Daniel Message 13

Conversion of Nebuchadnezzar – Daniel 4:1-18

Remember the theme of Daniel, that this book is basically a book of chokmah or wisdom and that the prophecies that it contains, though very spectacular and very important are not the main issue. The main issue is how does a believer live in the kingdom of man. Daniel represents, at 17 or 18 one of the most phenomenal young male believers of history, probably exceeded only by David. Daniel and David are both outstanding believers because they were outstanding believers at a very young age, believers who faced tremendous pressure, believers who lived at a time when their country was falling apart, when people around them, even other believers, had lost their stability and nevertheless, through their efforts as individual believers, trusting the Lord, managed to bring order out of chaos.

Each chapter of the book of Daniel is a crisis. Chapter 1 is a crisis over Daniel’s education, or Nebuchadnezzar’s system of education, and there we learned the doctrine of separation. How did Daniel go about asserting his loyalty to the Word of God against the loyalty to the state when the state interfered with the Word of God? And he did so by respecting the bona fide authority of the state, he didn’t start an argument just for the sake of starting an argument, he was polite, courteous, he respected authority, but where that authority went beyond, even by an inch, the authority of the Word, then it was no go. In chapter 2 we found the crisis of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, and out of that crisis we found the chokmah principle of problem solving, how Daniel kept after God, and kept after Him through persistence until a solution was forthcoming. In chapter 3 we dealt with the crisis of Nebuchadnezzar’s state religion.

Now in chapter 4 the crisis of Nebuchadnezzar’s conversion. Nebuchadnezzar finally, in this chapter, becomes a believer. And so if we put all these chapters together, 1-4, we have a profile of how the Holy Spirit brings men to Himself in the Gentile age; not in the age of Israel, not in cases where the culture has already been saturated with divine viewpoint. Chapters 1-4 show how the Holy Spirit works when the culture is not saturated with divine viewpoint, when in fact it is entirely pagan. How in a totally pagan environment does the Holy Spirit work? And the argument would be this; if the Holy Spirit can bring to Jesus Christ the most powerful man on earth, who was the father of the kingdom of man, remember Nebuchadnezzar is the head of the four kingdoms; kingdom one which is the Neo-Babylonian kingdom, kingdom two the Medo-Persian kingdom, kingdom three the Grecian period, and kingdom four the Roman Empire shading into the western world. If Nebuchadnezzar, who is at the head of those four kingdoms, can be brought to Jesus Christ then any person can be brought to Jesus Christ, all other the things being equal. The argument is then one of modeling; we can model our concept of evangelism from how the Holy Spirit works in Nebuchadnezzar’s life.

And one of the interesting principles that we discover right away is that God works slowly. Between chapter 1 and chapter 4 of the book of Daniel there are anywhere between 20 and 25 years of time. So it is taking the Holy Spirit a long time, decades, to bring this one person out of total paganism to Himself. And this should give certain perspectives on evangelism; this should at least warn you that you are not going to bring someone to Christ in a five minute canned presentation of the gospel and expect the person is going to drop everything they’re doing and become a Christian. You can’t expect someone to be invited to an evangelistic rally and trust the Lord if the Holy Spirit hasn’t done work antecedent to that point. Now often times it occurs that you will be able to share the gospel very quickly and the person will trust in Christ, but don’t go away from that saying aha, that means the Holy Spirit can work real fast. No, what it means is that the Holy Spirit was working in that person’s a long time before you came on the scene. So don’t misinterpret what looks like fast results from quick evangelism. The only reason they are getting results is because they are building on the work of the Holy Spirit for years prior to that point of witnessing. Now this should encourage some of you. If the Holy Spirit is working in that person as He is here in Nebuchadnezzar’s life, that person is going to come to Christ and you can relax, it doesn’t all depend on what you do or what you say.

Here’s some of the ways the Holy Spirit worked on Nebuchadnezzar. He worked on him through Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a man who had led the resistance in Israel to the patriots; it appeared to his day that Jeremiah was a traitor, but Jeremiah wasn’t, he realized that his country was in the fifth degree of discipline and he told his people that the best thing they could do would be to surrender to Nebuchadnezzar. And when Jeremiah, we don’t know all the details but from notices in the book of Jeremiah it appears that Jeremiah actually witnessed to Nebuchadnezzar. This was a long time before Nebuchadnezzar trusted the Lord. So Nebuchadnezzar got information from Jeremiah.

Nebuchadnezzar also appeared to get information somewhere in the area from the remnant of Ezekiel. Ezekiel is in the remnant in Babylon and he is witnessing; that remnant is having an effect. He has been talked to by Daniel, he has seen the three boys, Daniel’s three fellow teenagers who were having problems and who managed to endure the fiery furnace. So you see Nebuchadnezzar has had the gospel presented to him and has had the Word come to him in many different ways. Now if you learn to relax about this point it will help you. When you think of some other person out here, say person X, and that person is somebody that occupies your concern, and you are concerned that the Holy Spirit do something in their life, if you’ll just rethink in your own mind that you are just part of a team, you are just one player on a team, and you may have your shot one time and that’s all. But meanwhile God the Holy Spirit has other people and He’s working on that person; He has different circumstances He’s bringing into that person’s life. And if you think this way it’ll make you pray more effectively because what you’ll do, if you think of yourself as a team member rather than the Lone Ranger, you will automatically start praying Lord, let me synchronize my efforts with this person with Your efforts. So you’ll tend to be a lot more open to work with the particular situation. These are some of the principles we’ll see in Daniel 4.

Daniel 4:1, “Nebuchadnezzar the king, unto all people, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth; Peace be multiplied unto you. [2] I thought it good to show the signs and wonders that the high God hath wrought toward me. [3] How great are his signs! And how mighty are his wonders! His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion is from generation to generation.” Now you can immediately tell, based on what we have studied in Daniel 1-3 that something has happened. Nebuchadnezzar hasn’t been talking like this. There’s a complete change in this man. This man has been converted by the time chapter 4 rolls around. Chapter 4 is actually a track that was written by Nebuchadnezzar testifying as to how he was converted, and how he personally trusted in Jesus Christ. Now we’ll have some surprises for some in how you approach this question of trusting in Christ. It will be a lot different from some of you who are used to evangelism and some of its processes, because in Daniel 4 you’ll see how the Holy Spirit handled the situation.

Nebuchadnezzar is writing a praise tract, that’s why he says, “Nebuchadnezzar, the king, unto all people, nations, and languages,” that is the sign of an official governmental decree. So it’s a very powerful situation and shows you that as far back as, say around 570 or 560 BC, in this era, the entire world had information about the gospel. There wasn’t anyone in the Babylonian Empire who hadn’t had a chance to hear. Every individual in the Babylonian Empire had a chance to hear and look at how neat it worked out, with no funds for missionaries, with no extensive procedures, notice how God the Holy Spirit worked it out so that an entire world was reached for Christ in that generation by the witness of four teenagers. That’s all it took; four teenagers who had the Word of God. They were teenagers who had been brought up in their parent’s home, because obviously they didn’t get too much of the Word under Nebuchadnezzar, most of these boys for the first 114 or 15 years of their life had gotten Bible doctrine in the home, over and over and over. And they probably were boys who weren’t running around saying oh isn’t the Christian life great and all the rest of it. Sometimes it’s great and sometimes it isn’t. So don’t put on the phony front. Sometimes the Christian involves the most sorrowful times; of course deep down you always have the peace that Jesus Christ alone can give.

These four boys were persistent believers who kept with it day in and day out, whether they felt like it or not, whether they felt high or low, they still adhered to the Word of God. As a result they reached the one most powerful man in their day and that man now in verse 1 is reaching his entire world with the gospel. Now look at this, look at how efficiently the Holy Spirit works. It took four teenage boys plus circumstances that were engineered by the Holy Spirit, plus 25 years; add it together and you have an entire evangelization of the world at that time, at least of the Babylonian Empire; millions of people were reached with the Word of God, with an investment of four lives and 20 years.

Now fortunately they didn’t approach it like most Americans. If most Americans had the job of reaching a group of people like the Babylonian Empire they would try to reach it in 25 months with about $500,000 and maybe a staff of 250 people, because we Americans think in businesslike ways; that’s just part of our culture. Now we’re not saying that God couldn’t use that, but we’re just saying look how different the Holy Spirit works here. Four boys, no investment because who’s paying for the boy’s food? The people who are being evangelized. No missionary funds invested, not a dime. They were actually being fortified and provided for by Nebuchadnezzar, the man to whom they were witnessing. Do you see how affective the Holy Spirit is? Four boys, it took some time, it took 25 years to do it, granted, but still it worked and the result is something that probably the world had never seen.

The kind of document you are looking at in Daniel 4 is the kind of doctrine that was not repeated. It was repeated in the second kingdom: here’s the four kingdoms, the first kingdom is the Neo-Babylonian kingdom, the second kingdom the Medo-Persian kingdom, Cyrus apparently spread the Word, but by the third kingdom Greece, Alexander all he did, he trotted into Palestine one day and the high priest told him, hey Alexander, do you know that you’re the subject of Bible prophecy, and Alexander being a Greek had never read the Hebrew Bible, so he went up to Jerusalem, stopped his army and went into the high priest and the high priest gave him a complete exegesis of Daniel. And he showed how he was the subject of prophecy in this book and Alexander was so impressed that he was not anti-Semitic in his policies and the Jews flourished under Alexander. So the third kingdom, at least, was a kingdom in which you have very little evangelization, even though Alexander himself was reached. The fourth kingdom, you don’t have any government, no Caesar puts out a decree like this. So this happened way back with that golden head. Think of the metal of the statue of Daniel 2, what was the most precious metal? Gold. So even though this kingdom was apostate, actually this kingdom was better evangelized than any of the later kingdoms, probably better evangelized than our own generation.

Daniel 4:2, the language of verse 2 has changed and this is something that you’ll notice that doctrine will change people’s vocabulary; will get rid of all the religious words and will provide them with true Biblical words, “signs and wonders” is a phrase used to depict the historic revelation of God. So Nebuchadnezzar has actually acquired a new vocabulary. This is why in the family training it takes pain and all the effort in working with your children, to teach them propitiation, reconciliation, redemption, and so on, so that when the trust in Jesus Christ if they haven’t already they can come up with something with a little more content than I got turned on by Jesus. This way they will have a vocabulary that will describe what was involved. You see, you can’t think without vocabulary. You’ve got to have a working vocabulary in order to think. By developing your vocabulary you can develop your ability to think.

So Nebuchadnezzar’s vocabulary is changing, “I thought it good to show the signs and wonders that the high God hath wrought toward me.” Now to show you his mentality and to show you what has changed, just compare Daniel 4:2-3 with Daniel 3:14-15 and look at the difference. In 3:14-15 you have “Nebuchadnezzar spoke and said unto them, Is it true, O Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, do not ye serve my gods, nor worship the olden image which I have set up?” And at the end of verse 15, “And who is that God, that shall deliver you out of my hands?” Look at that, that’s the vocabulary of autonomous man, man building out from himself to find God to interfere, no authority higher than himself, the center of Nebuchadnezzar’s world is the center of his own works.

What has been the shift in Daniel 4:2-3? This is one of the signs, incidentally, that a person has genuinely trusted in Jesus Christ. Nebuchadnezzar was previously concerned with his own works; he has shifted now to God’s works. Now be careful at that point, there can be shifts happen when people get associated with religious groups and these shifts do not indicate conversion or any great spiritual growth. Here’s the kind of shift; person X may come into a group, before they were talking about their life and all the details of their life, and after they become associated, many times with believers, they’ve heard a little of the Word but they haven’t acted on it, they now think X in terms of my religious works, or my spiritual feelings. Has there been a basic change? Negative; the change has not occurred because here their life was the focus of their attention and their life is still the focus of their attention. That’s not the change that’s observed in chapter 4; this is a different kind of change. Here the shift is from the works of Nebuchadnezzar’s life to the essence of God. See what it is; one is anthropocentric, the other is Theocentric; one is man-centered, the other is God-centered. So what he’s talking about in verse 3, “how great are His signs, how mighty are His wonders,” he is no longer calling attention to his own works, even his religious feelings are not the issue. It is not the issue of how you feel about Jesus Christ. The issue is what is Jesus Christ, and what is your position as to the person of Christ and His work.

So when it says, “How great are His signs!” notice the exclamation point, there’s an involvement, this is a worship. In fact, verses 1-3 depict Nebuchadnezzar in an act of worship because it’s an act of praise; it’s a public rehearsal of the works and words of God. And then look at the end of verse 3, surely he’s gotten this vocabulary from listening to Daniel; surely this must have come from that source. “His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and His dominion is from generation to generation.” Now where do you suppose he got those words from? It’s simple; he called Daniel in for some conferences. And this man tried, probably being as thorough administrator as he was, Nebuchadnezzar represents one of the finest administrators of the ancient world, he was not only great military man but he was a man who administered perfectly the Babylonian kingdom. It was a most marvelously run group, as we’re going to see in a moment with the word “watcher.” But he had a phenomenal system of inspection, he had a system of logistics, he was a tremendous man in this regard.

So it’s logical that when Nebuchadnezzar trusted the Lord he would approach the Christian life like he had been approaching running his empire. And so he probably called Daniel in and said okay Daniel, now this suddenly makes sense to me, I want you to sit here and teach me some doctrine; I am a decision maker and I have got to have data at my disposal that I can use in decision making. I want to go through life stable and at peace, and he’s already accomplished this because the word “peace” in verse 1, “Peace be multiplied unto you,” is a new word for him. Remember up to this point he was upset, now he’s got stability and he’s enjoying this and he wants other people to share it.

So we see in verses 1-3 a tremendous change. The word “everlasting kingdom, and His dominion is from generation to generation” means, and this is the key to Nebuchadnezzar’s conversion and it’s not only the key to his conversion but it is the key point that we as believers today have to push hard, and will spend and consume 90% of our job witnessing to our generation, and that is that Nebuchadnezzar correctly perceived that God is sovereign. Of all the attributes of God that are the hardest to get across in a mechanistic type of culture, or where the universe is impersonal, is the idea that God is sovereign.

Now let me try and show you a little bit in what was involved in getting Nebuchadnezzar to this point. Let me draw two charts and see if you can see the difference. The Bible places God as the furthest back; there’s no force in back of God. God is not determined by things outside of Himself. He does not approach situations and God has a couple of option and God has to choose from those options; God doesn’t choose from any options, He makes the options. Everything comes out of God’s character. God doesn’t face anything in back of Himself. You have God, under Him you have Satan and under him you have man. You have a chain of command, you have the universe or we’ll just put the cosmos here.

Now the pagan view looks like this, and to a degree, if we’re going to be honest, everybody here shares part of this pagan view. You couldn’t have lived in this part of the world for as long as you have without inheriting this concept. So this thinking is in your soul, it’s in mine and the Holy Spirit’s in the process of working on us in these areas. But we all have this concept: that God and man share the same cosmos, we believe in God all right, but it’s God and man together against a backdrop further back. So we have God, and he’s out in the universe and man’s here, but both of us are the same in that behind us both is this cosmos. We pick this up in the evolutionary world view, the idea going back to the big bang theory, continuous creation, whatever the cosmogony is that you want to hold to it’s the same concept, this impersonal universe which spread and from which everything else has come. So God and man together are now looking around at the environment, the environment is here first, then God comes in, then man comes in.

Now you say I don’t hold that; oh yes you do. Every time you fail to trust in a promise of God you are essentially operating as though that was so. We are essentially operating as though God’s Word are the best possible given the situation, but the situation is a little bit overwhelming these promises; the promises aren’t quite big enough, they almost are big enough but not quite, and so I can never fully trust the Lord. I’ve always got one foot on the promises and the other foot on a gimmick, just in case God fails, I want another insurance policy. Now this is behind our lack of faith and this is the battle the Holy Spirit has to cut through at the point of evangelism and He has to continue to cut through this thing as we grow as believers. So, the book of Daniel was put into the canon of the Bible to show you this issue, and to show you how deadly it is and how it will be uprooted by force is necessary to train us to accept the fact that the furthest back is God and behind Him is no standard. This is the problem with some of the philosophers, Plato, always thought of the ideal good, or the ideal love, or the ideal something else, and it was God here and in back of God there were these ideals. That’s pagan, it makes God less than God.

Now let’s watch what happens, verse 4 is his testimony. Daniel 3:4, by the way, this is a good model for a testimony; here’s a man giving his testimony and watch how he does it, and watch what he emphasizes in his testimony. “I Nebuchadnezzar was at rest in mine house, and flourishing in my palace.” Now the word in verse 4, “I was at rest” or I was sitting at rest, doesn’t mean that he had attained inner peace; it means that he was, at this point in his life, free of external pressure. I want you to notice a neat principle here; oftentimes people say well, in order to bring someone to Christ God has to really clobber the person with a lot of pressure.

Sometimes a person will be brought to Christ in the middle of prosperity. That’s the way I trusted in Christ as far as my own life goes; there wasn’t any big pressure or trial that brought me to Jesus Christ. I was in high school, I had a scholarship to MIT, it was all set up and I just realized that this wasn’t enough. I was satisfied from the human point of view but realized that that still, after I had gotten it, was just like eating cotton candy, it looks good but there’s nothing to it. So you can come to Christ through adversity or you can come to Christ through prosperity and this points to the fact that Nebuchadnezzar was finally brought to Jesus Christ out of prosperity. Now he’s going to have adversity in here too but it starts in prosperity.

“I was at rest in my house,” he had no enemies, militarily he had conquered the world, he had brought together the finest set of administrators the world had ever seen, he had set up his empire which was the first one in history this large; it was a tremendous situation that Nebuchadnezzar had. He, at this time, married a woman who was a tremendous architect, and she told Nebuchadnezzar one day that when she got up and looked out her bedroom window she wanted to see a garden. So Nebuchadnezzar said fine hon, and he built here The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, just for the queen. She wanted it, Nebuchadnezzar built it for her. And this was a tremendous piece of architecture. And for years and years New Testament built up the city of Babylon; it was the showcase of the ancient world. And so he’s relaxing, he has his own golf course and so on, he just has it all fixed up.

And the word “flourishing” in verse 4 is the Holy Spirit’s tip off that something’s going to happen. It’s an ominous word because the same word “flourish” is used for human prosperity as well as plants that grow; flourish, it’s going to have something to do with a tree that’s coming up. But the word “flourish” is the way the Holy Spirit has of anticipating that all is not well. Nebuchadnezzar’s flourishing like a tree, but if this were played musically there would be kind of like a minor key injected into it. Not enough to stop the piece of music but enough to say something’s happening, something’s going to happen, you’d get an uneasy feeling.

Daniel 4:5, “I saw a dream which made me afraid, and the thoughts upon my bed and the visions of my head troubled me “I saw a dream” he said, and again Nebuchadnezzar was communicated to primarily by means of dreams. “I saw a dream which made me afraid,” and the principle that you see in verse 5 is that even if a person is free of external pressure, they are not free of the kind of pressure the Holy Spirit can bring to bear in their life. Here is a man who is at the pinnacle of power; he has wealth, he has good times, he’s like Solomon. He may not have a thousand women but he has his share. So is surrounded by prosperity on every side, except he doesn’t have peace deep down in his soul, and his thoughts turn, and he sleeps and he dreams, and he dreams, and he dreams and he keeps on dreaming, and it’s an antagonizing kind of dream, and unsettling kind of dream because this theme keeps coming up in his dream. And by now you can imagine after twenty years of prosperity he thinks dreams, you know, 20 years ago I had a dream that bothered me and I brought a young man in called Daniel and he explained the dream to me.

These dreams bother me, so in Daniel 4:6, we find Nebuchadnezzar decreeing, “Therefore made I a decree to bring in all the wise men of Babylon before me, that they might make known unto me the interpretation of the dream. [7] Then came in the magicians, the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers: and I told the dream before them; but they did not make known unto me the interpretation thereof.” Now the question that we want to raise in verse 6-7 is why has he brought in all the wise men; Daniel isn’t there. Daniel was the head of the wise man. Why is it this man didn’t call Daniel when he called all the wise men. He jumps the chain of command. Here you have Nebuchadnezzar in the organizational chart, here’s Daniel, and here are the men under Daniel. Now what he has done, he has usurped Daniel’s authority; he has gone over Daniel’s head here, down into his organization, which is a violation of administrative procedures. Sometimes this has to happen, but generally in an organization if you do this you wind up destroying the organization.

Well, Nebuchadnezzar is doing this, he’s bypassing Daniel, he’s giving an order to men under Daniel. He deliberately bypasses Daniel. Now the Bible doesn’t tell us exactly why, but maybe again with a little creative imagination we can think why. Put yourself in Nebuchadnezzar’s place, that last dream 20 years ago, what did Daniel tell you about that dream. It was a disturbing dream; it disturbed Nebuchadnezzar and the dream was disturbing because that kingdom would one day be smashed. And so apparently Nebuchadnezzar, like many unbelievers, is still trying to see if there is a solution other than the one offered by the God of Daniel, still trying to see if there’s some area of neutrality left; still trying and holding, there’s some gimmick that he can use instead of trusting in trusting in the Lord, or instead of getting lined up with the Word. Always searching for a gimmick, and so he looks for a gimmick. And the outcome of his work in verse 7 is that no gimmick is forthcoming. Now we live in a day and age of great gimmicks and we are going to pay in the same way that Nebuchadnezzar paid. Nebuchadnezzar knows the real solution, there’s no doubt in his mind at this point that Daniel has the goods. But he’s trying to bypass it, hoping that he can get some other solution than bowing his knee before the God of the Scripture as the God behind whom this is no other thing.

He wants to avoid that kind of a situation at all costs and we try to avoid the same thing. Take the area of business and economics, the Scripture is very, very clear as to what God’s Word says about inflation and about government sponsored inflation. It simply says it is a form of theft, and you cannot have a national entity which, as a result of governmental policy furthers theft without bringing down the judgment of God. You can have theft in a nation, but when theft becomes an official policy of the nation that’s quite another story. Every nation has had murder, but when these things become official policy, then we’re in another situation. The government has taken a position before God that it will further theft. This is one of the monetary crises; we need to let the economy come back to a free market and it means people will be hurt for a while, but we don’t want to trust the Lord with that. The government is inflating currency; it’s going up all the time. Just to show you how we’ve come a long way from the days of Babylon, here are the prices converted by the silver standard in today’s currency, and they considered Babylon to have inflation. Their inflation was running at 2% a year. Here’s some prices: 4 bushels of dates, $4.00 2 ¼ pounds of wool, $4.00. Great wine, $32.00 a jar. Some of these were high because of the preservation problems. If you wanted to by an ox or an ass, $240.00. Half an acre was four cents. A small house, $60.00. Bedroom set, $8.00.

This is all tied in with the Word in a very, very interesting way. Remember the metals in the statue of Daniel 2. What was true of the metals as you went down through history? You started with gold and you went to silver, to bronze and to iron. What was true about the monetary value of those metals? They were all decreasing. We can’t be dogmatic but it suggests that one of the implications of Daniel 2 is that the monetary currency of these kingdoms as you go on in history get progressive worthless, until you come right down to the end and it’s clay; and that fits with the book of Revelation because in the book of Revelation it looks like you have a paper credit system controlled completely by Satan, the mark of the beast, 666 is an economic mark; it’s authorization to buy and sell with a complete paper currency. In other words you have no currency that has historic value to it; it’s just complete checkbook type economy. So we’ve had an obvious change since Daniel’s day.

Now let’s continue and look at how God closes in with Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel 4:8, “But at the last Daniel came in before me,” he doesn’t go on to say why, just Daniel happened by according to Nebuchadnezzar, “whose name was Belteshazzar, according to the name of my god,” that was “may Bel protect his life,” Bel Marduk was the name of the chief Babylonian God. There is a debate at this point, in case you’re ever asked a question about that, there is a debate as to whether in actual history Nebuchadnezzar didn’t use the word “Bel” to talk about the God of Israel; he may have done that. He may have used the concept Bel or Marduk; either one of those words, to refer to God as he knew it, simply because that was the word for deity in his language; that may have been the situation, so just because he doesn’t talk about Bel Marduk here or he uses the word it doesn’t mean he’s completely apostate, “according to the name of my god, and in whom” that’s in Daniel, “is the spirit of the holy gods:” now whereas he may have used the words Bel Marduk for God at least this verse tells us he knew of another name, the holy God is “holy Elohim,” the holy God. Now it’s translated plural because the noun is plural but the usage in this context suggests that he also may be calling God Marduk, but then he also apparently at times will call Him Elohim, “the holy God, and before him I told the dream, saying,” and now he goes on and discusses the dream with Daniel.

He flatters Daniel, he recognizes Daniel’s testimony, Daniel 4:9, “O Belteshazzar, master of the magicians, because I know that the spirit of the holy Elohim is in thee, and no secret troubles thee,” that means no secret causes you difficulty, you are able to get through these complicated dream interpretations, “tell me the visions of my dream that I have seen, and the interpretation thereof.”

Daniel 9:10, “Thus were the visions of mine head in my bed;” and by the way, verse 10 is one of those rare places in the Bible, I think there’s only six places in the entire Bible that speak of thought occurring in the head; all the other places in the Bible speak of thought occurring in the heart, and you’re looking at a rare passage, but it does show you that in the ancient world they did recognize the existence of the brain. “…the visions of mine head in my bed, I saw, and behold a tree in the midst of the earth, and the height thereof was great.” A tree, a dream symbol, and of what is the tree dream symbol speaking.

Turn to Ezekiel 31:3; remember Ezekiel was a contemporary of Daniel, here we have the same symbol, the tree, just to show you that these symbols in the Bible can’t be interpreted any way you please, they must be carefully controlled by Scriptural contexts. “Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches, and with a shadowing shroud, and of an high stature; and its top was among the thick boughs. [4] The waters made it great; the deep set it up on high with its rivers running round about its plants, and sent out its little rivers unto all the trees of the field. [5] Therefore, its height was exalted above all the trees of the field, and its boughs were multiplied,” so Ezekiel 31 is your control. That’s why we know that dream symbol is consistent; the tree was used in the Scriptures to refer to empire, to monarchy, the idea is that the tree gave shade and shelter in a hot and dry land, so the tree then became the symbol of the government that gives protection to the people.

Back to Daniel 4:10, He said, “I saw…” these visions, this tree. And verse 11, “The tree grew, and was strong, and the height thereof reached unto heaven, and the sight thereof to the end of all the earth: [12] The leaves thereof were fair, and the fruit thereof much, and in it was meat for all: the beasts of the field had shadow under it, and the fowls of the heaven dwelt in the boughs thereof, and all flesh was fed of it.” So he has this entire vision of his prosperity, the tree encompasses all areas; this is certainly true, he lived in an era of peace. We have extra Biblical testimony to this era of peace. I’ll read a section from the book of Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 10, chapter 11. This is a history that compiles extra-Biblical notices of these materials. Here’s how it talks about Nebuchadnezzar; it gives you kind of another picture, another snapshot of this man.

“So he took upon him the management of public affairs, and of the kingdom which had been kept for him by one that was the principal of the Chaldeans, and he received the entire dominions of his father,” Nabonidus, “and appointed, that when the captives came, they should be placed as colonies, in the most proper places of Babylonia; but then he adorned the temple of Bel, and the rest of the temples, in a magnificent manner, with the spoils he had taken in the war. He also added another city to that which was there of old, and rebuilt it, that such as would besiege it hereafter might no more turn the course of the river, and thereby attack the city itself.” Of course the man did, his name is Cyrus, we’ll read about that in the book of Daniel. “He therefore built three walls round about the inner city, and three others about that which was the outer, and this he did with burnt brick.” You can imagine this construction, this thing was built out of brick; if you want a picture of it look in some archeology magazines or Eerdman’s Bible Handbook or one of the handbooks, and you look in there and almost every one of these handbooks has at least one picture of the gate of Babylon, and you look at that gate; those bricks aren’t any bigger than our bricks today and those walls were some 18 feet thick. Now you figure the material that must have been carted in load after load after load to build this phenomenal thing; you get an idea of the magnitude of the construction.

“And after he had, after a becoming manner, walled the city, and adorned its gates gloriously, he built another palace before his father’s palace,” apparently his dad’s house was too small so he just built a bigger one for himself, “but so that they joined to it; to describe whose vast height and immense riches it would perhaps be too much for me to attempt; yet as large and lofty as they were, they were completed in fifteen days.” So it shows you the fantastic logistical organization to pull off a project like this. He wanted a house built so he built it in 15 days. Can you imagine saying to a contractor, hey, I want a house built in 15 days. If you were Nebuchadnezzar you’d do it. “He also erected elevated places for walking, of stone, and made it resemble mountains,” the reason he did that was because of the sewers in the streets, it’s a little tough on the feet, so they had elevated walkways, and you could just go for an evening walk on these elevated walkways; fantastic. “…and built it so that it might be planted with all sorts of trees. He also erected what was called a pensile paradise, because his wife was desirous to have things like her own country, she having been bred up in the palaces of Media.” So she was used to the gardens and so he built his wife The Hanging Gardens. That gives you an idea of this tree and how it shelters everything.

Then Daniel 4:13 is the second part of his vision, notice it starts out in verse 10 with “I saw,” the technical word indicates a second part to this tract. But then “I saw in the visions of my head upon my bed, and, behold, a watcher and an holy one came down from heaven;” now that tells us something interesting. The word “watcher” is an angel, but he is spoken of as a “watcher” because the angelic forces are described in military terms, and beginning with the Babylonian Empire you have military forces called “watchers.” Here’s the map of the area, here’s the Eastern Mediterranean, Palestine down here, the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and Babylon. Now in order to keep this empire going and functioning you have to have informers. So he would have these various regional commanders, they’d be commanders of various parts of the army for a region, and coterminous with each military region would be a political subdivision. So he’d have a civilian and a military man; civilian and military man; civilian and military man, in each one of these districts. The military men were to spy on the civilians and they were to send roving bands around just to scout. They had tremendous numbers of these and they would just police the streets and they’ kind of mix with the crowd, and they had a fantastic intelligence system.

Now this was picked up by the Holy Spirit, the vocabulary of the “watchers” and applied to how the angels work in history. This same thing occurs again, significantly with a post-exilic book, in the book of Zechariah. In Zechariah 1:11 the angels are described in very similar terms. Here the Lord Jesus Christ in His preincarnate form is pictured as a commander of a company of watchers. The imagery is borrowed from the political and military time. Remember Zechariah was written during the Medo-Persian days. “And they answered the angel of the LORD that stood among the myrtle trees, and said,” see, he’s getting a report, the picture is that Jesus Christ is standing there and these horsemen in this grove of trees that Zechariah sees in his vision, all of a sudden as far as he can see is horsemen, horsemen, horsemen, horsemen, all in military formation, and they give their report. “And the answered the angel of the LORD that stood among the myrtle trees, and said, We have walked to and fro through the earth, and, behold, all the earth stood still and is at rest.” So it’s a picture of the watchers, the spies, the intelligence division of the military, and that vocabulary now becomes a vocabulary of the angels.

So in the vision, then, of Daniel 4, when he says I saw that “watcher and an holy one came down from heaven,” it is teaching that somewhere this particular angel, whether he was a commander or not, he has great authority. So you have an angel under God and he’s going to give an order; he’s acting as an area commander.

Daniel 4:14, “He cried aloud,” except the word “aloud” means cry with strong authority, the idea is that this angel is high up on the totem pole of rank, it’s an angel of, say… if you want to conceive of it in military terms he’s a two star general, “He cried aloud, and said thus, Hew down the tree, and cut off his branches, shake off his leaves, and scatter his fruit: let the beasts get away from under it, and the fowls from his branches,” this is interesting. Do you know what’s just happened? One angel has given an order to destroy a nation, and the largest nation on earth at that time would go down temporarily; now the nation itself would be sustained because of God’s grace, which we’ll see in a moment, but the most powerful man in his administration is destroyed by an angel. Now when you stop and see the crises of the world, and if you’re going to think Biblically about the crises, you have the Middle East flare up or you have something happen domestically in the United States, just back off from that a minute and thing; these crises may well be due to similar angelic moves today. Why not? The angelic administration hasn’t changed because Christ rose from the dead or because 20^th century man in his autonomous psychology can’t accept the view; too bad, the angels go right on existing anyway. They don’t care whether we can’t accept them, it doesn’t cancel out their existence. So today these things may be due to the same kind of operation.

Daniel 4:15, “Nevertheless leave the stump of his roots in the earth,” now there you have God’s grace, you’re going to see how God closes in on Nebuchadnezzar graciously; here’s some ways He closed in graciously. He waited until Nebuchadnezzar was free of external threats so He could blast Nebuchadnezzar without losing the Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian Empire for 7 years is going to be without a leader. For seven years that country is going to go on, equal to two terms of presidency in this country, and the country rocks along because of the fantastic administration set up by Nebuchadnezzar. And the country goes on in spite of the fact that in the Ancient Near East when a leader started to fail and became senile they’d usually assassinate them, if they didn’t get out of office or turn it over to his son. That’s how they usually handled it. Isn’t it strange that in the light of this trial this man is going to graciously be restored to power? God will protect Nebuchadnezzar; He’s going to keep him from being assassinated, He’s going to keep his empire in tact, and the sign of it is “leave the stump.” Cut it down but save the stump. This is God’s grace and when you see God clobbering somebody don’t sit there and gloat; God loves that person and the only reason they’re getting clobbered is because He loves them and God will save that stump because He’s going to restore Nebuchadnezzar to power, Nebuchadnezzar is going to be one of the great believers of all time but it’s going to be because of grace, “leave the stump, even with a band of iron and brass,” there’s protection that marks out the stump, “in the tender grass of the field; and let it be wet with the dew of heaven, and let his portion be with the beasts in the grass of the earth:

Daniel 4:16, “Let his heart be changed from man’s, and let a beast’s heart be given unto him; and let seven seasons [times] pass over him,” or seven years. Now the disease that Nebuchadnezzar has is a very, very rare disease. For years Bible critics said ha-ha, that disease is unknown, that’s just a figment of Daniel’s imagination. Not long ago one of the great conservative Old Testament scholars of our day, Dr. Raymond Harrison, saw exactly the same kind of thing. The disease is called boanthropy, and here’s a description that Dr. Harrison wrote from his notes observing this particular person. “A great many doctors spend an entire busy professional career without once encountering an instance of the kind of monomania described in the book of Daniel. The present writer, therefore, considers himself particularly fortunate to have actually observed a clinical case of boanthropy,” I guess that’s the way you pronounce it, “in a British mental institution in 1946. The patient was in his early 20’s, who reportedly had been hospitalized for five years.”

“His symptoms were well developed on admission and diagnosis was immediate and conclusive. He was of average height and weight with good physique and was in excellent bodily health. His mental symptoms included pronounced antisocial tendencies, and because of this he spent the entire day, from dawn to dusk, outdoors wandering around the grounds of the institution. His daily routine consisted of wandering around the magnificent lawns with which the otherwise dingy hospital situation was graced, and it was his custom to pluck up and eat handfuls of the grass as he went along. On observation he was seen to discriminate carefully between grass and weeds, and on inquiry from the attendant the writer was told that the diet of this patient consisted exclusively of grass from the hospital lawn. He never ate institutional food ever, and his only other drink was water. The writer was able to examine him curiously and the only physical abnormality noted consisted of a lengthening of the hair and a coarse thickening condition of the fingernails. Without institutional care the patient would have manifested precisely the same physical [can’t understand word] as mentioned in Daniel 4.” So lest there be criticism that Daniel is seeing something that never happened, obviously it does happen. So we have a case of an angelically administered sickness.

Daniel 4:17, where we’ll stop with the sovereignty placed in the angels; this matter is by the decree of the “watchers.” Now this doesn’t deny God is sovereign, but it shows you the vast power that angelic agencies have. Angelic agencies sentence to doom entire nations; you’re going to see another case of that in Daniel 10. So watch it, as far as God is concerned in history, when you look at a map of the world, and say you see the United States, Canada and so forth, the Biblical way is to think of boundaries superimposed on the United States, that coterminous with those geographical boundaries you see on your map is another boundary three dimensional above it. And in that three dimensional boundary above the two dimensional map is the angelic boundary, and that the angelic administration parallel and are coterminous with the political boundaries of nations. That is definitely taught in this book, we’ll see that later but here it’s only sufficient to see that the angels have fantastic power in history.

Daniel 4:17, “This matter is by the decree of the watchers,” notice this is plural, “and the demand by the word of the holy ones: to the intent” now here is the thrust of the entire passage, “the intent” or purpose “that the living may know” and this means may know for a truth, it doesn’t mean just intellectually know, “that the living may know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomsoever He will, and sets it up over it the basest of men.”

There are several points to observe; first, “that the living may know,” so the purpose of various movements in history, this is also reflected in Acts 17:25-26, the purpose of movements in history is to maintain a maximum God-consciousness in the human race, whether it’s one culture or another, God jockeys cultures and nations around, vying for power with war and peace. But behind it all is this constant scene being hammered home to man during the times of the Gentiles, that the living may know that God rules among men. How does this work? Frustrating human schemes, whether it’s famine and food shortages, whether it’s energy shortages, whatever it is, God is constantly at work to make us know that He rules in the kingdom of men.

Second, that He gives it to whomsoever He will, and that is the concept of His sovereignty in the sense that it’s the furthest back, God is not determined by anything; you don’t use brownie points to bargain with God. Ultimately history goes because God has said it will be this way, period. No one tells God which way to run history; we can petition it but we don’t order it. And He “gives it to whomsoever He will, and He sets it up over the basest of men.” That last thing is to see that God is a God of grace. He will take the lowest person on the social totem pole and use them to develop majesty on earth. The idea is that God does not adhere to man’s moral religious standards when He operates with these kingdoms.

So in Daniel 4:17 when we conclude that the matter is by the decree of the watchers, we have the theme of evangelism in the times of the Gentiles. What is the one point that God will get across in this age and that we ought to in our evangelism? That He is sovereign, that He is the One who is finally in charge. Next week we’ll deal with how Nebuchadnezzar finally is led to Jesus Christ.