Daniel Lesson 4

Doctrine of Dreams – 1:17-2:1

… to become a song that exalted Germany over all. Another song that was sung during that time was one of the Nazi theme songs singing hails and praises to Adolph Hitler. And these songs simply are incarnations of Babel, an incarnation of the kingdom of man. And it’s the kingdom of man that Daniel is all about. Daniel is written, not as a book on prophecy; Daniel is written as a book on wisdom. If it were written particular for prophecy it would be in the section of the Prophets; the fact that the book of Daniel is not in the section of the Prophets is proof that the book was written for application today, and therefore any type of treatment of the book of Daniel that postpones present actions, and we sit around waiting for Daniel’s prophecies to be fulfilled, is a tremendous distortion of the original purpose of the book.

Daniel is written about the kingdom of man. Beginning with Nimrod the kingdom of man has come down in many forms. Nimrod was the first situation which was smashed by Babel when God linguistically fractured humanity and set up many different cultures, but inside each of these cultures the dream has never died. Man always wants to build his kingdom. Each one of us has part of that same zeal in our souls, to build a perfect destiny for men. You can read about how this happens in Stauffer’s book, Christ and the Caesars, you can read about it in more modern works, but whatever the kingdom, whether it’s Rome, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, the Third Reich, the modern communist state, or even some super government type people in our own country, the goal is always the same. The doctrine of the kingdom of man is something that you can’t review enough.

There are five points to the doctrine of the kingdom of man; this doctrine spells out the dimension of the atmosphere you and I live in. It is the dimension that Daniel lived in and Daniel is teaching us in this book how we can survive while living in this world, in this age, when the kingdom of man presses in, and the social pressures apply to you on job, the social pressure is applied to you in the classroom, is applied to you in the schools, applied upon your neighbor, applied in a larger scale through society as a whole. How do you respond to it? That’s the theme of the book of Daniel.

The kingdom of man offers the promise of fulfilled destiny; security and fulfillment but on man’s terms, not God’s. And like the fig leaf and the nakedness in Genesis 3, this promise is good in the sense that it looks toward something worthwhile, it’s good that man’s destiny be fulfilled, there’s nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong that man corporately gather a kingdom to rule over creation; nothing wrong with that. But what is wrong is the terms on which it is done. As Adam and Eve were naked and covered themselves with fig leaves instead of imputed righteousness, so men socially want to build the kingdom of man rather than the kingdom of God. So the promise of security and fulfillment has been the same theme song from Karl Marx down through the modern super state.

We have the birth of the kingdom, always the birth, always the origin is enslavement. The picture is Nimrod. Nimrod conquers and suppresses the city-state, and from its program of conquest and suppression and destruction of political liberty, from that comes the kingdom. So the birth will always be external unity imposed upon internal chaos. The sinful man with his chaotic heart can’t become part of an organism; he can only become part of a forceful organization. And so the birth on human viewpoint terms must always be by power and by enslavement and by conquest, either economically, militarily or by other means.

Then we have the ethics and the law of the kingdom of man and the ethics and the law never emanate from God’s mind, it is always man’s mind that selects what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is false, never an absolute standard that is being used, never God’s law but always the human lawmakers: the ethics and the law of the kingdom. And in Isaiah 2 we’re told that ultimately when God’s kingdom is set up Jesus Christ will be THE sole legislator and there will be only one source of law and that will be God Himself. Lawmaking is a divine task, not a human one.

And then we come to the expansion of the kingdom of man. The expansion like the birth is always by power and by enslavement. And the expansion of the kingdom of man is always at the expense of individual freedoms and always therefore the bloated state. And so the fourth divine institution takes precedence over divine institutions one, two and three. It’s the fourth divine institution that decides for the citizen whether or not he will have medical insurance. It is the fourth divine institution that chooses for the citizen whether or not his children will be educated in humanism. It is the fourth divine institution that decides when and how to grant divorces. It is always the fourth divine institution that invades the other institutions, and so volition, responsibility, marriage and family are all victims of the expansion of this kingdom of man.

And then the leadership of the kingdom of man, the Nebuchadnezzar’s, the Nimrod’s, the Hitler’s, the Lenin’s, these are always men who in themselves may be very moral, very ethical men, very sincere men, in fact they may be very religious men but they are always very proud men who want to generate autonomously the perfect state, always with due credit to themselves and Mankind with a capital “M.”

So that is the doctrine of the kingdom of man; we’re in it, and to a degree we’re all compromising with that, even in the present moment. Daniel was the story of how to at least be effectively separated from it, that though we live in it we don’t have to be of it. Last time in Daniel we had three principles of separation, the doctrine of Biblical separation from the kingdom of man, that we can be at least loyal to our King, even though His kingdom hasn’t been set up yet. And how are we to be loyal to our King? Daniel gave three ways. Watching how Daniel operated in his day we learned that there are 1008 different places where we could fight the battle of separation with the kingdom of man but you haven’t got the resources; the church totally and corporately doesn’t have the resources to fight at every point.

And so you have to use the military principle, concentration of forces, or economy of forces. You have to limit your opposition; you have to limit to key issues, and that’s what Daniel did. Daniel could have objected to the identification name, Belteshazzar, but he didn’t. He could have objected to the curriculum of his education, but he didn’t. He chose instead to concentrate on the issue of being part of an apostate communion service, being part of a palace dinner in which the food and the eating of that food was a religious act. And Daniel chose there to make his stand. So we must limit our opposition to key points if we’re going to be effective. That’s wisdom living in these days. Daniel teaches us that wisdom principle. Carefully select the place of confrontation; you pick the place of confrontation. Don’t let your enemy pick it, you pick it, but then once you’ve picked it concentrate all your forces at that point.

The second thing is to arrange the separation by negotiation; arrange it as peacefully as possible. Daniel respect authority, he wasn’t a brat about the way he separated. He didn’t go on a mass hunger strike; Daniel was skillful. That’s why it says that Daniel asked, in verse 8, “Therefore, he requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself.” He asked the proper authority, he went through channels, he didn’t try to fight the system, he went through the system. That sometimes can’t be done and we’ll see cases in the book of Daniel what you do when you can’t do that. But at this point he was able and did do it.

The third principle of wisdom was that when you are fighting for a principle of separation you can either get a yes answer, a no answer, or a maybe. If you get a “yes” answer you’ve won the case, there’s no need to go any further. If you get a “no” answer that will be covered in later chapters of Daniel. If you get a maybe then Daniel teaches us that in the case when you have “maybe,” when there’s a possibility of keeping separate, you’ve made your request through channels and you’ve received back an ambiguous answer, then the next tactic to do is to propos a solution as Daniel proposed, and you sell it to the people of the kingdom of man, not on the moral basis. You don’t tell them this is the right thing to do or this is the wrong thing to do, you tell them this is what works.

You always approach inside the kingdom of man as though they are rank unbelievers, and you approach them on a pragmatic basis and not a moral basis. Daniel doesn’t preach the gospel and the Word of God to the prince of the eunuchs; he simply says now here’s the way that works, we can get out of it this way. And that’s the way the Christian has to sell Christian legislation to the community, he can’t say it’s moral or immoral to the non-Christian. He can to the Christian, we should support policy B instead of policy A because policy B is the moral thing to do; that’s what you say when you’re around Christians. But when you’re facing a non-Christian community at large you don’t say follow policy B because it’s moral. The non-Christian community could care less whether policy B is moral, the issue is you follow policy B instead of policy A because policy B works better. So Daniel teaches us the pragmatic approach toward the kingdom of man. It’s not compromised because the kingdom of man has already agreed collectively to avoid reference to God.

In dealing like this the same thing would happen with a public school illustration, to bring up a modern education. All public education at the present time is collectively built upon the assumption that the Bible can’t be the authoritative Word of God. All other opinions are tolerated except that one opinion; it’s absolutely the case that the Bible cannot be the inerrant verbal revelation of God. That being so, then we can talk about a God, we can talk about morals, but we can’t talk about THE set of authoritative morals of the Bible as God’s Word. So since the whole educational approach is grounded on that prior assumption the only way we can sell our deal back to them is on some sort of a pragmatic basis.

So this is the contest of Daniel and the contest can be summarized as this: is the kingdom of man going to change Daniel’s soul or is Daniel’s soul going to affect the kingdom of man. That’s the contest you face. Is the kingdom of man all around us going to affect your soul or is your soul strong enough, do you have spiritual guts enough, do you have enough spiritual training, enough Bible doctrine, enough of the divine viewpoint framework to affect the kingdom of man around you or are you going to cave in. Daniel was a boy who refused to cave in.

Let’s look at what happens. We left of at verse 16; we left off with the fact that the proposal had worked, he had sold it pragmatically to Melzar, verse 16, Melzar being a common word not a proper name. “Thus Melzar took away the portion of their food, and wine that they should drink,” and both the food and the wine in verse 16 are Gentile, very good, very nutritious food, but they are foods that to eat would mean to be partaking of a religious ceremony to the gods, Marduk and the others. And therefore Daniel said no, and I can do with vegetables and water. That shows what a tremendous teenager he was; any teenager that would prefer vegetables and water to T-bone steak must have some convictions some place.

Daniel 1:17, “As for these four children,” now this is the result. We’ve seen one of these results earlier. One of these results was given in verse 9. After Daniel took the first step he [8] “purposed in his heart” to separate, he chose the place of separation in other words, and then he went to the proper channels and tried to work peacefully, negotiating along the way through the system. Verse 9 says “God brought Daniel into favor,” it’s not “had brought,” it is “He brought Daniel into favor.” It’s not a circumstantial clause; verse 9 is a sequential clause to verse 8. And so “God brought Daniel into favor and tender love with the prince of the eunuchs.” That’s God’s work in opening the heart of the authorities.

And here’s where Daniel is a grace oriented believer; he goes ahead and obeys God’s Word, but he has faith enough to believe that God will respond to his obedience by changing the situation. That’s how you want to operate. There are some things in the faith technique that you do and there are some things where you rest. And you have to be wise enough to know when to stop doing and when to start resting. Daniel did certain things; Daniel had a meeting with this man, he negotiated with him, he arranged the appointment, he went in for his interview, he spoke to the man, he reasoned with the man. That’s what Daniel did in faith, but while Daniel was doing it he was also resting that the Holy Spirit would work inside that man’s soul. And it says in verse 9 the Holy Spirit did, so here is where faith means the doing and the resting. You have to learn how to get these things together so that you can do something and yet be resting while you are doing. Daniel did both, as he stood in the office before the prince of the eunuchs he was both doing and resting simultaneously and it shows his faith.

In Daniel 1:17 we see another result of grace. God’s grace is building these men into stronger believers. “As for these four children, God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom, and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams.” Now this refers to the three year curriculum. For three years these boys are going to study. They are going to study curriculum that has massive amounts of human viewpoint in it, and while they are studying they are using the faith technique of doing and resting. They are doing several things, which we can infer from the rest of the book of Daniel; number one, they are in the Word daily, all those boys, Daniel in particular. Apparently Daniel was the ring leader of the group; you get four teenagers together you always one who will be the ring leader, and Daniel was the ring leader and he apparently led them in Bible study every day and we know at least one book they studied; the book was Jeremiah, it was the latest book that had just been entered into the canon of Scripture. Obviously they also read the Torah, the first five books because they were aware of the dietary regulations. So Daniel is studying the Word every day. It doesn’t matter if it’s 5 minutes, 10 minutes or an hour, he’s in the Word and there is no other substitute. You cannot live as a Christian when you are involved in activity after activity after activity and it wipes you out of the Word of God. Your salvation daily is taking in the Word, either with a pastor, with some other person who has the gift of teaching or digging it out for yourself, but you have got to get in the Word daily. For the time that you are awaking, some 16 hours or so that you are awake, your mind is constantly infiltrated with human viewpoint. Since you’ve gotten up this morning you’ve probably been the recipient of human viewpoint attitudes expressed to you by various people as you walk in here, human viewpoint attitudes from various other sources. So human viewpoint constantly [small blank spot in tape]

…that he prayed every day. We know this because it’s explicitly stated later in the book, he constantly prayed. He realized that in order to get through the day he had to have a quiet time with the Lord to sort things out and he wasn’t going to make it if he didn’t, because once he got up and once he went to school, and once he got involved in the classroom it was too late to pray. While he was in class during those three years he had a very intensive curriculum, and during that time he had to master completely Babylonian cuneiform, he had to master astrology, he had to deal with the books of symbols, and it was a very, very complicated system that the Babylonians had. He had to deal with all their astrodeities; he had to know all the mythology, he had to get involved in Babylonian algebra. So Daniel had a tremendous amount of material that had to be taught him in three years, and once he got in the classroom it was too late to pray then; he had to pray first.

So he had a grounding in the Word, he had a grounding in prayer, and that enabled Daniel, while he was doing those things he was also resting, trusting that God would not give him a trial or test beyond that which he was able. He used 1 Corinthians 10:13, that no matter what happened that day he was not going to face a pressure greater than the spiritual strength available to him through Jehovah. And that was his daily trust. No matter how bad the going got there would always be sufficient grace available to move him through the trial. And Daniel rested at that point.

He also rested on another point. He rested on the fact that if he would do his job, get in the Word, pray, and that he would study as unto the Lord, do his work which is explained in the New Testament in Colossians 3, if he would do his studies and prepare himself as unto the Lord, then God would reward him by having the mastery over the material. And this is why in verse 17 you have God responding. “As for these four children, God gave them knowledge and skill,” notice it is God, not the Babylonian tutors that are giving them the skill. God is giving them the skill, and the significance in verse 17 of God and not the Babylonian tutors is that the material, the facts that Daniel learned will be integrated inside the divine viewpoint framework.

He will learn facts from the Babylonians, he will learn, for example, algebra, he will learn cuneiform, he will learn astrology, he will learn these subjects and in those subjects there may be some bona fide factual material. Therefore he will collect his facts, and collect some facts over here, over here, over here, and then he’ll go to pray, he’ll go to study the Word, he’ll put those facts together in the divine viewpoint framework. The framework is like a set of coat hooks in a closet. And the facts are like the clothes that you hang on the hooks. If you don’t have hooks to hang your clothes it looks like a mess, and if you don’t have a set of academic hooks to hold your material you’ll be confused. That’s why many, many students are confused, they don’t have any hooks to hang the material on to get it all together, and they’re not going to get it in the modern educational system either.

There’s only one place you’re going to get that and that’s the Word of God. You won’t even get that in most Christian schools. Most Christian schools are one of the worst places to go because you have out of it Christians teaching and at least on an atheistic Gnostic campus you have some unbelievers that are quite candid in what they say and usually are very good and experts in their field, and you can get a tremendous amount of facts from them. You just have to stain out all the human viewpoint that they’re feeding along with it and learn it. And Daniel did this, but “God gave them the knowledge.” And that’s the motto when you’re learning anything, God gives you the knowledge and God gives you the skill.

Now the word translated here in verse 17, after knowledge and skill, “in all learning and wisdom.” The word for learning is cepher, and that means a scroll, and it came to mean literature, or written material. So that part of what Daniel’s curriculum dealt with was literature or things that were read. And they weren’t read in Hebrew so that implies that at least for the three years Daniel had to learn Aramaic. And he had to learn probably Akkadian, and probably he had to learn some cuneiform, the cuneiform alphabet. So therefore Daniel had a lot of learning to do and it included written material, he had to read and read and read and read. And he didn’t have any speed reading courses to do it; you don’t speed read cuneiform. Cuneiform takes time.

So he was skilled, and God gave him learning in literature and wisdom; the wisdom meant the application of what he learned. So Daniel had a complete education; he learned the theories from what he read and he learned skill in how to apply it. In algebra he learned how to solve the equations and then when he was given a set of problems he was able to solve the problem. That was true for all four of the children. Now in the text, in verse 17, the Hebrew is so arranged so as to maximize the contrast between two parts of verse 17. And in the original language the contrast is not between the learning the different subjects, but between the people.

The four children as a group are set off from Daniel as an individual. So literally we should read, “As for the entire group, God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom; but for Daniel, He made him understand,” or “He caused him to understand in all visions and dreams.” “…made him understand” is a hiphil stem of the word to discern. And when you put in the hiphil it means to cause to discern. So God caused Daniel to discern, it means to understand, go between. The verb in the Hebrew for discern comes from the preposition “between.” And it’s the idea of distinguishing something, seeing something from something else, contrast. So Daniel is dealing here with dreams and visions.

Now there’s something in Daniel 1:17 that is going to set us up for the reset of the book. And to see this we’ve got to study a little bit about the Biblical doctrine of dreams. What about dreams? Why is this subject material so much more interesting and so much noted by the Holy Spirit over the rest of the material. The rest of the boys, they learned the curriculum, but Daniel was gifted in a certain area of dreams. Why does the Holy Spirit, in verse 17, pick Daniel out and link Daniel with the ability to discern dreams and visions.

Daniel is related to, here’s a lone Jew in the kingdom of man; he is connected with dreams. If you let your memory flip back in Scripture, who else was a alone Jew, isolated in the kingdom of man, all by himself as a young boy, taken away from his home and raised in a Gentile culture, and his manifestation of the spirit of God was again the ability to discern dreams? Joseph in Egypt, the same thing. Why is God so interested in giving His people inside the kingdom of man the ability to discern dreams? What is it about dreams that seems to be outstanding, because if this book is an apologetic for the God of Daniel against Marduk, the god of Nebuchadnezzar, then there must be something about the ability to discern dreams that gives testimony to the superiority of the God of the Hebrews over all other gods.

What about dreams? We can say some things about dreams in general, then we’ll get into what the Bible says. Basically in modern thought dreams are produced two ways; there are two sets of factors. Of course the great and most famous exposition of dreams was Freud, Sigmund Freud’s work, and although much of his material has been disproved, the core of it has been authenticated, and Freud was right that one of the things that causes dreams is that you’ll have suppressed personal antagonisms; in other words, you’ll have a dimension of the psychological state. And it’s your psychological state that sets you up to dream certain things. Freud was right in this factor, but modern research in dreams has added another factor, and that’s the fact of external stimuli.

Now both of these are important for something I’ll show you in a moment. External stimuli, you’ve all had the situation of dreaming and the alarm would go off next to your bed and in your dream there would be the alarm, and you’d wake up and realize it was the alarm next to you that was doing this. They have experimented with people in laboratories and they would dream. You can tell a person dreams because of the rapid eye movement. The person would be lying there and in one experiment they took this boy and they had him lie down and go to sleep and he was dreaming the researchers took a lot of cotton and stroked his arm with it, and he had a dream that he was holding hands with his girlfriend. So external stimuli is one source of dreams.

If you’ll look at both of these for a minute you’ll notice something that fits perfectly with the Biblical doctrine of man. Go back to the soul; the mind is in the soul, the soul is a byproduct of the body, where you get the external stimuli, the physical stimulation, and the soul is also a product of the spirit and this is where you have your psychological dimension. So dream research fits the Biblical picture of man; man is not just material, he is material and immaterial. And so dreams, being a function of the soul, have two sides to them, external physical and internal psychologically.

That’s generally the dreams, but the point is that most dream researchers stop here and they say that’s all that’s involved in your dreams, is just the psychological or just the physical, or just the combination but there’s no real sense of a dream about the future, there’s no real sense of dream with added insight. The only insight you get out of here is what’s already in your mind. Here you are, you’ve had a bad day, and you have lots of things rocking around in your brain that you’ve picked up, you’ve had a fight with somebody and something else, and you’ve had just a bad day all around from the time you got up and during the night this stuff is dreamed about, and there’s all sorts of weird associations and so on. Now the point is that all the stuff you dream about comes out of your own head, it’s internal source stuff, or the alarm clock next to you or something. It’s always something right near you. Dreams, according to modern man are just that which you already possess.

Now here’s where we have to part company with the modern dream researcher. In the Scripture there is evidence that there is a third source of dream, and the third source of dreams are spiritual powers outside of your soul that impinge upon your soul. So in Scripture there are three sources. The Scripture would permit the idea of external forces; Scripture would permit that most dreams are caused by your psychological state, but the Scripture would also insist that you live inside a world with spiritual forces that operate upon you. And these spiritual forces an influence the way you dream.

Now we want to make some statements about Scripture and then we’re going to go to some of the great dreams of Scripture and see if we can understand why Daniel’s ability to discern is such a key point in the book of Daniel. Before we get to the content of the dream of Daniel we want to understand just dreams in general.

First of all we can say this, there are 22 dreams in Scripture; 16 in the Old Testament, 6 in the New Testament. That is not much, there are only 22 dreams recorded in the Bible. Of these 11 out of the 16 in the Old Testament occurred before the Old Testament was written, very important observation. God used dreams to communicate before the written canon of Scripture. And in the New Testament the 6 dreams were dreams before the New Testament had been written. So that shows you right away that dreams in Scripture, if they are to be linked with revelation from God, are to be linked with revelation from God before the canon of Scripture became established.

What else can we say about dreams? Turn to Genesis 20 for one of the first dreams of the Bible. Here we are forced to conclude, as against modern research on dreams, we are forced to conclude there’s other factors than just your personal junk in your subconscious that’s causing the dream, because in Genesis 20:3 we have Abimelech. Abimelech is the king of Gerar; Abraham has come down there, again he’s afraid of Abimelech, he isn’t trusting in the Lord so he passes his wife off as his sister again. Verse 3, “But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, Behold, thou art a dead man, for the woman whom you have taken; for she is a man’s wife.”

Now look at the reply, this proves that this dream was not due to internal psychological conflict. [“But Abimelech had not come near her: and he said, Lord, wilt thou slay also a righteous nation?”] Verse 5, “Said he not unto me, She is my sister? And she, even she herself said, He is my brother. In the integrity of my heart and innocency of my hands have I done this.” So he claims innocency. In verse 6 God authenticates his innocency. “And God said unto him in a dream, Yea, I know that thou didst this in the integrity of thy heart; for I also withheld thee from sinning against Me: therefore I allowed you not to touch her.” That last part of verse 6 is one of the most powerful evidences for sovereignty and responsibility you can think of. Here is Abimelech, he had no idea God was twisting his arm. And yet this announcement says that his very behavior pattern towards Sarah was determined by God’s sovereign will. God chose to control his behavior when he had no idea that there were forces restraining him; none whatsoever.

But the important part of verse 6 is the first part; there in verse 6 God authenticates that there is no problem of internal conflict. This dream of Abimelech comes about not because of personal conflict and not because of external stimuli. This dream comes about because God wants to communicate to the man involved and God does appear to him. So that’s the third reason for dreams besides the two given by modern research.

What else can we say about dreams? Let’s divide the dreams of the Bible into two kinds. Let’s divide them into the dreams of the Jews and the dreams of the Gentiles and you’ll notice something about Biblical dreams. None of these dreams directly involve the individual. All these third class of dreams are about God’s plan for history, not about the individual person per se. The individual person may be involved in the dream but whether it’s a Jew or whether it’s a Gentile, that dream is linked to God’s plan for history.

Let’s look at how it works with the Jews. Turn to Genesis 28:12, Jacob’s dream. “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. [13] And, behold, the LORD stood above it, and said, I am the LORD God of Abraham, thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed.” So Jacob here is dreaming a dream about the Abrahamic Covenant. It is not just about Jacob’s personal life; it is about how his life impinges upon God’s overall historic plan. These dreams are not self-centered dreams; they are historically centered dreams.

In Genesis 31:10 we have another dream of Jacob. “And it came to pass at the time that the cattle conceived, that I lifted up mine eyes, and saw in a dream, and, behold, the rams which leaped upon the cattle were ring straked [striped], speckled and grisled [spotted]. [11] And the angel of God spoke unto me in a dream, saying, Jacob: And I said, Here am I. [12] And He said, Lift up now thine eyes, and see, all the rams which leap upon the cattle … for I have seen all that Laban doeth unto thee. [13] I am the God of Bethel, where thou anointed the pillar, and where you vowed a vow unto Me; now arise, get thee out of this land, and return unto the land of thy kindred.” That has reference to the overall working of the Abrahamic Covenant, the curse provision of Genesis 12:3 and so on. Again the dream is not a self-centered dream, the dream is about what God is going to do in history for the Jew, so it is a national type dream, not an individual type dream.

Then in Genesis 31:24, “And God came to Laban, the Syrian, in a dream by night, and said unto him, Take heed that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad.” Again the dealing isn’t with Laban per se, it is with Laban’s relationship with Jacob under the Abrahamic Covenant that is at stake, and thus again the Biblical dream is not individual, it is national.

Then in Judges 7:13 we have the dream of a soldier in the middle of a camp one night just before they entered a battle. This is the story of Gideon and the Midianites. “And when Gideon was come, behold, there was a man who told a dream unto his fellow, and said, Behold, I dreamed a dream, and, lo, a cake of barley bread tumbled into the host of Midian, and came unto a tent, and smote it that it fell, and overturned it, that the tent lay flat. [14] And his fellow answered and said, This is nothing else except the sword of Gideon, the son of Joash, a man of Israel,” and here incidentally is the fact that dreams are symbolic and in verse 13 you have the barley bread, and what is the occupation of Gideon? He’s a grain farmer. And his production is the barley bread, and so the dream has a symbol that stands for Gideon. Dreams are symbolic; Freud was right on this point. Again, this has to do with victory in holy war; it has not to do with the soldier’s individual destiny but with the destiny of the nation.

Now we come to 1 Kings 3:5, the dream of Solomon. ‘In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, Ask what I shall give thee.” Solomon, though he had prophets also had a revelation through dreams. Now this dream, it could be possible that this dream as well as some of the others, had some of his own soul involved. God comes to him, He’s going to say something, but the dream is very intimately connected with verses 1-4. Solomon is doing worship, he’s come down to Gibeon to worship, in other words there are thoughts on his mind and God can use those as secondary means. “In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, Ask what I shall give thee. [6] And Solomon said, Thou hast showed unto thy servant David, my father, great mercy, according as he walked before thee in truth…” verse 7, “And now, O LORD my God, thou hast made thy servant king instead of David, my father; and I am but a little child: I know not how to go out or come in. [8] And thy servant is in the midst of thy people whom thou hast chosen, a great people, who cannot be numbered or counted for multitude.” Verse 9, “Give, therefore, thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people….”

Now this dream contributes something very interesting in this idea of what does the Bible say about dreams. Most modern dream research has come to the conclusion, which by the way, 90% of the time you dream in black and white, not in color; they’ve also pointed out that in most dreams you are passive to the action, you are an observer to it, vocally that is. In other words, you may be active and moving but very few dreams are you actually speaking in the dream. Here is one of those cases where Solomon is an active participant in his dream. This shows you, at least in this case, now in the other dreams it’s not so but in this case of Solomon, Solomon is verbally saying something back to God, he’s not just watching a picture. Obviously this is a nationally centered dream rather than just an individual centered dream.

Now Daniel 7:1, here’s a dream that will conclude the survey of the Jewish dreams. In Daniel 7:1 we have Daniel’s dream. “In the first year of Belshazzar,” that’s not Belteshazzar, that’s Belshazzar, “king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head upon his bed; then he wrote the dream, and told the sum of the matters.” There are three dreams in the book of Daniel, two by Nebuchadnezzar, one by Daniel and this is Daniel’s dream. And this is a dream about the history of Israel. So we can generalize; Jewish dreams that are portrayed in Scripture are dreams that have to do with the history of the nation under God’s program of the Abrahamic Covenant. They are not individually centered dreams.

Now what about the Gentile and his dream. Let’s turn to two Gentile dreams. Since we’re in Daniel, obviously we know Nebuchadnezzar’s two dreams in Daniel 2 and Daniel 4, and Nebuchadnezzar is dreaming about the history of the Gentile, he is dreaming about his country and its destiny. So there again it is a national destiny.

Now Pharaoh’s dream, turn back to Genesis 41:1, Pharaoh, another Gentile ruler, like Nebuchadnezzar, and in Pharaoh’s dream, “And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river. [2] And, behold, there came up out of the river [Nile] seven well favored kine [cows] and fat fleshed; and they fed in a meadow. [3] And, behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the river, ill favored and lean fleshed; and stood by the other kine upon the brink of the river.” By the way, there you have the dream symbolism operating again. The Nile is what in Egypt’s economy? The Nile is that which provides the water and the fertilizer for the ground. What is raised in the ground that is fertilized by the Nile? The cattle. And so in the dream the cattle come out of the Nile; the Nile is the source of the cattle. So the dream short circuits it, makes it symbolic, but it corresponds to what’s really happening. The cattle come up out of the Nile, and then the lean cattle eat up the fat cattle, and this is the story of the coming plagues. But again, as with the Jews, these dreams involve mass movements among nations. They involve national and historical destinies.

And so we can conclude our first point about dreams in the Bible, that the dreams are always national and historical centered dreams. They are not primarily for the individual. Dreams in the Bible are sometimes terrifying. Job 7:14-15, the case of Pharaoh, the case of Nebuchadnezzar, the case of Daniel, and some of Pharaoh’s associates. Dreams can be symbolic.

Now let’s turn back and watch how Joseph used dream symbols to interpret a dream. Genesis 37:5. Actually here it’s his father that’s interpreting them but the principle is the same. In Genesis 37:5, “Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it to his brethren: and they hated him yet the more. [6] And he said unto them, Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed; [7] For, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and, lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, y our sheaves stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf.”

Immediately, verse 8 is the interpretation of the dream, it was obvious to them what that dream was about. Verse 7 is the dream; verse 8 is the interpretation of the dream. “And his brethren said unto him, Shat thou indeed reign over us? Or shalt thou indeed have dominion over us? And they hated him yet the more for his dreams, and for his words.”

Now there’s an even more interesting type and very clear symbol that’s used in the next dream, verse 9. “And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it to his brethren, and said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me. [10] And he told it to his father, and to his brethren,” and now Jacob is going to interpret the dream and notice Jacob interprets the symbols. Here’s Joseph’s dream: the sun, the moon, and the stars, and so in verse 10, Jacob said, “What is this dream that you hast dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to the to the earth?” to you. And so the son is the father, the moon is the mother, and the stars are the children. Those are classic dream symbols that are found, not just in Scripture, they are found in myths, they are found in much ancient literature, that the sun is the father figure, the moon is the mother figure, and the stars are the children. And this is just a kind of symbolism that is true in the Scriptures and true in the ancient cultures of the world.

But that was how dreams were interpreted when they were these kind of dreams. But in order to interpret this third class of dreams, caused not by external stimuli, caused not by personal conflicts but rather caused by God Himself in a special way, drawing attention to His prophetic program of history when the canon of Scripture was not complete, during that time the dreams must have been interpreted.

And so we find in Genesis 40:8, “And they said unto him, We have dreamed a dream, and there is no interpreter of it. And Joseph said unto them, Do not interpretations belong to God?” There are other references, Genesis 41:16 is another reference and proof of this point; Daniel 2:22 and Daniel 2:28. These are passages which teach that the third class of dreams, where you have revelation going on, themselves must be interpreted by God Himself.

Now let’s turn back to Daniel and see why the ability to interpret dreams is crucial. We said that the big issue in Daniel is whether the kingdom of man will change Daniel’s soul or Daniel’s soul will change the kingdom of man. For Daniel’s soul to change the kingdom of man Daniel’s soul must be superior to the kingdom of man. To put it a little bit more specifically, Daniel must have something in his soul that is more powerful than the kingdom of man with all the glory and the power of Babylon around, the tremendous wealth, the tremendous education, he was in the educational center of his world, but Daniel has to have something going for him inside him that is superior to everything that is in his environment. Sort of like the New Testament, “greater is He that is in you than He that is in the world,” that same principle.

What is it that Daniel has that the kingdom of man doesn’t have? And when we answer this you will now see why the book of Daniel is a book, not of prophecy but of wisdom, but yet it has prophecy in it. All those dreams that we just read about, we made the point very carefully that they were all history centered. And I did that for a reason, because when I said they were history centered, at that time I didn’t add that they were looking at history from the beginning to the end; that the Abrahamic Covenant was made in eternity past and it concerns the goal of history in eternity future. That when you consider the plan of history from God’s perspective, He looks at the beginning, He looks at the end, because one of God’s attributes is that He is eternal. God is omniscient, God is sovereign, and because of those three attributes of God, God therefore can view history the way He does.

Now the third category of dreams can occur with believer or unbeliever in the Bible. They’ve occurred down through the centuries; just because a man dreams a category three dream does not mean he’s a believer; it just means that God has illuminated his mind to the truth of where history is going, and that’s the point. Daniel says, I can’t interpret these dreams, Nebuchadnezzar, apart from God’s spirit. Joseph said to Pharaoh, I can’t interpret these category three dreams apart from Elohim, my God. But when these men interpret the dream and the dream authenticates it links Elohim, the God of Israel, as the God of all history. And since He’s the God of all history, He is greater than the gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia. That’s the argument of the book of Daniel.

That’s the testimony of Daniel. All the prophecies we are going to study in this book, we can get lost in the forest for the trees, all those prophecies ultimately aren’t the issue. The issue of the book of Daniel is whether this boy is going to have impact on his culture and how is he going to have an impact? By relating all of his spiritual experiences? In the book of Daniel he never comes to Nebuchadnezzar and says oh Nebuchadnezzar, I’ve had a heart-warming experience. He never relates his experiences to Nebuchadnezzar. In fact, the guy that’s having experiences is Nebuchadnezzar, not Daniel. Nebuchadnezzar is going to go crazy, he’s going to go the funny farm before this whole thing gets through. He’s the one having the ecstatic experiences, not Daniel, but Daniel is going to relate the character of God backed his testimony, the nature of the God of Israel, superior to Marduk, superior to all the gods and goddesses of the pantheon.

How do you prove the superiority of the God of Israel? You do it by the God of history, and God is going to work in such a strange way, He sets up the situation to totally blow the human viewpoint system right out. He’s going to do it two ways; not only with Nebuchadnezzar is God going to show him a dream of history which will authenticate within one generation, but He is going to not permit Nebuchadnezzar to share his dream with Daniel so Daniel will be called not just to interpret the dream, but Daniel will be called upon to give the dream, then interpret it. Two things, not one thing, and that definitely shows that the God of Israel is the God of all the earth, and Nebuchadnezzar will be won to Jesus Christ, apparently in the text, through this young boy’s testimony. And it all begins with this verse, Daniel 1:17, God gave Daniel “understanding in all visions and dreams.” Daniel didn’t get it from the Babylonian astrologists. This is one thing that was not on the curriculum list.

This is something Daniel got and he got it again, and here’s the big point, don’t miss this point when we get involved in prophecy, the purpose of prophecy is to glorify the character of God. We can argue about details from now forever and that’s not the issue. The object of prophecy is not to be a newspaper tomorrow, contrary to what some teach. The object of prophecy is to glorify the character of God, and it’s proved by the setting of the book of Daniel and Daniel’s place in history, in the Gentile court. Category three dreams were the way they had of refuting human viewpoint. Human viewpoint could deal with category one dreams, category two dreams; category one dreams are the internal conflict, category two dreams would be dreams that would be involved with the external stimuli. Category three dreams are when you have spiritual forces operating in the person.

Now the Bible also says they are demonic dreams and that’s another whole story, but demons can cause dreams in believers and unbelievers, and they can solicit you, they can give you a picture of temptation and so on, and you can actually sin by giving in to these kind of dreams. Demons will do that and we’ll show passages later on but today we’re just dealing with one kind of category three dreams, the good kind that come from God, and those dreams are not individual centered, they are history centered and probably, we can say pretty firmly, that they are not going on today because the canon of Scripture is closed off. God is not functioning today in a revelatory way. All the revelation that God has has been given, it is in the canon of Scripture.

So Daniel goes on and in the rest of the chapter he passes his final examination. Daniel 1:18, “Now, at the end of the days that the king had said he should bring them in, then the prince of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar.” After three years they had an oral. Verse 19, “And the king communed [conversed] with them, and among them all was found none like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah; therefore stood they before the king.” Do you notice in verse 19 they are given their Hebrew names, not their Gentile names, because the emphasis is upon their true character. Their souls are superior to everyone else in spite of three years of indoctrination.

Verse 20, “And in all matters of wisdom and understanding that the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers that were in his realm.” And there’s a point about this that you can claim as a Christian, all other things being equal, as far as your intelligence, as far as the time you study, as far as the time you practice doing whatever skill it is on your job, all other things being equal the Christian ought to be able to outdo his unbelieving competitors…all other things being equal. And here you have it, Daniel and these men got with it with the Word every day and were superior. They were superior because they had the divine viewpoint framework and they could put it all together.

And verse 21 is a testimony to the endurance of Daniel, “And Daniel continued,” that means he continued as the advisor to the government, “even unto the first year of King Cyrus,” and Cyrus was a completely new dynasty, it was when the Medo-Persians took over. There you have the story of a man who is exalting the nature of his God.

Dreams will, in chapter 2, be the means of testimony.