't heard this story a million times. Think for a moment about what Daniel could have said:
We'd hate to put your life in danger. We're sorry we even brought this up.
We can make do with what's in front of us. We'd hate to be the cause of your death.
We promise we won't tell anyone. The king will never know.
Instead, Daniel simply negotiated further--not the typical behavior of a captive! He's bold, he's calm, he's taking the reigns from his captors and gaining the upper hand.
Test us for ten days. We'll be healthier at the end, and it will show everyone, including the king if he should want to know, that God's law and His ways are best.
His reply sets them up to be a public witness no matter how far and wide the story might travel. They have no secrets to keep, no lies to tell, and no hint of fear that keeping God's law will cause another person's harm or death.
Because God's laws were designed to protect and enrich life, not destroy it, designed for everybody everywhere, nor just one people group in one small Middle Eastern country.
Of course, we do know how the story turns out, how the young men are healthier after just ten days than all the other students, likely including other Hebrew captives whose health visibly deteriorated while they ate the king's food and drank his wine during the ten days of Daniel's test. We know how at the end of their college course, they came out far ahead of not only their own class but also all the other wise men in the kingdom.
Talk about a captivity turned around in their favor. You know why?
Their bonds to God directed every choice they made. They didn't buck Nebuchadnezzar's system just to see if they could, or to prove their independence, or merely to test the limits of their prisoner of war status.
They rebelled against only those things that would force them to break God's law, and in claiming their moral freedom trusted themselves entirely to His protection. They obeyed by faith and thereby obtained His promised blessings. They didn't break one command in order to keep another. For them, it was all or nothing.
Their story illustrates how far-reaching and binding God's law really is through all time, and sets it on a high level of honor.
That's true even if we might happen to find ourselves in situations that feel completely out of control, whether in a literal prison or whether it's simply a job or a boss that introduces "little" compromises.
And their story injects courage straight into my veins, right now, today.
Like them, I don't have to feel captive to circumstances, backed into a corner where there's no way out but to break God's law or sacrifice my principles. It's so easy to feel that way, though, isn't it? We worry about what people think, whether we'll be able to find and keep a job, whether someone else will get hurt if we take the stand we know we know we need to take.
Daniel and his friends didn't worry about those things. I suppose you could say they had nothing left to lose, except their lives (and we'll get to those stories soon!). Yet they trusted. They obeyed. And eventually they stood in the king's court, their influence extending over the largest kingdom of the earth.
I don't believe for a second they did any of that in their own strength or in their own wisdom, and I don't have to either. They simply chose to be faithful, and the Bible says "...God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom..." (See Daniel 1:17).
The same One who provided for all their needs promised to provide for all yours, too. Let's trust Him more today.
Shall we even get brave and ask Him to let us know if there's an area of our lives that isn't matching up with His ways of doing things? Even if we end up needing to make some changes in our lives, on the other side of those changes God only has more amazing things for us to be, do, and enjoy--for His glory.
