Daniel Lesson 5

The Crisis of Human Viewpoint Failure – Daniel 2:1-3

 

The book of Daniel is a wisdom book, not primarily a book on prophecy.  And this means that however one interprets Daniel and however we utilize the teachings of Daniel, it must be in conformity to its overall purpose, which is wisdom and wisdom means skill in living.  Daniel teaches the believer skill in living Satan’s world, skill in coping with the kingdom of man.  Daniel is the story of a contest, a contest between one lone believer against an entire society of human viewpoint, idolatry and works.  Simply stated, Daniel is going to answer the question, who wins, the lone believer or the system. 

 

Today we begin the first major half of the book, from chapters 2-6.  We have entitled this section, to gain continuity with chapter 1 which we have entitled, Daniel enters Gentile politics; we’ve entitled chapters 2-6, Daniel has a successful career in Gentile politics.  Chapter 2 gives one of the crises in Daniel’s career, the crisis of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.  Most people studying Daniel are familiar with it from before always go to Daniel 2 and they talk about the four kingdoms, and that’s fine, but that’s insufficient.  Chapter 2 is not primarily about the dream; chapter 2 is primarily about Daniel’s crisis in his political career.  And the proof of it is how the chapter ends.  At the end of chapter 2 Daniel was elevated in his political career; he has successful met the crisis. 

 

There again is the theme of wisdom showing up, that’s why this book is not included in the prophetic books of the Old Testament, it is included in the wisdom books, how to live, and if Daniel had been interpreted down through the years in fundamentalist circles as a wisdom book, the way it should be interpreted, then we would not have prophecy freaks misusing the contents of God’s prophecies as an excuse to sit around and do nothing, to mope and say the world is getting worse and worse, we can’t do anything so we’ll be spiritual dropouts, we won’t evangelize, we’re not interested in missions, we won’t bother with taking our citizenship responsibilities seriously, etc.  Prophecy freaks are basically spiritually dropouts and they are dropouts because they fail to interpret Daniel in its framework.  Daniel is a wisdom book.  Each chapter in this book deals with a crisis in Daniel’s career and how he meets those particular crises. 

 

In Daniel 2:1 we’re introduced to the time of this first crisis.  “And in the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar dreamed dreams, and his spirit was troubled, and his sleep broke [went] from him. [2] Then the king commanded to call the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans, to show the king his dreams.  So they came and stood before the king. [3] And the king said unto them, I have dreamed a dream, and my spirit was troubled to know the dream.”  And it goes on to describe what happens.

 

The first problem we have in this passage, the first thing that ought to be understood clearly if you’re going to respond defensively and offensively to the attacks on the Christian faith, and remember when we are dealing with Daniel we are dealing with the most critical book in the canon of Scripture, every liberal, every unbeliever, every skeptic must emasculate Daniel.  Daniel stands in the way of human viewpoint.  To allow Daniel to go unattacked by a naturalist is to commit suicide.  Daniel must be suppressed; this book must not be allowed to be taught without it being corrected by modern naturalism.  We must destroy Daniel, says the critic, because Daniel represents true prophecy, specific prophecy.  And so any little place in the text it will give an inch to his criticism is used. 

 

Therefore I’ve been careful as we’ve gone through the text to provide you with a basic defense on these points that are attacked, and here in Daniel 2:1 we come upon another point of attack.  It concerns the term, “the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar.”  How can this be, say the critics, when in chapter 1 Daniel was in training for three years after Nebuchadnezzar became king; how then can he be considered an expert and being promoted in chapter 2, which would place his being promoted before he finished his training in chapter 1; chapter 1 depicts him as a student, not as a state official. 

 

And thus says the critic there’s a contradiction between chapter 1 and chapter 2.  Chapter 1 is one source, they would argue; chapter 2 is another source, and there is no way that you can reconcile Daniel 2:1 with such verses such verses as Daniel 1:5 and 18.  So there’s an internal conflict it’s claimed.  But again patience shows that this is not so.  In Babylon the accession year of a king was not counted as the first year of his reign.  So Nebuchadnezzar became king, year 1 of Daniel’s training; his first year as king was Daniel’s second year of training; his second year of kingship was Daniel’s third year of training.  Therefore, Daniel finished his three years of training in Nebuchadnezzar’s second year, precisely the year that begins the episode of chapter 2. 

 

There is no conflict between chapter 2 and chapter 1.  Not only is there no conflict, but to notice “second year” of verse 1 is very important.  You can’t interpret Daniel out of its historical context and therefore we have to know history.  And when we study history we discover a very interesting thing.  In 605 BC was the battle of Carchemish.  Carchemish was a place to the north, what is now Syria, you have the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea, here’s Israel, and up here was a place called Carchemish.  Geographically this place is a desert, then as now, and the main trade routes used to run through Israel northward, and then northwest into Europe and Asia Minor, and then also eastward.  And there was a great center of commerce near Carchemish. 

 

Carchemish therefore, politically and militarily was a very, very important place.  And there were two powers that were vying for world domination at this point in history; the Egyptian sphere of influence included Palestine and the eastern Mediterranean, all the way northward to Carchemish.  And then from the southeast, moving up slowly the Tigris-Euphrates Valley was a new group of people under the command of Nebuchadnezzar’s father, Nabopolassar.  Nabopolassar had gained together the Chaldean tribes, had taken over the Assyrians, Nineveh fell, and now his son, Nebuchadnezzar, wiped out Pharaoh’s armies in 605 BC at the place called Carchemish.  605 BC was a dividing point in political and military history.  In 605 BC the entire world, the center of the world, the Middle East, fell into the hands of the Babylonians.  They were now in the driver’s seat; the Assyrians had collapsed, the Egyptians were in full scale retreat.  Palestine was exposed to Babylonian control. 

 

In the spring of 605 BC, when Nebuchadnezzar led the armies in a victorious raid against the Egyptian fortress at Carchemish, he emerged as the one man that had absolute dominion over this entire area, Damascus, the northern kingdom or what was left of the northern kingdom, the Sea of Galilee, all the way south to Jerusalem and beyond.  And he was going to, in 605 BC, conquer these lands but in September his father died, and so before he went back to take over the throne he paid a quick visit down to Jerusalem and obtained hostages.  Four of those hostages are listed in this book, Daniel and his companions.  These boys were brought back as hostages when he went back to the capital of the Babylonian Empire, that is Babylon, and took over the throne.  He took over the throne of his father in the fall of 605 BC. 

 

In 604 BC Nebuchadnezzar drives into the land again, this time since he has secured all the area around Carchemish he comes south, and in 604 BC he attacks Judah, 1 Kings 24:1.  In 604 BC Nebuchadnezzar establishes suzerainty over the King of Judah.  Judah becomes subjugated; Judah loses its national identity; Judah essentially has been wiped off the map politically speaking, soon she’ll be wiped of the map actually speaking.  Then he goes further south and begins to attack the Philistines, and destroys Escalon. 

 

In 603 BC, the next year, the armies return and finish off the Philistines completely.  And so it is in 603 BC, the date, Nebuchadnezzar’s second year.  603 BC, the date in history when Nebuchadnezzar was the young king, the victorious military commander, is the dictator of the then known world. All political power has fallen into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar.  This is the point when world supremacy has passed from Israel into the hands of the Gentiles.  Jesus Christ said in Luke 21:24 that “the times of the Gentiles” had begun, that from this point in history until He would return, Jerusalem would always be under the main power of Gentile influence. Even today the state of Israel doesn’t legally and technically exist by itself; it exists by a mandate of the Gentiles.  And so the times of the Gentiles continues, the war of 1967, just because the Israeli’s liberated Jerusalem from their point of view does not mean that it is liberated from God’s point of view.  Still the times of the Gentiles persist. 

 

Now during this interim, from 603 BC on through at least 1974 AD, we have had 25 centuries of the times of the Gentiles. During these 25 centuries we have had the divine institution’s functioning, functioning in a particular way because God has ordained that history has shape to it, the fifth divine institution which is the area of war and peace and tribal diversity, the idea that there is no one-world government today, there cannot be a one-world government today, it is not God’s will that there be one-world government today.  So in 603 BC on to this very year the nations have always vied for power, and God’s plan as revealed in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is that from this 603 BC date until whenever Christ returns, during this interim of history God’s will is imperialism, Gentile imperialism.  Always there will be one or more powers of Gentile nations in absolute dominion over the nations.  The nations will not be equally divided; there will be the haves and the have-nots by divine decree. 

 

Babylon will be the first one to dominate the scene; then Medo-Persia, then Greece, then Rome, and then the historical and cultural descendants of Rome, which we’ll be studying in Daniel.  But history has a shape to it and the shape is given to it by the decrees of God.  God is controlling history and His will is that there be peace by imperialism.  Now this may sound completely opposite to the ideas and dreams of 20th century man, but if you will observe history carefully Christianity has always flourished and peace have always existed when you have had imperialism.  The two great periods in history when we have had great peace, the one period was the Pax Romana, it existed after the time of Jesus Christ when the Romans, by force, controlled all nations.  Frankly, in 20th century terms it was straight out imperialism.  Rome controlled the world and because Rome controlled the world there was peace in the world.  And while there was peace in the world Christianity expanded more rapidly than it ever had.  Christianity moved through the Roman Empire.

 

The second great peak of Christian expansion was in another age of imperialism, the 19th century, the Pax Britannica, when Britain ruled the world; when the sun never set on the British Union Jack, when from one hemisphere to the other it was the British that controlled the sea lanes of the world.  The British army controlled the great frontiers of the world; always the Red Coats, always the Royal Navy, and always the Christian missionary; together they expanded and conquered the world.  And it was a time of great peace.  We’re not saying it was a time of great justice.  We’re not saying it was a time of great righteousness; we’re simply saying from God’s point of view it was a maximally stable situation.

 

All of that comes from the philosophy of history given in this book and it begins with the dream of Nebuchadnezzar.  Picture this man, if you will, picture him in his situation:  Nebuchadnezzar is a young man; he is not an old man.  He will be an old man in other episodes of the book but not in Daniel 2:1.  Nebuchadnezzar is a young man; he reminds you of Alexander who conquered the world while he was still in his 20’s, who supposedly sat down and cried because he had no more people to fight.  He was an example of the imperial Gentile.  Nebuchadnezzar is the archetype of them all.  And here he is, a young man, brilliant commander, an extraordinary administrator, and he is going to have a crisis in his life.  And the interesting thing that we read here of his lifestyle is that as the most powerful man on earth, the most envied man on earth, Nebuchadnezzar is not a believer.  Nebuchadnezzar has no divine viewpoint; Nebuchadnezzar, while on the outside appears to be confident and happy, he has all the power that any man could want, he has his proof of his masculinity behind him. 

 

Nebuchadnezzar has succeeded, but when we meet him in Daniel 2:1 he’s a troubled man.  And we know a little bit about Nebuchadnezzar’s personal life, that though he was sitting on the pinnacle of power, Nebuchadnezzar was desperately troubled, like many leaders in high places. High position, when you have a spiritual vacuum in your heart doesn’t satisfy.  And we know from verse 29 that what was on his mind was the future.  In Daniel 2:29 Daniel says, describing the king, “As for thee, O king, my thoughts came into thy mind upon thy bed, what should come to pass hereafter.” Nebuchadnezzar, a young, brilliant, successful man, but he’s terrified by his dream.  It’s his dreams that are unsettling him.  As an unbeliever with no divine viewpoint he takes his problems to bed with them; he becomes an insomniac, he can’t sleep because he has no place to put his trust, like a lot of believers who have divine viewpoint and don’t use it and can’t sleep either.  Not that because you can’t sleep it always means lack of faith, but the point remains is that Nebuchadnezzar’s lack of faith was the cause of his sleeplessness.  He was a man terrified.

 

To understand his terror and his dreams, remember that there are three causes of dreams.  In the Bible, because man by creation is made up of body and spirit, there are both material and immaterial causes of dreams.  The body can give you dreams by physical stimuli and the physical stimuli on the present tense, they come to you now, and we’ve all had the experience of dreaming and some sound was happening in your dream, only to wake up that the sound was happening in your room. That’s physical stimuli; the Bible allows for this because of its doctrine of man.  The Bible also says that man is made up of soul, which is the product of his body and his spirit.  The soul includes his mind and therefore another source of dreams are mental conflicts, mental conflicts inherited from the past.  So you go to bed, unresolved problems come up out of the subconscious, things that you have repressed all day long come floating back up to be dealt with in dreams, unsettling dreams at times, disagreeable, sometimes terrifying dreams because these problems have not been resolved Scripturally.  And perhaps one measure of our maturity as believers is how much we dream in divine viewpoint versus how much we dream in human viewpoint.  It might act as a measure of how deeply the Word of God has sunk down into the soul.  So the second category of dreams has to do with the soul and the mind.

 

The third category of dreams has to do with the spirit, and this concerns things of the future.  And this has to do with both God and Satan; God can give dreams and Satan can give dreams.  Satan gives dreams in Deuteronomy 13:1, Jeremiah 23:32.  God gives dreams to both Jew and Gentile in many places in the Bible, as we saw last week.  God used dreams to reveal before the canon of Scripture was closed.  So here’s Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2:1 and he dreams many dreams, notice it is the plural, he dreams many dreams, wherewith “his spirit was troubled.”  Apparently Nebuchadnezzar took his problems to bed with him.  The mental conflicts of the past did play a part in this dream that we’re going to see.  This dream in Daniel 2 didn’t happen out of thin air, it happened to a real man faced with a real historical situation.  He was a ruler of a people and he knew just as the Assyrians had exalted themselves to mighty power and been brought down by my power and he was asking himself and he was tormented in his soul, how long will my kingdom last.  Will the Babylonians kingdom be like the Assyrians that I just clobbered; will our kingdom be like the Egyptians at Carchemish two years ago; will my kingdom face the same limitations that other kingdoms have faced in history?  So one of the things was that he was struggling with his own political, physical and social limitations.

 

Hold the place and we’ll see why, and we’re going to see a very neat and very clever way of pre-evangelism.  Turn to Ecclesiastes 3:11, as we pay close attention to this man, Nebuchadnezzar, we’re going to have a little advantage as Christians because we’re going to actually watch God deal with an unbeliever and bring him to himself.  We are going to watch God the Holy Spirit deal with autonomous man, step by step, very, very effective.  Ecclesiastes 3:11 is the Trojan Horse of the autonomous man; the autonomous man is the unbeliever who wants to erect his own kingdom, like Immanuel Kant, give me matter and I’ll make a world; Descartes, I think, therefore I am; beginning with themselves and working out from themselves with human viewpoint, there’s the autonomous man.  And so God has planted sort of a self-destruct system inside the soul of autonomous man. 

 

It’s described in the last part of Ecclesiastes 3;11, God “has set eternity in their heart,” the Hebrew word is holem; it’s the word for eternity.  God has set eternity in their hearts, that means that in some strange way all men made in God’s image differ from animals.  In spite of the dolphin experiments, in spite of all the other experiments you occasionally read about animals and man communicating, it is not so.  Communication yes, language no!  No one communicates in language apart from those creatures made in God’s image.  And language conveys the fact that you have absolutes, things that go on and on and on and on and on and on, eternal absolutes.  God has placed a sense of eternity into the heart of men, and they can’t erase it.  They can try suicide, they can try whatever they want, drugs or whatever; no matter what you do it comes back to haunt you; if not in your waking moments in your dreaming moments by night.  The sense of eternity of the soul cannot be suppressed; it will emerge again and again.

And it says in here literally in the Hebrew, “God has set holem in their heart, yet no man can find out the work of God that God makes from the beginning to the end.”  The work that God makes from the beginning to the end is His plan for history.  That’s the historical plan of God, and the irony of the situation is that man has a sense that there is a purpose, there are these eternal absolutes, but no matter how hard he grasps he can’t find out God’s plan from the beginning to the end.  Ecclesiastes 3:11 is a very, very important text to understand the unbeliever and to understand ourselves as Christians.

 

Turn back to Daniel.  Ecclesiastes has told us the soul of Nebuchadnezzar; now watch what’s going to happen.  Nebuchadnezzar is an autonomous man; Nebuchadnezzar by his own might, he thinks, by his own strength, by his own wisdom, by his own power, has subdued the world.  He stands in the position of absolute success.  He stands where every autonomous man wants to stand, but when he stands there in his second year, the year 603 BC, the year that all power came into his hands, that year he dreamed many dreams—many dreams, it’s a plural, over and over he dreamed, not just one dream.  There was one dream that tormented him and the plural here must indicate that perhaps this dream came to him again and again and again and again. There’s nothing in the text of Daniel 2 that says that the dream only came once to Nebuchadnezzar.  This man was tortured by the dream, night after night on his bed the same image would appear in this dream.  It would drive him crazy because the last part of the image, the image is smashed to dust by a rock cut without hands, and that’s just what’s secretly lurking in his heart, he’s terrified. Autonomous man always knows that working out from himself, negative volition, building his own kingdom of man out from himself, that always that kingdom is limited.  What lies beyond the edge of it, how do we know that tomorrow there won’t be an invasion that will smash it, just like he smashed the Assyrians, just like he smashed the Egyptians. 

 

So we’re saying that the background of the dreams of Daniel 2:1 is not just God the Holy Spirit operating directly on his soul, it’s God operating through history on his soul.  This man is an auton­omous man threatened by his own autonomy, threatened by the insufficiencies of his own position.  It’s the same thing today, you can take an unbeliever and on the outside he may be a very successful business man, maybe a very educated person, may look down his nose at Christian things, but on his bed at night, in his dream life what happens; in his dream life occasionally there will be truth of his limitations.  What if you die tonight, what happens after death?  Are you so cock-sure you know, or are you just guessing?  Are you putting on a phony front?  Do you really know?  In the dream life, where the subconscious becomes active, man’s limitations begin to show up. 

 

And so in Daniel 2:2 he calls the magicians, the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans.  Who are these people?  Each class of the people of verse 2 represents the great priests of the kingdom of man.  These represent the fuel that drives the kingdom of man. Today they would correspond to the educators, the scientists, the advisors, all the wise men.  The key of the human viewpoint kingdom of man is his reputed wisdom, “we know” cries the kingdom of man, we know better than to believe the Word of God that claims exclusive domain over us.  We know better than the idea that just one culture is right and all other cultures are wrong. We know better than that, we’re more broadminded.  And so he calls upon the wisdom, all the wisdom.  And it’s important that you see in verse 2 all the words he used, all the classes, from one set of educators, this set of political advisors, this group, that group, all the groups are brought, a complete spectrum of the leaders of the society, the men who act as the advisors.

 

And if we study history we know how powerful these groups are, these magicians, and the astrologers, these were the people Herodotus and other historians tell us that taught the Egyptians and the Greeks arithmetic; the Babylonians with their 360 degrees had vast amounts of wisdom.  It was the Babylonians that gave the world astronomy, but it was also the Babylonians that gave the world astrology.  They couldn’t distinguish between the two. And so arithmetic, astronomy, astrology and mythology came from these men.  These men were sought after.  Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians sent people up to Babylon to learn the wisdom of the world. So this is the fountainhead of all wisdom, and now what you’re going to see, and the tremendous clash of chapter 2 is part of the wisdom framework of Daniel, not the prophecy framework.  The wisdom framework is that you’ve got the cream of the crop as far as human viewpoint education goes.  You have got the final authority, the experts in every field called in to prop up the kingdom of man when its leader, Nebuchadnezzar dreams by night and is terrified.

 

So who are these people?  First, the word “magician.”  The word translated “magician” comes from a word that means stylus, and therefore comparing how this word occurs at other places, we believe that that word refers to the men who had control over writing.  They were the men that worked with the cuneiform, a little stylus, it looks like a little piece of bamboo and you take a piece of soft clay and you stick it in; and if you see cuneiform this is the way it looks, it’s where they stick the stylus into the clay and then they bake the tablets.  And that’s why we have so many cuneiform things in archeology because it’s very enduring.   The magicians, then, are the custodians of the written language. They are the professors who teach it because the average person on the street did not know how to write in those days; cuneiform was like advanced mathematics; very few people knew how to write. 

 

So the magicians are not necessarily involved in any kind of mysticism in the sense that they possessed the skill of writing.  But again they did have mysticism because they began to mystify the relationship of numbers and words.  They are the people that started arithmetic, yes, but they are also the people that said two has a magical effect, three has a magical effect, four is a magic number, and they’d devise all this mythology based on the numbers.  So you have the skill of the magicians in the writing plus the human viewpoint led to a vast mythology, all produced by these magicians.  It’s a poor translation because they are not magicians in the sense that we think of the word magician.  These are the masters of literature and it would correspond to the professors of literature today.

 

The word “astrologer,” the etymology is dubious; we don’t know what that word refers to.  The next word, “sorcerers,” that we do know what it refers to.  It is used for the deepest kind of demonic involvement mentioned in Scripture.  The sorcerers are involved in what is known as black magic, the cursing.  You’ve seen pictures of the people in the Jamaican Islands, voodoo, that kind of thing, they take a little doll and put pins in it and so on, the person dies.  You’ve seen pictures where they take a doll and bend its arm, then you see the guy and he bends his arm.  This is the so-called black magic and these people are involved in the demonic very, very deeply.  Deuteronomy 18:10 proves this; 2 Kings 9:22 shows that these people had been brought in, sorcerers, the human viewpoint experts in demonics. 

Now all these people… and “the Chaldeans” is a word for the general cultural group.  Who would they correspond to?  You’ve got to see this for the impact of what’s coming up at the end of this, otherwise the whole point of this thing falls off. You’ve to see that you’ve got a man, he’s at the pinnacle of power, he’s got everything that any successful man could want, except he can’t get rid of that nagging Ecclesiastes 3:11 in his heart, the fact that he is not really autonomous, even though he tries desperately to pretend he is. And now when he’s terrified and he faces the limitations of his power, and the limitations of his life, in other words, translated into Biblical terms, Nebuchadnezzar is having an existential experience as a creature. Faced in that situation he calls on the experts that would correspond in our day to the charlatans who decree what you will and will not learn in the public schools; it would correspond to the advisors of people in high places that suppress all attempts at influencing them from the divine viewpoint.  It is the experts of our society that would correspond to the experts in verse 2.  You cannot get any more sophisticated advice than Nebuchadnezzar has.

 

And so in Daniel 2:3 he expresses his need to his advisors.  “And the king said unto them, I have dreamed a dream, and my spirit was troubled to know the dream.”  Now we know later on what the dream is about, but the problem that Nebuchadnezzar faces and the problem that he wants to solve is: I have everything, from the human point of view I’ve operated on your presuppositions, you priests were the ones who taught me as a young boy, as I studied here in Babylon under my father, I learned my lessons from you, I learned how to handle a sword in your school, I learned what history is all about from your schools, I’ve sat in your rector halls and you taught me origins, and you gave me how we came into existence.  I sat under you when you taught me all about the gods of history.  Now he says, I have a limitation and I demand an answer from it, your system that you taught me is not sufficient to cope with real life; I want answers.

 

So in Daniel 2:4 the book of Daniel shifts to Aramaic.  At this point, it’s been five or six years since I’ve dealt with Aramaic and beginning in the middle of verse 4 we shift to the Aramaic language.  “Then spoke the Chaldeans to the king in Aramaic,” Aramaic is written in Hebrew letters but it is a different language.  “O king,” they say to him, “live forever; tell thy servants the dream, and we will show the interpretation.”  This is the usual procedure.  This is the procedure Pharaoh adopted in his court, he told Joseph the dream and then Joseph told him the interpretation of the dream.  So they say let us proceed, and with great pomp and circumstance you can just see them sitting down, tut tut-ting at this young boy who has just taken over the throne.  These are the older men; these are the men that have their degrees.  These are the men that know everything.  Let’s see what happens.

 

In Daniel 2:5, “The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, The thing is gone from me.  If you will not make known unto me the dream, with the interpretation of it, ye shall be cut in pieces, and your houses shall be made into a dunghill [refuse heap]. [6] But if ye show the dream, and its interpretation, ye shall receive from me gifts and rewards and great honor; therefore, show me the dream, and the interpretation of it.”  Now “The thing that has gone from me” in verse 5 has often been taken by people to mean that Nebuchadnezzar forgot the dream.  Not so!  Nebuchadnezzar knows very well what the dream is all about.  The very test that he’s proposing proves that Nebuchadnezzar has not forgotten the dream.  The phrase, “the thing has gone from me” is the same phrase that occurs at the end of verse 8, “the things has gone from me, [9] But if ye will not make know unto me the dream,” in other words, “the thing that is gone from me” is a technical phrase which means “I have issued this decree:”… colon, quotation mark, dot, dot, dot, that’s how that should be translated.  In other words, when he summons the people who have taught him, when he summons his professors before him, when he summons all of the authorities of his day he summons them as their king, as a man with absolute power.  And he says listen, I have already made a decree, it has “gone from me,” and here’s the content of the decree, and he gives them a challenge with it.


Now why is he so vicious, just look at what he’s saying here.  We’ll go through the decree and then we’ll think a little about why he’s so hard on them.  He says, [5] “If you will not make known unto me” two things, he says I know what the dream is, but I’m going to make you tell me the dream back and not only that, you’re going to tell me the interpretation of the dream, and if you don’t, literally as it says in the Aramaic, “I will turn you into a pile of limbs,” that’s what he says.  And the last word, I will turn “your houses into a dunghill.”  Turn to 2 Kings 10:27 and we’ll see what that means.  If you’re the kind that thinks the Bible never gets into the language of the street just strap in your seatbelts.  The language of the Bible was written in the language of the street because it’s the language of the street that communicates to men who need it.

 

They had a technique in the ancient world of defiling temples.  In 2 Kings 10:27, “And they broke down the image of Baal, and broke down the house of Baal, and made it into a public toilet [latrine] unto this day.”  That’s what they did to defile the temples of their day.  They’d think nothing of having the great statutes, and people urinating all over them.  That was how they defiled them, that’s how they showed their respect to the gods who had failed.  It was the symbol in the ancient world of gods who had failed, you urinate all over them, defecate all over them, that’s how you showed respect to the gods who had failed.  Ezra 6:11 is also another cross reference.

 

Now turning back to Daniel, what’s the significance of turning those homes into dunghills?  It means the gods have failed, the whole system has failed, the whole cotton-pickin’ human viewpoint mess has failed and I’ll have everyone in Babel come in there an urinate all over it.  That’s what Nebuchadnezzar is saying.  Obviously it’s a decree that would produce a little anxiety in the advisors.  This was standard procedure and you must know and interpret this culturally.  This is an announcement of total and complete and public failure.

 

And so in Daniel 2:6 the option, “But if ye show the dream, and its interpretation,” both the dream and the interpretation says Nebuchadnezzar, then I’ll promote you, “ye shall receive from me gifts and rewards and great honor; therefore, show me the dream, and the interpretation of it.”  So the floor is yours, show me the dream and show me the interpretation. 

 

Now why does Nebuchadnezzar make such a strong vicious decree?  You kind of get the impression from reading verses 5-6 that he really doesn’t think they can do it, and why in verses 5-6 does Nebuchadnezzar put the peculiar test before them of both the dream and decree, as though he’s deliberately trying to cause failure.  Well, with Nebuchadnezzar, the leader of the kingdom of man, the first Gentile imperialist, you will see now demonstrated in Daniel 2 the essential weakness that has always cropped up, particularly in the West, it cropped up centuries and centuries ago in the East, and people are always surprised when this thing crops up; people always wring their hands, even Christians wring their hands and wonder what is happening.

All right, watch what’s happening.  The autonomous man starts out with negative volition.  He is intelligent and he adds wisdom to the negative volition.  For a while he is successful in building his kingdom… for a while.  For a while it looks like everything is going fine; for a while it looks like philosophy, literature, the arts, science, and technology all fit together on the human viewpoint basis.  Then along comes something like this that shatters confidence in the whole thing, shatters it completely.  And it always, since 600 BC, men have always reacted this way, smash it, smash the whole thing, as autonomous man I’ll have my rationalism or as an autonomous man I’ll have my irrationalism but under no conditions will I have a systematic divine viewpoint.  I will select either rationalism or irrationalism, I’ll have either order or chaos but I won’t bow my knee to the God of heaven. 

 

So what do you notice in the arts, what have you noticed going on in music and in literature for the last hundred years, since Christianity has failed, so to speak, has dropped out as an option among western intellectuals; what have you seen?  Have you seen great orderly neat paintings?  Have you seen music that has beautiful form to it?  Have you seen literature that is magnificent?  What have you seen?   You’ve seen a deterioration all across the board, you’ve seen the rise of men like Nietzsche, men like Sartre, they say the hell with knowledge, that’s their message; that’s the message of the artists. You wonder if he stood across the street and threw paint at the canvas.  They’re doing the same thing Nebuchadnezzar says.  I can’t have my knowledge and my human viewpoint basis and make it fit, so instead of doing that I’ll fly into a tantrum and smash the whole thing. 

 

Frances Schaeffer discusses a book, Madness and Civilization, and in it he discusses this thing in its present day.  Four or five years ago I taught the book of Ecclesiastes here and there was a rock festival.  We had just spent weeks teaching the book of Ecclesiastes, over and over I taught what happens when you have negative volition, finally getting to its own limits that it decays in and of itself.  Over and over I had said that when you have a civilization such as ours where the spiritual has dropped out and you have the frantic power grab, the money grab, when people were concentrating on the almighty buck, the highest god on earth was the college degree, but no reason is ever given why you should be interested in truth, no reason is ever given as to why this is right and that is wrong; no reason is ever given, just go to college, girls can get husbands and husbands can get degrees; that was the only two reasons given for going to college.  So that whole generation broke out into the hippie movement.  And so when they camped five miles south of town we had Christians couldn’t understand what had happened. We went down there and we were witnessing to them and evangelizing them, discussing with them.  And we had people in this congregation call my house and wonder why I dare to go down there and talk to those dirty filthy people; people for whom Christ died, that’s why.  People who never got the answers. 

 

Schaeffer goes on and describes what’s going on with the world today from this book, Michel Foucault’s book, Madness and Civilization.  He says: “What Foucault is finally against, however, is the authority of reason.  In this Foucault represents an important tendency in advanced contemporary thought.  In his despair of the transcendent powers of rational intellect,” we would translate it autonomous intellect, “he embodies one abiding truth of our time, the failure of the 19th century to make good its promises.  This is why at the end he turns to the mad and half-mad artist and thinkers of the modern age, and through their madness the language of their art dramatizes the culpability of the world and faces it to recognize itself.  These observations [can’t understand word] their reality of the intellectual situation of the present moment, a moment that is coming to think of itself as post-everything, post-modern, post-history, post-sociology, post-psychology.  We’re in the position of having rejected the 19th and 20th century systems of thought and have nothing else to fill their place.”

 

That’s exactly the point, and that’s exactly what Nebuchadnezzar says.  This is why in verses 5 and 6 he calls all the people who taught him, come here, I’ve got something to say, you cut me out of real truth, you never gave me answers to the big questions, you taught me evolution in your classroom, you are too stupid to see the moral results of it in Hitler, the same kind of thing; oh, I believe in evolution and creation; so did Hitler, that’s how he justified the extermination of the Jew; you with start with cosmic evolution on a large scale sense, everything is changing, so are morals; if you want down with some racial minority go ahead and kill them off, you’ll advance the race.  You can’t stop that moral conclusion, no matter how hard you try.  Yet we still have people saying well, I believe in evolution and creation too. 

 

So Nebuchadnezzar says hey, you believe that, you come here, I’ve got a message for you.  So here’s the artist, like the 20th century musician who smashes the cords, who smashes the structure of his music, here’s the artist who breaks his brushes and smears paint all over, that’s what he’s trying to say; same thing Nebuchadnezzar’s saying in verses 5-6.  You show it to me before I turn your house into a toilet, that’s what he’s saying.

 

Daniel 2:7, “They answered again and said, Let the king tell his servants the dream, and we will show the interpretation of it.”  Now in verse 8 the classic, classic reply.  “The king answered and said, I know of certainty that you would gain the time, because you see the thing,” that’s the decree, “is gone from me. [9] But if you will not make known unto me the dream, there is but one decree for you; for  ye have prepared lying and corrupt words to speak before me, till the time is changed,” do you know what he’s saying?  Do you know what he’s saying?  He’s saying you people are con artists; you ripped us off ever since you set up your system.  You’re putting us on and I’m tired of being put on with phony answers.  I’m tired of spending my life as the emperor of this kingdom with my children in the court’s house listening to you people and when it comes to a real crisis you can’t handle it, your system can’t handle it.  You’re phonies, is what he’s saying. 

 

And when he says, “till the time be changed,” he’s saying until you hope I forget about it, “until you hope that I forget asking the basic question.”  Just like a lot of people in the public classroom, don’t answer the big questions where we came from because that’s religion and in a classroom we want to be neutral.  Don’t bring God into the classroom, park him outside the door so we can be free of Him in our neutral environment and then we won’t have to talk about him any more, and then we hope that the students don’t ask big questions.  We hope, rather, that they ask how did pepper moths turn from white to gray and back to black rather than where did we come from in the first place.  The second question we don’t answer in this classroom because that’s religion, the first question we do because that’s trivial.  So in verse 9 that’s what he’s saying, you people specialize in trivial answers.  You’re scratching me where I don’t itch; I need an answer to my dream.  […therefore tell me the dream, and I shall know that ye can show me its interpretation.”]

 

And this is the test he’s going to propose; the test is, he is so suspicious that these people know what’s really going on that he says okay, I’ll give you the ultimate test, you tell me what the dream is, then I’ll know that you know something and then I’ll pay attention to the interpretation.  But if I really let it out and say I dreamed this, I dreamed this, I dreamed this, I dreamed this, how do I know you guys aren’t putting me on?  You’re making up a bunch of bologna about my dream.  So I sit here and believe it and go on happy, fat dumb and happy, like I’ve been going on for 25 years of my life.  I don’t buy it any more, says Nebuchadnezzar.  Now I want the dream and then I’ll believe your interpretation and if you can’t tell me the dream you are phony and you’re whole system is phony. 

 

Just like every educational system apart from being based on the Word of God is phony to the core.  Playing with tidily-winks, that’s all it is, manipulating numbers, manipulating facts, with no real reasons behind it at all.  No wonder Jerry Reuben, one of the yippie leaders said in his book, I lost my interest in books in literature class; I lost my interest in foreign language in language class; I lost my interest in biology in biology class.  We’re going to invade the schools and free our brothers who are prisoners.  We will burn the buildings and we will burn the books and we’ll take all the records, grades and administrative stuff and flush it down the toilet.  Now don’t say Reuben is wrong; Reuben isn’t wrong, Reuben is just like Nebuchadnezzar, he’s absolutely right, one big happy game being played, never getting down to answering the big question.  And that’s what Nebuchadnezzar’s hacked about. 

 

So in Daniel 2:10, “The Chaldeans answered before the king, and said, There is not a man upon the earth that can reveal the king’s matter, therefore, there is no king, lord, nor ruler that asked such things of any magician, or astrologer, or Chaldean.” now isn’t this interesting.  Just look at the irony of this.  There is humor in all of this; God has a sense of humor when He writes it; this book is satire, Daniel is one big satire on human viewpoint, ha-ha God says. Remember Psalm 2, the nations conspired together and God looks down and laughs at them. That’s Daniel; Daniel is a satire on human knowledge.  Man with all his pretended autonomy, he’s really got it made.  And here Nebuchadnezzar is, and if you could draw a diagram of Nebuchadnezzar in history, here he is, he’s the head of a kingdom, it’s like he’s floating on a big ocean, he’s got a beautiful boat, it’s watertight, got a lot of things on it, he’s happy.  There’s only one problem, he doesn’t know where he’s going.  That’s the satire, that’s the satire of this whole story.  He says you stupid people, sure we’ve got an empire, but where are we going?  That’s what my dream is all about, I see it in my dream, I keep seeing night after night in the darkness in my room, the statute and at the end the thing crumbles in the dust.  I know something is going to happen, where are we going?  If you can’t answer that, why are you building the boat; boats are supposed to go from some place to some place, why build it.

 

See, that’s the satire of it all. That’s the satire of the American who worships the god of education.  Why get educated, what good does it do, go to a technical school and learn how to turn nuts on screws, you’ll make more money.  Why bother with education, it doesn’t have any answers, it doesn’t tell you where you’re going, you’re wasting your time. 

 

So this satire comes to a conclusion in Daniel 2:11.  “It is a rare thing that the king requires,” well you bet, it’s a rare thing that a student asks a basic question, “and there is no other that can reveal it before the king, except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh.”  Oh, now we’re getting some place.  [12] “For this cause the king was angry and very furious, and commanded to destroy all the wise men of Babylon.”  Do you know what that decree means in verse 12?  Don’t take that one lightly.  Do you know what would happen in any state, any nation on earth, that destroys every single advisor.  In other words, Nebuchadnezzar is so furious that the system doesn’t have the basic answers that he is willing to take the whole bunch, the whole edifice of Babylonian arithmetic, Babylonian astronomy, Babylonian astrology, things all the other nations have come to, and he’s willing to destroy it overnight because it cannot answer his basic question.  Nebuchadnezzar is neurotic at this point; he’s like a lot of the 20th century artists, he’s absolutely neurotic, driven there by his dream and frantically asking someone to point out to him.  And this is going to set us up for a witnessing situation as Daniel faces this crisis.

 

Now to turn, so we don’t leave everyone in the public toilet, let’s turn to Deuteronomy 30, this is the Biblical answer, and this is the answer that Daniel is going to give, and this is the only answer that can ever be given any place in life, whether it’s a military person, a political person or a person in the academic world.  I got to know where the boat is going, I’ve got to know the big picture, like one graduate student in psychology was telling me, he was in a psychology seminar and they were talking about morality and ethics and psychology and the professor was going on and on about the fact there ought to be purpose, there ought to be meaning in a person’s life, and these people come to you in your office and they’re all neurotic and you have to put them through psychotherapy and this and that and the other thing.  You’ve got to give them purpose; you’ve got to give them meaning.  So he just raised the obvious question, don’t you think we kind of ought to go to the big picture first, because how can individual lives have meaning if the whole world has no meaning.  If the overall has no meaning how do the pieces have meaning.  Nah, no-no, that gets too involved.  So for $50.00 an hour you can pay someone to make up little sweet words to pretend that life has meaning for you, when as a matter of fact even the person you’re paying isn’t really sure that there’s meaning.  He doesn’t know where the boat is going.  He can clean his deck and paint his boat but he has no idea how to turn the wheel, right or left. 

 

Deuteronomy 30:11 is the only answer. Moses said, “For this commandment” which he had received from God, “I command you this day, it is not hidden from thee,” and the word “hidden” is the Hebrew word for incomprehensible, it isn’t incomprehensible, you don’t have to have a PhD to know Bible doctrine, any person can understand it, it is for all believers to understand.  “…it is not incomprehensible, neither is it far off.”  Moses says you don’t have to have some mystical experience to get the content of Bible doctrine; it’s as close as your Bible.  It is not in heaven any more, you don’t have to build a tower of Babel that would reach unto the heavens.  [12] “It is not in heaven, that you should say, Who shall go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us; that we may hear it, and do it? [13] Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it? [14] But the Word is very near unto you, in your moth, and in your heart, that you may do it.”  What is it?  It’s the Word of God that you have the privilege of holding in your hands and reading at this point in history.  We have the opportunity to take it in, to learn it; that tells you where the boat is going.  Next week we’ll watch Daniel who is now prepared, three years in school, the moment he is prepared God opens the door for his ministry and we’ll see what happens.

 

[Daniel 2:13, “And the decree went forth that the wise men should be slain; and they sought Daniel and his fellows to be slain.”]