Daniel Lesson 1

Introduction, Daniel 1:1-2

No other book in God’s Word has been attacked more than the book of Daniel. Daniel represents the greatest offense of the Word of God to modern man. And for that reason the book of Daniel must be crushed by the critics of Christianity, for if the book of Daniel is left to stand then the case against Christianity falls to the ground. Therefore the most vehement hatred has been vented against this book in academic circles. It is this book that has borne the brunt of liberal attacks over the centuries. It was one of the first books that were attacked by the early anti-supernaturalists. And every course on religion on the college campus or in high school which is taught by an unregenerate, unredeemed individual or a person who does not think doctrinally, that course will feature a prominent attack on the authenticity of this book.

If you are a witnessing Christian and you stand firm for the Lord Jesus Christ, you must know how to defend yourself against the attacks upon this book. Sooner or later you will be trapped into a situation where you will be shredded by a knowledgeable non-Christian who has studied some of the higher critical arguments and will attempt to demolish your position by hitting you at what amounts to in most believers’ lives as their Achilles heel, their inability to defend this book.

The book can be defended; moreover the book not only can be defended but it can be shown that it is this book that disproves the presupposition of liberal theology. The reasons why this book offends so many people and draws down upon itself so many attacks is basically one simple fact, and that is there’s no other place in Scripture where prophecy is so clear and so detailed and has already been so completely fulfilled, that the argument of the book of Daniel shows the existence of a supernatural God, revealing Himself clearly and distinctly to man centuries before an event, and then that prophecy coming to 100% fulfillment. There are obviously many unfulfilled prophecies in the book of Daniel but the book of Daniel has so man already fulfilled ones that it is deeply offensive to the anti-supernaturalists. People who attack Daniel hate the concept of a personal infinite God who speaks to His creatures and they vent their hatred by their academic attacks upon this book.

There are no intellectually acceptable reasons why this book should not be considered as authoritative as any other book in the canon of Scripture. The only reasons given follow from an anti-supernaturalists bias at the starting point, presupposing that miracles can’t be, that God cannot verbally reveal Himself, therefore Daniel cannot be what it claims to be, is the argument of modern higher criticism. Daniel, throughout history, has had tremendous impact; probably no other book of Scripture is better known for its prophecy, Daniel is read more widely than the book of Revelation; to most believers if they had to pick between the two they’d pick Daniel over Revelation, for that reason people are more familiar with Daniel.

Daniel has had an impact on the thinking of the non-Christian world. As we will show as we go through the book of Daniel, the mere existence of this one man giving testimony to the sovereign Biblical God in the midst of the pagan culture, led to a disintegration of polytheism in the Near East in the area of the sixth century. In the sixth century strange things began to happen across the face of the earth. In the sixth century some six world religions began; you can go through the comparative religions and count them. Go to Zoroastrianism, you can go to India and the Hindus had the time of their Reformation. Go to Confucius or Buddha, go to Judaism in its legalistic form, go to the philosophy of Greece, all these movements began in the sixth century. And yet very few people today ever bother to even ask the question, why was it that we can have centuries upon centuries of no new religions but then suddenly, as if someone took the cover off the pot of boiling water, we have a multiplication of new religions, all basically the same in structure, rationalist, beginning in the sixth century. Who lived in the sixth century that might have influenced this tremendous shift in the world intellectual climate? One strong candidate is the young man, Daniel and his interactions with the high influential people of Babylonian society.

But Daniel not only had an influence in the ancient world of thought, Daniel has had an influence in the modern world of thought. Daniel, according to R. G. Collingwood in his book, Idea of History, was the basis from which Hegel obtained his four kingdoms. Hegel and his philosophy held to the concept that there were four kingdoms in man’s history, the Oriental Kingdom, the Kingdom of Greece, the Kingdom of Rome and the Kingdom of Germany, and out of those four kingdoms Hegel explained the ideal spirit behind history. And Hegel in turn sowed the seeds of developmental historiography into the minds of a man by the name of Karl Marx and his associates. And thus we have an interesting situation. It turns out that the most virile opponents of Christianity today, communism, attains its very philosophy from Christianity. The concept of historical progress toward an ultimate kingdom is a concept the communists have stolen from the Bible. And the place where they got it, via Marx, via Hegel, is this book. So paradoxically the west finds itself falling apart before communism because it’s not using the weapons that can be used and the weapons of Biblical Christianity.

We’ll follow certain procedures as we teach this book; it’s a very difficult book to teach. I would recommend besides just taking notes, this book called Ezekiel-Daniel, it’s a study guide prepared by Irving L. Jensen, put out by Moody Press, for $1.50, and the last half of this is on Daniel and he gives you an outline to follow in your reading of Daniel. He doesn’t go into all the details, that’s not the point of this book. The point of this book is to help you read through the book for yourself, just get acquainted with the book and then we’ll take it verse by verse. You’ll get out of it as much as you put into it and this is one easy way to kind of get started.

The other point about our procedure is that instead of covering all the attacks on Daniel at the very beginning in a long lengthy introduction that will bore most people, we’ll cover the critical problems as we go through the text. So as we move through verse by verse in the book of Daniel, when we come on a verse that sort of epitomizes a particular problem we’ll pause there, and I’ll say this is a critical problem number so and so, and when you hear that, that’s the signal that I’m stopping and I’m going to deal with the problem of assault against the book. For example, today we’re going to deal with two critical problems; right from the very start that we encounter before we even get into the second verse and these two problems have to be dealt with so you learn how to handle them and then we’ll go on to the text.

Another point of procedure, as we go through the book I will show you why here at Lubbock Bible Church we follow the premillennial position on the interpretation of this book. We’ll show you why conservatives vary in their interpretation of Daniel so if somebody comes trotting up to you someday and says well, there are many, many different interpretations of Daniel, the implication is not one of them is valid, and to head that argument off at the pass we will show you what the alternate interpretations of Daniel are and their faults, and then we’ll move to a premillennial interpretation of Daniel.

Let’s go to the first problem: obviously the location of the book of Daniel. Before we can get through the title of the book we must face the first critical problem, and this is a problem that liberals will throw against you, people who have gone to college or taken religion courses will hear about this and drop it in your lap. So if you’re to be an equipped believer, handle it. It’s a quite simple argument to handle; if you know what the argument is you can deal with it.

It starts from the concept of the Hebrew Bible. The Old Testament was written over many centuries in Hebrew. And this Hebrew canon was divided into three parts. When you open the Hebrew Bible what you think is the back is not the back, it’s the book of Genesis. Hebrew is the ideal book for those people who love to read the back of the book first. The Hebrew Bible is divided into three parts: the first part is called the Torah, or the Law. That consists of the first five books, sometimes called the Pentateuch, the word “five,” the first five books. This is considered the basis of the Old Testament; everything is built on the Torah. The word “Torah” means instruction. The second part of the Hebrew canon is called the Nabiim, and this translated means the prophets. The third part is the Kethubim, and it means the writings or what is written.

So you have these three parts of the Old Testament Bible, the Torah, the Nabiim and the Kethubim, or the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. These represent three sections of the Old Testament. And here’s the problem posed by the book of Daniel. Which of those three you would guess Daniel would be listed under? Keep in mind that the Old Testament Hebrew is not in the same order as your English Bible. When the King James translators translated they didn’t follow the order of books of the Old Testament Hebrew, they followed the order of the books in the Septuagint or the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

Now you would expect that the book of Daniel would be in the second part, because the second part is the prophets. The second part includes Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea; it includes these men so clearly defined in Scripture as prophets. Now if there’s one book in Scripture that is known for its prophecy it’s the book of Daniel, but in the Hebrew Bible Daniel is not in the Prophets. Daniel is in the Writings; Daniel is part of the Kethubim. And so the critics have said aha, that proves that Daniel was a late, recent, writing.

Now here’s why they draw that conclusion. The liberal argues that first you had the Torah, that was written and that was closed, in other words, these books were written down and when they were finished being written the men closed the canon and that section of the canon was finished. Then in time we have the development of the Nabiim, they were written down, and they include Malachi, the last of the Nabiim is Malachi which is the last book in your Bible, Malachi written about 400 BC. And when Malachi was finished then the second part of the canon was finished and closed. Then they argue came the Kethubim, and since Daniel was late it was too late to make the second part of the Old Testament, thus Daniel was a late creation. Now if the second part of the canon closed at 400 BC and Daniel was written this side of 400 BC it’s obviously a forgery because Daniel claims to have been written before 400 BC. Daniel claims to be written by Daniel who lived during the days of the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian Empire had long since passed off the scene by 400 BC. So go the critics, Daniel therefore is a late book.

Here’s our response to that argument. The argument is circular because one, here are the steps in the human viewpoint legal argument, and watch how it’s circular. It closes back on itself. The argument starts out saying that Daniel has to be late because its prophecies are too exact to be real, thus Daniel must have been written after these prophecies were fulfilled. Therefore Daniel must have been written in the vicinity of 200 BC or 165 BC, the time of the Maccabean Revolt. Daniel has to be written after the fulfilled prophecy because they’re not prophecies, he’s just pretending to have predicted history; history really occurred, Daniel wanted to show the sovereignty of God so he made up this big story that God had shown him these prophecies.

So the first step of the liberal argument is that Daniel has to be late because the prophecy can’t be real. Notice that this first step in the argument involves a presupposition of anti-supernaturalism, that prophecies can’t exist. It has no basis in fact and as we go on through the text I’ll show you that, in fact, Daniel must have been written before 165 because we have a scroll of Daniel found in the Dead Sea that dates before 165 BC. If that’s the case, then obviously Daniel had to have been written before the Maccabean Revolt. But in this case the liberals argue that the dating of the scroll must be wrong because they are so sure of their presupposition against super-naturalism. They’re so sure that there is not a God of the Bible; they are so sure that even if there was a God of the Bible He couldn’t speak, and being sure of this presupposition then Daniel must be written late. That’s their first step.

The second step is that the canon represents three periods of history of writing, namely that the three sections of the Bible aren’t three sections topically arranged, they are three sections chronologically arranged. So the second point of their argument is also an assumption, that the Hebrew canon developed over a time period and that what we see as the Nabiim and the Kethubim are simply the result of a long evolutionary historical process. Now taking those two points together, that Daniel must be late, that the canon was chronologically arranged, they conclude that Daniel must be late. But you see they started off sure that Daniel had to be late so it’s not any surprise that they conclude that Daniel has to be late. It’s all grounded on their theological presupposition which is usually dishonestly suppressed in the discussion.

Therefore, we argue that the question of Daniel’s position in the canon is a result, not of chronological development but it’s the result of topical organization. These three parts, the Kethubim include the Psalms of David, and these Psalms are written centuries before, so you can’t argue that the third part of the canon was written late. The third part of the canon was not written late nor collected late. The third part of the canon was collected under a topical system.

Now what topical system? Basically here’s the point. There were three classes or three emphases in the Old Testament education, three subject areas. Some of these overlap but there are three emphases: the priest, the prophet, and the wise men. Now let me explain each of these three. The priests were the men, the Levites who were ordained to work at the cultist, they were the men ordained to help worship; they were the men ordained to teach the Law, thus the first third of the Bible, the Torah, is the section used by the priests, and therefore we explain the first part of the Bible not as the earliest writings, though in this case they happened to be. The organization of the Bible is the result of topical arrangement. So the Torah was what the priests taught the people. The Torah included the divine viewpoint of economics, of war, of justice, of capital punishment and so on, everything that so irritates the maudlin sentimentalist.

And now we come to the Prophets, the second section. The Prophets writings are the work of the Prophets, and the prophets are the ones who added to the Torah; the Torah was the base, the Prophets showed where the Torah was being amended, changed, updated or applied to later history. And so the Prophets were gathered together in a second set of writings, all by topic, not by time.

I’ve often said that if you will just pause and relax as a Christian when someone hits you with a liberal attack, and back off and think of it for a moment, you will usually find in the process of solving the problem a blessing. And sure enough when we go to answer the final stage of this first critical problem we come up with a vital truth that will control our entire interpretation of the book of Daniel. And Christians who fail to obtain this point, who go to prophecy conference after prophecy conference and have the idea that the chief point of Daniel is prophecy, you’re wrong. The chief point of Daniel is not prophecy; if it were it would be in the second part of the Hebrew canon. So obviously there’s another reason for Daniel other than prophecy. Prophecy is obviously there, but that’s not the chief purpose of the book.

Daniel is in the Kethubim or the Writings which were the product of the wise men. The wise men were men who would be wise in skill and living. For example, the Psalms were the writings of the composers of the Hebrew culture. The wise men were the creators of Hebrew culture. They were the ones that took the Word of God out into every area of life and created: the poets, the musicians, the literary people, they were the wise men. So the Psalms represent the songs of the nation. The book of Proverbs represents wisdom in the daily details of life and running a business, a marriage, and running a nation. The book of Proverbs is a book of wisdom. The Song of Songs, dealing with sex and marriage, deals with skill in sex relationships and therefore that’s included in the Kethubim as a repository of wisdom and skill.

And so Daniel is included, not with the prophets; he is included with the writings of the wise men. He is therefore writing in order to give skill in living to believers. It is not primarily a book of prophecy; it is a book of wisdom. What for? Why? Wisdom that Daniel teaches us is the wisdom that I think several in this congregation need. Over the years we’ve taught the Word of God, we’ve shown you that the Word of God applies in every area of life, including every academic area, we’ve shown that the Word of God does have something to say in spite of instructors to the contrary. The Word of God does have authority to speak in the areas of geology, biology and economics, to cite three fields that people are convinced it doesn’t have authority in. The Bible does speak to these areas. And the Bible does not allow for demilitarized zones to exist between the believer and the unbeliever. Don’t be fooled, there are no areas of neutrality. And so the Christians who have studied here have become more and more aggressive, and they’ve begun to see that the Word of God must be applied in every area.

About every two or three weeks we have a confrontation involving one of our people and a professor at the local campus, or in business, or in some other area where our people rub elbows with other people, and the confrontations always are centered on the fact that our people are aggressively applying the Word of God and bumping against Christians who have been taught that the Christian gospel applies only to the evangelistic appeal; to them Christianity is trotting down the aisle, raising the hand, signing a card, etc. But when it comes to running your business and selecting one economic theory from another, the Word of God is of no help. When it comes to discerning the sequence of events in past history, including earth history, the Word of God can’t be of any help because it’s neutral there. When it comes to discerning the continuity in nature and biology the Word of God can’t help because it’s neutral there, so the line goes. And our people have aggressively fought against this. And now we’re at the stage of growth where the soldiers have been trained, now we are ready to apply diplomacy.

And without at all curtailing the fighting spirit of some of you, I want you to pay attention to how Daniel handles it; that’s the key to the book of Daniel: how does the believer live in the kingdom of man, when he is surrounded 100% by human viewpoint, how does he live. Daniel was a young man who fought his way through the most concentrated dose of human viewpoint a believer had ever seen up until that time. Remember all the other heroes of the faith were men who lived inside the kingdom of God, on Jewish soil, under the priests and the prophets. They had their apostasy but they had the temple to go to. They always had the idolatry of Baalism but they always had the Torah to come back to. Daniel was all alone; Daniel had no priest; Daniel had no prophet to cry on his shoulder. All alone Daniel lived in the world of complete darkness and Daniel came out to be a shining example.

Why, then, is the book of Daniel written? The book of Daniel is written to give wisdom to us who live in Satan’s world. How are we to be successful in coping, without compromise, yet how are we to be successful living in a human viewpoint type culture? Daniel is a wisdom book for that reason. So I hope those of you who have captured this one part, Daniel will not mean much to you if you haven’t got to the first stage of your Christian growth, where you’ve begun to fight the wars and you’ve, so to speak, pecked away at somebody that had a couple of PhD’s after his name, and all you asked the wrong question and whoof, the roof caved in on you and all of a sudden the mask came off and the vicious nature of the hatred of this world toward anything of Scripture was exposed. Then you discovered that no one is objective; even the people you are paying for your education, you thought they were nice cold scientific and objective, you thought they were until you began to rub on their religious presuppositions, and then you discovered they’re not objective. They’re more fanatically committed to their presuppositions than any Christian ever thought of being and they show it by their emotional reaction to Bible doctrine.

Having discovered this now you’re ready for diplomacy. How can you live with a minimum of explosion; how can you live and walk through the shrapnel? Daniel is the model. Just as David’s life was the model of sanctification, Daniel’s life is the model of living in the kingdom of man.

That’s the first critical problem, the answer to the position of the book of Daniel in the canon is not that it was written late at all; the answer is that the book of Daniel is in the Kethubim, it’s in the Writings because it’s a wisdom book. It’s not primarily a prophecy book, it’s a wisdom book, how to live in the kingdom of man.

Now one further point; before we can start verse 1 we have to define the type of literature we’re dealing with. This may be a new word but you can’t think without a vocabulary, words are the handles of ideas, so learn vocabulary; here’s a word: apocalyptic. That’s the word that defines the kind of literature that Daniel is—apocalyptic literature. Apocalyptic literature is included in the overall sense of prophecy but it’s a special kind of prophecy. You have the set of all prophetic writings; the apocalyptic literature is a subset of that overall one.

Apocalyptic writings—what are they? Here are the places in the Bible where apocalyptic literature is found. There is a halfway kind of apocalyptic literature in Isaiah 24-27, that’s when apocalyptic literature was beginning to develop. Ezekiel 37-48 is another section of the Bible where there is apocalyptic literature; actually the whole book of Ezekiel is apocalyptic. The book of Daniel is apocalyptic, particularly chapters 2, 7, 8 and 10-12; those chapters are generally considered apocalyptic. Zechariah 1-6 is considered to be apocalyptic literature. And finally, the book of Revelation is considered to be apocalyptic literature.

If you look at that list you notice what book comes last? The book of Revelation. That gives you a clue about something. How you interpret Revelation depends how you interpret those other books. Whatever rules you use to interpret Zechariah, Ezekiel, Isaiah and Daniel must be the same kind of rules that you play the ballgame with in Revelation. And a lot of people get in trouble because they come to Revelation and Revelation and just can’t be the same so we’ll use a different set of rules over here in Revelation. Huh-un, apocalyptic literature has to be interpreted by the same set of rules throughout. If you’re going to use certain rules to interpret Revelation you’d better be prepared to apply them to Daniel, Zechariah, and Ezekiel.

Now what about apocalyptic literature? If you look at those passages of Scripture do you notice something peculiar about them all when you consider the Old Testament? They occurred toward the end of the Old Testament in time, and what happened toward the end of the Old Testament? You have in 1400 BC the setting up of the kingdom in Canaan, you have the split in 930 BC, or civil war, you have the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom. The northern kingdom goes out in 721 BC with the fall of Samaria to the Assyrians; the southern kingdom goes out in 587-586 BC with the fall to the Babylonians. So what’s happening as you go through the Old Testament? People are suffering more and more and more. So what is the situation behind apocalyptic literature? It is a time of disaster. Apocalyptic literature rises to the fore whenever you have massive catastrophes and disasters, when people are discouraged God gives apocalyptic literature.

Apocalyptic literature differs from the prophets in that the prophets condemned the people for their sins but the apocalyptic literature doesn’t usually condemn for sin, it encourages, hang on, hang in there believer, hang on. So the message of the apocalyptic literature is hang in there because…because what? Because God’s final program is certain. So the apocalyptic literature is a literature of encouragement for downhearted believers in the middle of catastrophe. It was written, always during times of darkness. Believers during these times of deep depression, and deep discouragement go one of two ways; either they’re going to lose their faith and chuck the whole thing, I tried Christianity, it doesn’t work, or they’re going to go the other way, hey, there’s something wrong here, I want to get straightened out. And apocalyptic literature hopes that the second will be your path, not the first.

What are some characteristics of apocalyptic literature? Characteristics would include it is visionary; always in the apocalyptic God gives an audiovisual vision of His throne. These men are treated to the greatest audiovisual presentation the human race has ever seen. Apocalyptic is vision centered. It is mediated through angels; the angelic powers, the good ones, the elect angels, are the ones that put on the audiovisual presentation to the mind of the viewer. And thus in frequent times in the apocalyptic literature the man will see something and he will turn to the interpreting angel and he’ll say what do these things mean. Or the interpreting angel will show him the picture and he’ll say Daniel, do you understand, or John, do you understand the things you have seen? So there will always be an interpreting angel there to aid the understanding of finite man.

Apocalyptic literature is always pessimistic in the short run, there’s no hope. The die has been cast, unlike in the prophets when there’s a possibility of repentance, by the time you get to the apocalyptic literature the game is over; the whistle has blown, there’s no hope for repentance. There’s only one option—sit it out until God intervenes. So apocalyptic literature is literature is pessimistic in the short run, optimistic in the long run.

Obviously and needless to say, the last characteristic is it’s symbolic. And that’s where we’re going to be faced with the interpretation of symbols, and it demands careful attention to define these symbols correctly on the basis of the Word itself. These symbols, if we can define them in Daniel and if we can define them in Ezekiel, and if we can define them in Zechariah properly, when we come to Revelation it will be an easy book because Revelation, basically, does not introduce any new symbology. Most of the symbology of Revelation is already explained in these prior books. That’s why these books should be approached first.

Now the rough outline of Daniel: Daniel can be divided, actually it’s classically divided into two parts; I’ll divide it in three. Chapter 1 is the introduction to the book, and we could summarize the thought of chapter 1 as Daniel enters Gentile politics. It describes his entrance into politics. The book is political; it is wisdom in how to live in a human viewpoint environment. Daniel enters Gentile politics is the theme of chapter 1.

In chapters 2-6 Daniel has a successful career in Gentile politics. He was successful and if Daniel can make it, you can make. That’s the encouragement of this book. No matter how many idolaters you rub elbows with you still can be successful in this world. Daniel proves it, his life is a testimony. Daniel has a successful career in Gentile politics.

The last section, which is namely visionary, Daniel learns the outline of history and its connection with his people, and that’s the part the Jews very much cherish, those last chapters of Daniel. Chapters 7-12 are the third part; Daniel learns the outline of history as it relates to his people. And it’s a comforting word, particularly to Israel.

Now we come to verse 1; we’ll look at verses 1-2 together and then we must go to our second critical problem and in solving this second critical problem, just as when we solved the first critical problem, we will be spiritually benefited.

Verse 1, “In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, came Nebuchadnezzar, king Babylon, unto Jerusalem and besieged it. [2] And the Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand, with part of the vessels of the house of God, which he carried into the land of Shinar to the house of his god; and he brought the vessels into the treasure house of his god.” The god mentioned there is the god Marduk. He was the god of the Babylonians; he is equivalent to Jupiter in the Romans and Zeus to the Greeks. He was a god that was worshiped in the ancient world, and as Velikovsky has pointed out, probably worshiped because the planet Jupiter is not basically a planet. Velikovsky has for years said that the planet Jupiter must have shone as the brilliance of the sun in ancient history, for nobody today can hardly go out at night and point to where Jupiter is; it’s an inconsequential pinpoint of light in the sky. What caused the ancient world to worship this little pinpoint of life? Nothing, because Jupiter wasn’t a pinpoint of life; Jupiter shown like a second sun in the ancient world, and this must have been, Velikovsky argued, to explain the mythology of the ancient world. And so on that basis Velikovsky went on to make certain predictions, that the planet Jupiter would be an odd planet. Just this week the results of the outer space probes to Jupiter show that Jupiter is hotter than the sun on its surface, that Jupiter has a radioactive field a thousand times the lethal dose of man; no man will ever set foot on Jupiter. The electromagnetic disturbances around Jupiter are so intense that it could only be classified as a dead star. And of course this is what we’d expect, the ancient world worshiped it and it must have looked different then than it does today.

Now this Marduk, this god, was the center of a polytheistic pantheon in the ancient world and to understand this we must go back to the history of the time, just a survey quickly. Notice the word in verse 2 for the Mesopotamian plain, Shinar. If you are acquainted with the early chapters of Genesis that word should ring a bell in your mind: Shinar. Where have we heard the name “Shinar” before? That was the place where the tower of Babel was erected. That was the place where the kingdom of man took its first form, the land of Shinar. It was the land of Shinar from which God called Abraham out in around 2000 BC or later, to form a divine counterculture, to build up a counterculture based in divine viewpoint to fight against the human viewpoint culture. It was from Shinar, back centuries and centuries ago, that God’s plan started with the election of Abraham, and now we have come full circle because in the book of Daniel the product of Abraham’s seed, existing over many centuries, has been brought back to its home, back to Shinar, the place of apostasy, the place where God called Abraham out of in order that he might teach him divine viewpoint.

But now we’re going to see something different; now the people have been equipped, the culture has become solid enough for believers to go back to Shinar and change Shinar. So, between the years of 2000 BC and 600 BC, for some 1400 years God has not gone back to Shinar with the Word of God. God has kept the Word relatively confined to one nation, letting it stew and develop and strengthen, and get the theology and the doctrine prepared, and now after fourteen centuries of careful preparation God is ready to change Shinar, and he does it in an interesting way, letting his people become captured, letting them become the slaves of the people of Shinar. And then we’ll see who, after a time period, who the real slaves are.

What happens to these Jewish slaves? I can tell you one thing that happened, and we know it from archeology. Archeologists were surprised to discover certain tablets on which the entire banking system of Shinar was illustrated, and when they discovered this, guess who within fifty years controlled all the banking of Shinar? Who were the slaves then? Daniel and his brethren were very successful. Anything of worth in Babylon wound up in Jewish hands within one generation. They took over the culture, and it shows you, can the believer survive in a human viewpoint culture. You bet, because they did.

Now what about the problem; what about this second critical problem, the second attack that you must be prepared to face. The second attack starts with the first phrase of verse 1, “In the third year of Jehoiakim….” Turn to Jeremiah 46:2. The liberals say aha, a conflict in God’s Word. In Jeremiah 46:2 it says, “Against Egypt, against the army of Pharaoh-neco, king of Egypt, who was by the River Euphrates in Carchemish, which Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, smote in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah.” Oh, a conflict, because it can be shown that Daniel was taken out this battle in Jeremiah 46:2. Now if Jeremiah 46:2 says the battle occurred in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, and Daniel 1:1 says the same event occurs in the third year of Jehoiakim, obviously says the liberal there’s a contradiction between one passage and another. And since there’s a contradiction, that invalidates the Christian claim to a rationally consistent verbal revelation.

So obviously this is a passage that has to be dealt with. Now in dealing with this we’re going to deal with it by going back into history. And this will serve a double purpose, answering the problem and giving you background in verse 1. Let’s go back to Leviticus 26, back many, many centuries in time. We want to understand what’s going on in the history, then we’ll understand why these two different years are mentioned. In Leviticus 26 God says I have a plan for the nation Israel. The plan is the Abrahamic Covenant; the plan involves certain purposes in history and on a moment by moment basis the nation is locked into its national election by the Abrahamic Covenant. The nation can never be knocked out of its election; that’s security, that’s the Abrahamic Covenant. But on a time basis the nation can be disciplined. The nation can see discipline as a group, as we as individual believers can receive discipline on an individual basis.

In Leviticus 26:14 we have the method that God used to spank. “But if you will not hearken unto Me, and will not do all these commandments, [15] And if you shall despise My statutes, or if your soul abhor Mine judgments, so that ye will not do all My commandments, but that you break My covenant,” verse 16, “I also will do this unto you,” and He describes certain specific things that He will do. They consist basically of letting the curse of the fall have its full effect on nature.

Leviticus 26:18, there are five degrees of discipline here. First degree, he gives it to them, it ends at verse 17, beginning at verse 18, “If you will not yet for all this hearken unto Me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins,” second degree of discipline. And then in verse 23, “And if You will not be reformed by Me by these things, but will walk contrary unto Me, [24] Then will I also walk contrary unto you, and will punish you yet seven times for your sins,” the third degree of discipline. Then he says in Leviticus 26:27, “And if ye will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk contrary unto me, [28] Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times more for your sins,” the fourth stage of discipline. Then finally at the end you’ll see where He promises the fifth degree of discipline, verse 30, “I will destroy your high places” and so on.

Leviticus 26:31, “And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation,” etc. and it describes the horrible thing where he says in verse 32, “And I will bring the land into desolation….” Verse 33, “And I will scatter you among the heathen,” the prediction of the Diaspora, “and you land shall be desolate, and your cities waste. [34] And then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths,” and he goes on to describe the land shall be left of them, and describe the horrible sufferings which were fulfilled many, many times in the nation.

At the time of Daniel the nation has reached the fifth degree of discipline. That’s what Daniel is all about; the nation has gone into disaster. They have not paid attention to their sins, even though the prophets have pointed them out and pointed them out and pointed them out, over and over again. One king in particular led the nation to disaster. His name was Manasseh. To see what a nice gentleman this man was turn to 1 Kings 21 where we have the account of the administration of Manasseh. Manasseh was responsible for bringing the nation to the fifth degree of discipline. Strange thing, this Manasseh; he has the son of one of the most godly men of Israel, Hezekiah. And yet, as a son he was the most vicious, most vicious unbeliever ever to sit on the throne. He eventually became a believer the hard way but one of the things Manasseh did, according to extra biblical tradition, he couldn’t stand Isaiah, they had a doctrinal conflict, to put it mildly. So he decided he was going to shut up Isaiah and the tradition which is repeated in Hebrews 11 is that he had Isaiah sawed in half, and that was his way of taking care of it. That’s no relation to the first and second Isaiah of the liberals.

Isaiah was sawn in half by Manasseh and this stood for all time as the greatest affront to God and this is why in 2 Kings 21… he began his reign in 687 BC, it terminated in 642 BC. During that reign the announcement came that the nation was doomed; no one could stop the machinery from destroying the nation by this time. 1 Kings 21:10, “And the LORD spoke by his servants, the prophets, saying, [11] Because Manasseh, king of Judah, has done these abominations, and has done wickedly above all that the Amorites did, who were before him, and hath made Judah also to sin with his idols, [12] Therefore, thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Behold, I am bringing such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah, that whosoever hears of it, both of his ears shall tingle. [13] And I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria, and the plummet of the house of Ahab; and I will wipe Jerusalem as a man wipes a dish, wiping it, and turning it upside down. [14] I will forsake the remnant of Mine inheritance, and deliver them into the hand of their enemies; and they shall become a prey and a spoil to all their enemies. [15] Because they have done that which was evil in my sight, and have provoked me to anger, since the day their fathers came forth out of Egypt, even unto this day. [16] Moreover, Manasseh shed innocent blood very much, till he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another; beside his sin by which he made Judah to sin, in doing evil in the sight of the LORD.”

So obviously Manasseh wasn’t the best king that came along. Now what happened in the history after this? Here in this chart you have the lead up to Daniel. In 642 BC Amon assumed the throne. He was quickly succeeded by a very godly king called Josiah. Josiah was able to delay judgment by a revival, but he could not eliminate the judgment. By this time the doom upon the nation had become so certain that only a postponement could be had. Whether the United States is in a similar position where we are going to get ours, or whether we are in a situation where we can actually postpone this thing or do away with discipline, God only knows, but certain nations reach a point of no return. And believers from that point forward in the nation can only do one thing; basically teach the Word and prepare for the worst. We may be in that kind of a situation, where it may be too late to reverse the tide; it may not be, and since we don’t have a living prophet to tell us we can’t be dogmatic either way. We can just kind of read the signals and move as we see.

In Josiah’s ministry came Jeremiah; Jeremiah began to preach in the year 627 BC. That year is significant; subtract 40 from 627BC and you get 587 BC. Jeremiah spans forty years, and there’s the number forty coming up, the number of testing. God allowed the nation forty years to prepare for that disaster. Jeremiah is the man, and he is preaching disaster, disaster, disaster, and his message to believers is get ready for it, get your economics in shape, get your home in shape because this country is going down, we can’t stop it we can only postpone it. And Jeremiah preached until 587 BC, the nation went down then and that was the end of his ministry, forty years exactly.

After Jeremiah began there arose to the northeast a man by the name of Nabopolassar, where this man came from no one knows. He comes out of the area of the Assyrian Empire, he gathered together some Chaldean tribes, they lived in four or five different tribes, and he gathered them together into a kingdom and he organized attack. In 616 BC he began to attack the mighty Assyrians, and by 612 BC Nineveh had fallen and now we have the rise of God’s instrument for destruction.

Now even the fall of Nineveh, which was the capital of Assyria, is a story in itself. Nineveh was a great city that had an opportunity to hear the Word of God; Jonah took the Word of God to Nineveh. And that city heard, there was no one in Nineveh who didn’t hear, they heard Jonah loud and clear and they rejected the authority of the Word so another man came along by name of Nahum. And he said okay, you people in Nineveh, you had your chance to hear the Word of God and you rebelled; God’s going to wipe you off the map. And the mighty Assyrians, who had the most ferocious military machine known to man laughed; huh, who’s going to eliminate Assyria. Nabopolassar eliminated Assyrian in 612; Nineveh fell; Nineveh, the city that could have been saved had they responded to the Word.

Nabopolassar had a son; the son’s name was Nebuchadnezzar, the man you meet in Daniel 1:1. Nebuchadnezzar did battle at a place called Carchemish. We’ve got to go to a map and get this straight where it all occurred. Here’s the Mediterranean, Jerusalem, Damascus, Babylon. The Assyrian Empire had been to the north, centered on Nineveh. This man operated further south out of Babylon. Babylon is right next to a city called Ur. Back in Genesis 15 Abraham is said to have come from Ur of the Chaldeas, so you see this full cycle.

Nebuchadnezzar realized that his father had indebted the nation, they had something called inflation and the nation of Babylon in its first era, its first generation, was plagued with deficit financing. So Nebuchadnezzar, being a smart economist and also being a very smart military commander, realized that if his father’s empire was going to hold he had to capture trade routes. The Median Empire to the north had captured all the trade routes from India and so trade was moving north of Babylon up into the Median Empire and then back down along the coast.

So Nebuchadnezzar said we’re going to take those trade routes. So he began to embark on a campaign of military might and moved to a place called Carchemish; it was at Carchemish where one trade route stopped and another began, where the goods were traded and then redistributed. It was a collection and distribution point, kind of a hub of the ancient eastern trade route. Carchemish was important militarily also and so it was Carchemish where he decided to strike. And he moved his armies up northwestward and he fought with the Assyrians and the Egyptians. When he did so, he was met by a residue of Assyrians from Nineveh who came down from the north. By this time the Assyrians knew they were in trouble so they began to make overtures to Pharaoh, who was Pharaoh Neco; Neco moved his forces to the north, but in this political give and take he had to move through Israel to get to Carchemish, and Josiah thought he saw his chance.

In 2 Kings 23:29, Josiah made a desperate attempt to influence the outcome at Carchemish. He knew what was on Pharaoh’s mind; Josiah had a small army but he was a wise man and he thought he could use it so he went to a place near Megiddo, and he tried to stop that northward advance of the Egyptians. Josiah wanted Egypt destroyed; he hated the Assyrians and anybody that was against the Assyrians, as far as Josiah was concerned, was for the Hebrews, even if it meant playing games with Babylon.

So he tried to stop Pharaoh Neco, and you can see the results in verse 29. “In his days Pharaoh-neco, king of Egypt, went up against the king of Assyria” he went with the king of Assyria literally, “to the River Euphrates,” that’s the place at Carchemish, “and King Josiah went against him; and he slew him at Megiddo, when he had seen him. [30] And his servants carried him in a chariot dead from Megiddo,” and this was a great shock to the believers; here Josiah, the godly man, the godly king after Manasseh and all his crud, and you can think what the believers must have thought, how could God allow this godly man to die. Here’s a man trying to lead our nation back to repentance, he goes, he tries to stop Pharaoh-neco and the Lord allows his death. So there must have been this undercurrent or unrest, what is God doing?

And Pharaoh-neco came back after slaying Josiah, and he established one of Josiah’s sons on the throne; we’ll have to go back to our king charts for this. One of the sons of Josiah was called Shallum, and he was renamed by Pharaoh-neco as Jehoahaz; Jehoahaz tried to play footsy with the Egyptians, and all this gives you the background for why Nebuchadnezzar is going to do certain things. Jehoahaz pledged one thing for the Egyptians and he double crossed them. And Nebuchadnezzar heard about these Hebrew kings that double crossed their authorities. So he sat one of Josiah’s sons, the other son, Eliakim, Jehoiakim, which is the man that you encounter in Daniel 1. [2 Kings 23:34, “And Pharaoh-neco made Eliakim, the son of Josiah, king in the stead of Josiah, his father, and changed his name to Jehoiakim….”]

In 609 BC the first battle of Carchemish has been fought; 609 is the signal that things are going bad. So Jeremiah begins to prophecy doom in a very intense form. In Jeremiah 25:1 you can see the effect of that battle on Jeremiah. Jeremiah was not an idiot and when he saw what happened at Carchemish he knew that the Hebrews had made a big mistake because at the battle of Carchemish international power is being decided. “The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah in the fourth year of Jehoiakim,” notice the fourth year, just like you saw in Jeremiah 42:6, “the son of Josiah, king of Judah, that was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon.” This is when he told him to watch out for what he was doing, after this first battle, and then in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, in 605 BC there was a second disaster at Carchemish. The Egyptian fortress that they had left, that Neco had left at Carchemish was overrun. Finally Nebuchadnezzar had his way and with this Carchemish battle in 605 BC, the second one, that’s the fourth year; that’s what is called “the fourth year” in Jeremiah.

So the fourth year equals 605 BC. That fourth year was when the balance of power shifted completely into the hands of the Chaldeans or the Babylonians. Now what does that mean as far as Judah was concerned? The battle lasted in the spring of that year and as the summer months persisted, Nebuchadnezzar came down through Palestine, and he was pursuing the Pharaoh actually, and Egyptians forces, he was going this way. He decided he was going to stop off for a little visit at Jerusalem. And in 605 BC, that summer, he stopped off for a visit. And during that visit he said I’m going to fix you so you don’t double cross me like you double crossed Pharaoh-neco. See, double crosses are never respected; people who double cross you can never be trusted. This is why left-wingers are always the first people killed when communists take over a land because left-wingers are people that have doubled crossed the country and the communists know it and they don’t want a double cross type mentality and they’ll eliminate them. This has happened in case after case, it happened in Eastern Europe. The first to be executed are the left people, because they’re the people that cannot be trusted.

So what he did was he found in Daniel 1:1-2. “And the Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand, with part of the vessels of the house of God,” now when he took the vessels of the house of God he took two things. He took part of those vessels which he knew was sacred to the Hebrews, and he did another thing. He went through the palace and said all right, I want you, you, you, you’re coming with me. And he pointed out all the young Jews who were princes and of royal blood and he said, Jehoiakim, if you ever double cross me you are never going to see these children again. And he went through the palace of the king and stripped them of all the young noblemen of Hebrew culture. Daniel was in that group.

Daniel was kidnapped as a hostage; that’s how his life begins as you see it in Scriptures. We’ll meet Daniel and we’ll notice that Daniel got there being a hostage; here’s why, I’ve given you the history behind it. The history is that Nebuchadnezzar couldn’t trust these kings. So Daniel, you can see, had a very precarious life. If the kings double crossed them he would be killed.

Now what do we do about the dates. Why does it say forth year in Jeremiah, and third year in Daniel? The answer is amazingly simple. Jeremiah lived in Palestine and in Palestine they did not count the accession year of the king as the first year. So Jeremiah said the fourth year, which would be one, two, three, the fourth year from the time that Jehoiakim sat on the throne. In Babylon this accession year was seen as a special year and therefore the Babylonian calendar would omit that first year because it was a special year; they honored that year, that was the accession year and then they’d go one, two, three. And it doesn’t require a mathematician to see the problem. It’s just two calendar systems, and this is not a conservative fudging because of the apparent error; this can be substantiated archeologically. There were two calendar systems going, and that’s why you see “in the third year,” it does not conflict with Jeremiah 46:2.

Let’s turn to a passage that Jesus uses to comment on this, Luke 21:24, where Jesus gives us the correct name for the era that is about to begin. When Daniel and other teenage young men are hauled off as hostages a new era of history has begun. Jesus has a special name for this era of history and he calls it “the times of the Gentiles” in Luke 21:24. He says, “And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations; and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.”

What happened back when Daniel was led into captivity? From that point through Christ, on down to Jesus Christ’s Second Advent, you have an era of history in which the Gentiles reign supreme. It is the era of Gentile imperialism. God will now work, between the years of 586 BC and X, whatever X is when Christ returns, the method of international peace, notice this, the method for securing international peace will always be by imperialism; when you have had peace since 586 BC there has always been one condition, that have nations have gone down under one Gentile nation. It has never been a balance of power; balances of power basically themselves do not produce peace.

What produces peace is when you have one nation reign supreme and you’ve had a succession of Gentile empires; you have had the Neo-Babylonians dominate the world, the Medo-Persians dominate the world, you’ve had the Greeks dominate the world, the Romans dominate the world, and since the Roman Empire dissolved you basically had jockeying for position among the post-Roman countries. We are one of those; Britain is one of those, Russia is also one of those. And the story of world history from this time forward, particularly since the fall of Rome, has been a story of which one of the pieces of the Roman Empire can imperialize and dominate the world. Obviously today this is east and west locked into a battle for supremacy. We hope as we go through Daniel we can have some kind of wisdom as to what is going in history.