Daniel Message 14

Conversion of Nebuchadnezzar, continued – Daniel 4:19-37

At the beginning of every era of history God always does something special to show the way He is going to work for the rest of that era. He does this in Daniel but he has also done it at other times in history. Let’s take two other examples and then compare it to the book of Daniel so you can see the principle. At Sinai God laid forth the Ten Commandments which would characterize His rule for the dispensation of Israel. For that dispensation the issue would be focused on God’s authority, made known in the Torah, or the Law, and therefore to emphasize this when He phased in this dispensation he made an issue out of the minutia of the Law, so that, for example, when some picked up sticks on the Sabbath day they were killed because God wanted the issue made clear that the Torah, from this point, was the Law. The Torah would be the standard, the Torah would be the issue; all things would surround the Torah. It was what God had decreed and men would have to obey that.

Another era, the Church Age, when God phased the Church Age in He made it very clear that there were certain things required, and one was that the grace principle be foremost. And so when Ananias and Sapphira refused to operate on the grace principle and switched to works to impress men they were disciplined very severely in Acts 5. So we see that at the beginning of these two eras God made an issue; an issue, incidentally, which He did not repeat for if God were as strict with us as He was with Ananias and Sapphira our congregation would be decimated. So God has backed off of the severity of His discipline. The reason is because during an era of grace God suspends to a degree His judgment throughout that era, in order that men may have a chance to accept Christ.

Now the times of the Gentiles was the period of history inaugurated by Nebuchadnezzar and would consist of these four kingdoms. It would consist of the Babylonian kingdom, the Medo-Persia Kingdom, the kingdom of Greece, Rome, and the latter form of the Roman Empire as it deteriorated into one of pottery and iron. So during this period it would be accepted, it would be expected that God would make an issue; we would look for God to make an issue at the very beginning of the times of the Gentiles to give us a clue as to what would be the issue for the rest of that period of time; what would be the standard reference when God would come back throughout the era in various forms of revelation He would always emphasize one particular point.

So if we are to study, and we live in the times of the Gentiles, we live in the time when God’s kingdom is held in abeyance, then if we are to see the real issue, that the Holy Spirit will always zero in, though He may focus in on other issues, we go to the very beginning of the times of the Gentiles, close to 600 BC when the book of Daniel was written, and the book of Daniel has to do with the key issue. And what is the key issue between God and Nebuchadnezzar? The key issue is who is supreme, God or man. And this will always be the issue that God will pound away century after century, year after year throughout the times of the Gentiles. This is important from our own point of view as far as a model for personal evangelism is concerned. When God goes to deal with Nebuchadnezzar it is not over the fine points of the Law. God does not deal with Gentiles over the fine points of the Law. If you hold the place and turn to Romans 2 you’ll see why. All during this era the Holy Spirit when He works does not work on the Gentile with reference to the Torah; the Holy Spirit works on the Gentiles with reference to something else. Something else is central, not the Torah, and what this something else is must be known by every witnessing Christian, for if you do not emphasize what the Holy Spirit emphasizes then you cannot expect to be successful in personal evangelism.

In Romans 2 we have the men without the Bible in the first 16 verses of the chapter. You’ll notice in Romans 2:11, “For there is no respect of persons with God.” This is characteristic; God is class-less in His operation. [12] For as many as have sinned outside,” not without but “outside of the law shall also perish outside of the law.” Verse 14, “For when the Gentiles, who have not the law” or the Torah, “do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves. [15] Who show the work of the law, “or Torah, “written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.” So obviously the Gentiles do not have the Torah, the Holy Spirit will not bring conviction of sin for violations of the Torah. The Holy Spirit during the times of the Gentiles brings conviction of God-consciousness. So therefore we know now that what the Holy Spirit will emphasize as the church of Jesus Christ expands into heathen areas is not violation of the Torah but violation of God’s character or His essence. This is the central facet of the frontier of the operation of the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, we come back to Daniel and we see God working with Nebuchadnezzar, God has sovereignly picked out a man in history, a man who typifies the rest of that era, a man who in himself gathers all of the characteristics of the Gentile period in him, he’s an excellent military man, Nebuchadnezzar won and secured the Middle East from all of the various tribes to the north and then finally Nebuchadnezzar beat the Assyrian tribes and eventually came to be king over all of the Babylonian Empire. Nebuchadnezzar, then, represents military power. Nebuchadnezzar represents administrative and managerial genius. Nebuchadnezzar was a fantastic organizer and had one of the greatest organized kingdoms the world has ever seen.

So Nebuchadnezzar represents the epitome of Gentile power, and it’s this man, not someone else, that God chooses to deal with in a very clever and wise way, so that in these chapters of Daniel as you study them, don’t just think of them as chapters of prophecy. The book of Daniel is primarily a book of chokmah, not prophecy. Therefore watch this book for principles as to how God’s spirit gripped Gentiles caught and trapped in their own kingdom, the kingdom of man. If you see this and you see that the Holy Spirit can work with a man like Nebuchadnezzar, then the Holy Spirit can work with your loved ones, can work with people with whom you come in contact with and so on. You will never meet an unbeliever of the power of Nebuchadnezzar, and therefore you can say if the Holy Spirit does it this way, then He can do it again.

Now the issue throughout this time period for a believer, the believers trapped inside the kingdom of man have to face a dilemma. They do not have the Torah; they do not live inside the kingdom of God because the kingdom of God has been removed from history. Therefore the issue is simply this: either the believer modifies to a degree the kingdom of man that he immediately touches or the kingdom of man modifies him. There’s no neutrality. Either the believer applies the Word to his own life, to his personal life beginning with his body, beginning with his own emotions, working out to his family, working out from there to his neighbors, to his associates, either he does that or his associates influence and channel him. It’s a continual tug of war and there’s no neutrality; either you influence your environment for God or your environment influences you for Satan. This is the either/or.

Now to deal with man, like Nebuchadnezzar, and to deal with man trapped in the kingdom of man God has to use a very interesting kind of approach. We can summarize the approach we have seen today by saying this: that when God works with Nebuchadnezzar the first thing we notice is that He uses a multiplicity of channels. God is not limited in evangelism to one channel; He’s not limited just to Daniel. He’s limited, if you want to say it that way, to men like Jeremiah, He’s limited to some of the priests that witnessed apparently to Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC, he uses the Scripture that Nebuchadnezzar was exposed to through the various teenagers that went into captivity with Daniel and so God has many, many different channels besides circumstances. So when you witness, when you work with people, remember God the Holy Spirit uses a multiplicity of channels, not just you. It doesn’t depend just on you; it depends on who and what God is and how He’s working in that person’s life.

Another thing that we begin to see about this, that it takes time. The Holy Spirit has taken at least two decades to bring Nebuchadnezzar around to Himself… two decades of time have been involved in this situation. He was not won by a two minute presentation of the gospel with an invitation to accept Jesus into his heart. Nebuchadnezzar was worked upon by various ways and means for many, many years.

Another thing we notice and can learn about our personal evangelism is that the Holy Spirit zeroes in, primarily at the point of Nebuchadnezzar’s finiteness, not his sinfulness, not his fallenness right away, but his finiteness. This makes the person God-conscious; Nebuchadnezzar at the pinnacle of power in 603 BC has a dream and in the dream he sees the statue and the statue grows and grows and finally it’s smashed. Nebuchadnezzar has this haunting feeling, this haunting sensation that night after night, and apparently he dreamed this many times, night after night as he dreams this he wonders, is my kingdom, with all of the power that I have put into it, what will happen to it in the future; I being finite man cannot tell the future. And so Nebuchadnezzar sees his own limitations in his dream. God the Holy Spirit makes him see his own limitations, cuts him down to true size so that he might look at the essence of God. So again the Holy Spirit emphasizes man’s finiteness and conterminously and simultaneously God-consciousness.

Another lesson that we can learn through this is that the Holy Spirit will shift back and forth between prosperity and adversity. At one era he will use prosperity, that’s Daniel 2; Nebuchadnezzar, at the height of prosperity, at the very pinnacle of his happiness was prosperity, God the Holy Spirit begins to show him that he’s a very unhappy man deep down inside. At the pinnacle of his power the Holy Spirit shows him he’s impotent. At the pinnacle of his riches God the Holy Spirit shows him that basically he is a very poor man. That’s one way the Holy Spirit has of working.

Now in Daniel 4 God the Holy Spirit shifts tactics, for if He cannot reach those whom He wishes to reach by prosperity then He will use adversity. If we do not respond to the Word of God in rich and in health, God will take away the riches, God will take away your health, God will do anything He can to you in order to win you to Jesus Christ. So in Daniel 4 we see the Holy Spirit now shift tactics away from the prosperity test to adversity test.

Last time we left off in verse 18; we had seen Nebuchadnezzar’s second dream, the tree dream, the dream of the great tree that was suddenly cut down and then he called for Belteshazzar or Daniel.

And in Daniel 4:19 we read: “Then Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, was astonished for one hour, and his thoughts troubled him. The king spoke, and said, Belteshazzar, let not the dream, or the interpretation thereof, trouble thee. Belteshazzar answered and said, My lord, the dream is to them that hate thee, and the interpretation thereof to thine enemies.” Now what is Daniel troubled about? There are many things that could figure into this shock, but the verb to be “troubled” and to be “astonished” in verse 19 conveys shock, Daniel is shocked. Now what would it take to make a stable believer like Daniel shocked. We can only speculate as to what the exact details were because the Holy Spirit doesn’t say, it just describes Daniel’s shock, so we have to kind of gauge it from the context.

If you look in the context, obviously what he is seeing is that God the Holy Spirit is going to close in on Nebuchadnezzar. Why should this shock Daniel? Hasn’t Daniel, for example, interpreted the dream of Daniel 2; doesn’t Daniel know that God is sovereign? Yes. But here apparently what shocks Daniel is the suddenness and the devastation that God, just out of nowhere suddenly intervenes. Now Daniel, the book of Daniel, you’ll have to understand is written to warn us about certain mental attitudes that we all have, and this is one of those. Typical of living in the kingdom of man is this attitude of uniformitarianism; God has gone to His place, Hosea says, God no longer actively intervenes in history in a public way because Israel is now held in abeyance. So during the kingdom of man God works providentially. But then, suddenly, at a certain point in time God will introduce Himself and it will be a shock to people because for years and years, for at least 20 years Daniel has not seen any public manifestation of God. There’s no Shekinah glory like he used to see in Jerusalem, apparently the Urim and Thummim are not function, so he hasn’t seen any public evidence of God’s miraculous working. Now he’s about to see it and so it shocks him.

The world will be shocked when the next intervention of God occurs in the tribulation. There will be tremendous shock, men will be astonished, their thoughts will trouble them for the same reason; they are trapped in this uniformitarian human viewpoint and suddenly for God to intervene…. All the people that have been so self-confident in uniformitarian geology, in evolutionary biology, will suddenly discover it’s no longer just an academic debate whether catastrophism is true or not; they’ll have the evidence in front of their face.

Daniel 4:19b, “The king spoke, and said,” let me see the dream, basically, let me hear it, don’t worry about it. And Belteshazzar said, My lord,” which shows you another principle about Daniel; Daniel recognizes bona fide authority. Daniel calls Nebuchadnezzar his lord because Nebuchadnezzar is the head of the fourth divine institution, the government, law, and because he is the citizens of that nation owe him respect. Daniel gives respect where respect is properly due. Now where Daniel does not give respect, nor his companions, was in, say for example in Daniel 3. Remember back in Daniel 3 when Nebuchadnezzar had overstepped his boundaries, when Nebuchadnezzar had invaded the area of worship through his communion service, through his statute.

Here are the divine institution’s, here are the categories of the details of life. And as long as we keep them in balance we’re going great, but always Satan would have us expand one of these areas to the detriment of the other. I have deliberately drawn this the way I have to show you various things. One is that you can’t expand one of these areas or spheres of life without decreasing some of the others. So there’s no such thing as over-expanding one and keeping the rest of them in balance; it doesn’t work that way. So what Nebuchadnezzar has done, he has taken the fourth divine institution, justice, law and punishment, and he’s expanded it and expanded it over into the area that properly belongs to, in our day, what would be the church, the area of personal worship. In other words, the fourth divine institution has invaded this area, the area for the church and when the fourth divine institution invades the area of the church then we are in for a collision. This is a danger of the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, when the federal government will be empowered by the constitution to walk into a local church and say the church constitution is unconstitutional simply because it violates federally guaranteed women’s rights. So we are seeing in our own day the same kind of collision of Daniel 3 can reoccur very rapidly.

So Nebuchadnezzar has legitimate authority and he has illegitimate authority and every once in a while it takes a group of stubborn believers to teach big government a lesson that it cannot over-extend in these areas without harm to itself. In our own generation we’ve seen the Amish farmer, for example, refuse to pay his social security on the basis of the Bible’s command to take care of their older people and so the Amish farmers refuse. So the Social Security Administration had to back off and allow an exception at least in the case of the Amish farmer, and this was a case when the federal government had overstepped its boundary, becoming the daddy, and the Amish farmer said we have a Father in heaven but it’s not located in Washington, it’s located in heaven. So from time to time there will be these collisions and we might as well prime ourselves by studying Daniel carefully because we will probably see a collision in our own generation. Government occasionally in history has to be cut down to size.

Daniel 4:19c, “My lord,” says Daniel, “the dream is to them that hate thee,” what does he mean by that, that they caused it? No, in the Aramaic the word “to” with the preposition is “to the advantage of,” this dream is to the advantage of your enemy, Nebuchadnezzar, because you’re going to decline in power; you’re going to be vulnerable Nebuchadnezzar to enemy invasions from the outside and to domestic upheaval from the inside; it was typical in that day for the Ancient Near East that when a king went impotent or when he became incompetent that he would be assassinated and he is saying Nebuchadnezzar, you are in danger of assassination; the court intrigues will take care of you Nebuchadnezzar, you are in great danger. But of course God is a God of grace, and part of the dream we will see, that is the “stump” part of the dream is a signal of God’s grace, that God will protect Nebuchadnezzar and keep him even though He is disciplining him.

In Daniel 4:20, from verses 20-22 we have the first part of the interpretation of the dream. This is what is the tree; now the tree we have already seen is typically used in Scripture for the kingdom. For example, I showed you Ezekiel 31 but that’s not the only place in the Bible that shows the tree being used as a symbol for a kingdom. There’s one very, very familiar one, you’ve all read it but you’ve probably never thought of tying it into this context; turn to the New Testament, Matthew 13, Jesus uses the same concept of a tree symbol. If you are a little skeptical about whether the Bible can really be interpreted and you say well, if you take ten people and they interpret the Bible they’ll come up with eleven interpretations, that may be true, but not in the basics. If it’s really so hopeless that the Bible cannot be interpreted by man, what you are in effect saying is that it is hopelessly to verbally communicate, in which case I would challenge you that anything you write is open to the same objection. If you object that the Scriptures can be interpreted in a multiplicity of ways I will respond to you that anything you write can be interpreted in a multiplicity of ways; does that stop you from writing. Because the newspaper can be interpreted in a multiplicity of ways does that stop the newspaper editor from writing a daily edition? Because vocal words can be misinterpreted, does that stop you from talking to people? Not at all, so obviously you’re insincere and hypocritical in the objection that Scripture cannot be interpreted accurately because you only apply that criterion when it comes to God’s Word. Why aren’t you honest and apply it to every area of communication. Why do you single out Scripture for that degree of skepticism? If you are going to be an honest skeptic be an honest one and don’t talk and don’t write, because after all, there might be a multiplicity of interpretations.

Now in Matthew 13:31 we have a situation where Jesus is illustrating mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. “Another parable He put forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven” which is synonymous with the kingdom of God, “is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field, [32] Which, indeed, is the least of all seeds; but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches of it.” Now that’s a familiar parable of Jesus: the kingdom is pictured as a tree, and the birds come to rest in the tree. Now turn back to Daniel 4 and you will see precisely the same imagery. There’s no subjectivism here, there’s no inaccuracy of interpretation, the tree symbol means always the same thing; it means the symbol of the kingdom, the common Ancient Near Eastern symbol, and it was understood by anybody who was above moron intelligence in that day, that a tree represented a kingdom.”

Daniel 4:20, “The tree that thou saw, which grew, and was strong, whose height reached unto the heaven, and the sight thereof to all the earth; [21] Whose leaves were fair, and the fruit thereof much, and in it was meat for all;” and now look, “under which the beasts of the field dwelt, and upon whose branches the fowls of the heaven had their habitation,” now what’s that talking about? Exactly the same thing Jesus was pointing to in Matthew 13, the kingdom of God is there referring to a political future kingdom of God and in that political future kingdom of God there will be many citizens, just like there was in this kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar. The birds are people; the birds and the fowl come to the branches and they have there their habitation.

Daniel 4:22, “It is thou, O king, that art grown and become strong: for thy greatness is grown, and reaches unto heaven, and thy dominion to the end of the earth.” Now this doesn’t mean that Nebuchadnezzar literally rules to the end of the earth, it has reference to the decree of Daniel 2 in which during the times of the Gentiles there is a potential for Gentile imperialism. The Gentiles have been given the go-ahead for imperialism across the face of the earth. This is why Western history is strewn with the wreckages of the empire, the empire of France, the empire of Spain, the empire of Germany, the empire of England and of America, what we had. We buy our way through the world, everybody else conquered their way and the result is our kingdom is collapsing because you can’t buy people’s allegiance. People have spit in Uncle Sam’s face for the simple reason that friends aren’t bought, friends are won. So in verse 22 when Daniel makes the announcement he completes the identification between the tree and Nebuchadnezzar and his kingdom.

Now Daniel 4:23, in verses 23-26 the second part of the interpretation, what about the action that happened in the dream. We had the tree seen in the dream but something happened to that tree in the dream. Now these verses will tell us what is that all about? What does that mean? So verse 23 says, “And whereas the king saw a watcher and an holy one coming down from heaven, and saying, Hew the tree down, and destroy it; yet leave the stump of the roots thereof in the earth, even with a band of iron and brass, 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 of the field, till seven years [times] pass over him.”

Now in verse 23 he has reference to the famous “watcher.” Now why is this word used in Scripture? What’s a “watcher?” A watcher, we said last time, is a term taken from Babylonian and Persian political culture and applied to the angelic realm. A watcher was a system that they would set up during the early days of Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom of informants throughout the kingdom, constantly patrolling the area. You had, for example, various provinces; these provinces would be broken down politically, there would be political subdivisions. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy Nebuchadnezzar’s managerial control. He didn’t want to leave it just to civilian politicians. And so he divided up his army along geographical lines corresponding to these political divisions. So in one province you’d have one division, in another province you’d have another division, and there would be military commanders along with the civilian commanders in each one of these areas. You’d have a governor and a general, a governor and a general; you’d have the civilian authority and you’d have the military authority, and this was the system of maintaining order inside his kingdom.

Now the military would sent patrols out into the villages, their job was constantly patrol, over and over, watching for bands of invading hordes from across the boundaries of the empire, also watching for theft in the market place and sort of acting as a state police. And these men would patrol back and forth and they came to be known as the “watchers.” Now in the book of Daniel the term “watcher” with all of its imagery is borrowed and then used and applied to the angelic realm. So instead of having a political division and a military division, in the book of Daniel we’ll see something very startling, it will come out in the 5^th chapter, and one which just blows the mind of most naturalistic historians, but here what the Bible is saying: that when you have political subdivisions on the globe, take a globe and you see the various subdivisions, that coterminous with all of these subdivisions, congruent with them are angelic subdivisions, just like those military subdivisions broke out during New Testament. Do you have a governor of a province and you have in that day a military general who was commander of that province. What Daniel is arguing is there’s something greater going on than just that. You have civilian leaders over a given geographical area and you have an angelic leader over that area, so there will be an angelic head over the United States, there will be an angelic head over Russia, there will be an angelic head over all the countries of the world where you have government established. So this parallel structure is exists.

Now what has happened is that God has overall, let’s combine all these things into one now. Here’s Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom; here’s Nebuchadnezzar, he’s the head of that kingdom. But simultaneous with Nebuchadnezzar’s reign is the reign of a watcher, and the angelic being is acting, not for Nebuchadnezzar, but he is acting for God; he is watching how Nebuchadnezzar rules history for God and out of this now we are going to get a principle of history. And this principle of history is still operational today. Today the angelic watchers are still ministering and the book of Daniel tells us where and why they intervene in history, we will never see them bodily but we can observe in the newspaper various swift changes, for example, in the fortunes of a political leader, we will observe changes in government, we can observe the effects, like Jesus said in John 3, you can hear the wind but you can’t see it; you can empirically measure the effects but you can’t really get a hold of it. So we can measure politically and scientifically the effects of the watching angels in history; we can never see them, only the Bible gives us the clue as to how they operate.

So we have a watcher here along with Nebuchadnezzar. The watcher has gotten an order passed down from the throne room to remove Nebuchadnezzar. So God’s kingdom, the angels here, this head angel comes down and he says all right, Nebuchadnezzar goes, I’ve got an order from the Most High God. And so that is what the watcher is in verse 23, “And whereas the king saw a watcher and an holy one coming down from heaven,” he had been to the throne room to get an order.

If you want to see what a meeting in the throne room looks like, turn to 1 Kings 22:19. Here’s an actual meeting of what one looked like a prophet once was admitted to one of these meetings. “And he said, Hear thou, therefore, the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven,” that’s all the angelic forces, “standing by Him on His right and on His left.” We are to presume from what we see here that the angels on His right are the elect and the angels on His left are the fallen; some on the right and some on the left. [20] “And the LORD said,” He’s dealing with a point of history, He’s dealing with a national entity operating in history and He goes to the angelic powers, “And the LORD said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead? And one said on this manner, and another said on that matter,” that’s just Hebrew idiom for they had a discussion.

This is a meeting of Yahweh and the angelic council. And in the angelic council the Lord brings up a motion, and the motion is discussed, not that God runs it that He gets one vote and the angels get one vote or something like that, it’s not that, but it is an open discussion in which the angelic powers are asked to innovate. So angelic beings have creativity, they’re being asked for an innovation for a creative solution to the problem of history. Now God, of course, in His omniscience is above the angels and God knows what the angels are going to say and do, but the point still remains that in the Bible there’s an exciting inter linkage between angels and men, that angels actually sit and they contemplate history, and God would interact with the angels and say now what are we going to do about this problem, what are we going to do about that problem and there will be a discussion, and this is a discussion going on.

Finally in verse 21, “And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the LORD, and said, I will persuade him. [22] And the LORD said unto him, By what means? And he said, I will go forth and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And He said, Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also; go forth, and do so.” So the angel presents an innovative solution to the problem, the Lord says fine, I like it, do it. Now there is a case of the meeting of the angelic council. Now it’s the same kind of meeting that happened over in Daniel 4:23, where we have one of the watchers coming out from a meeting, he’s coming down from heaven after he called a meeting about this problem. The problem is Nebuchadnezzar; the problem is that God loves Nebuchadnezzar and Nebuchadnezzar is on negative volition toward God. Nebuchadnezzar rejects God’s character. Remember, Nebuchadnezzar does not have the Torah; Nebuchadnezzar does not have a lot of doctrine. But Nebuchadnezzar as a Gentile, as all Gentiles do, had God-consciousness and what he has done, he has gone on negative volition toward God-consciousness.

So here Nebuchadnezzar sits, here’s the God-consciousness and Nebuchadnezzar says no; of all of the witnessing that had been done to date Nebuchadnezzar still hasn’t got the point. He sees that the God of Daniel is a God, he sees that He is highest over all the gods, he sees that Daniel’s God controls history, but the one thing that Nebuchadnezzar still hasn’t seen is that Daniel’s God is a totally sovereign God. It is God plus something in Nebuchadnezzar’s mind and this is always the problem that we have; every time you worry, every time you fail to apply a promise of God, it’s always God plus a gimmick, because we have one foot on God’s character and His promises and the other foot sitting over on this gimmick. All of us have this tendency in our souls to trust God plus something, it’s never God only, always God and our own private insurance policy. All right, Nebuchadnezzar has this problem so God is going to deal with him and the announcement is passed down from heaven, give him the adversity test.

Now God doesn’t take pleasure in giving men adversity tests, but where you have a person as stubborn as Nebuchadnezzar, on as high a degree of negative volition as Nebuchadnezzar, they are going to get smashed. And please notice something else; Nebuchadnezzar is not being smashed because of his immorality. He is not being smashed because Nebuchadnezzar drinks; he is not being smashed because he looks at all the girls in the palace. He is being smashed because of his defiance of God’s character; always the central point of evangelism in the times of the Gentiles. God is not convicting Gentiles over specific sins; God is convicting Gentiles over the issue of His own character; that’s always the issue in evangelism. So that’s the issue here, and they’re going to cut him down, literally the concept of the tree. In fact that’s where we get out concept “cut somebody down to size.” You don’t cut an animal down to size, you cut a tree down to size, and so here the tree is cut down to size but a stump is left.

Now Daniel 4:24, “This is the interpretation, O king, and this is the decree of the most High, which is come upon my lord the king,” notice the combines the two authorities. Here’s this tremendous genius of diplomacy. Daniel was fantastic when it came to diplomacy. You see, he’s according his two sovereigns their proper authority in one sentence. He says this decree has come down from “the Most High,” so there Daniel recognizes the supreme authority of God, but then he turns around and says ‘upon my lord the king” and there he accords the king his proper authority. Daniel kept the authorities within their spheres and he didn’t have a problem like modern man does here. He divided it up by spheres, the sphere sovereignty.

Daniel 4:25, “That they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, and they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and they shall wet thee with the dew of heaven, and seven times shall pass over thee, till thou know that the most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomsoever he will.” He repeats the details of it and we gave a reference for this, boanthropy is an observed disease when men turn into this, eating grass, their fingernails grow long and for a while they turn into vegetarians. And the case that I read to you the boy would only eat grass from one part of the lawn and this went on for years, he fed himself exclusively on grass and water. How he did it without vitamin deficiency I don’t know; it must not have been the grass that grows around here. But he made it and Nebuchadnezzar is going to make it; for seven years Nebuchadnezzar will eat grass, and he will behave as an animal.

But then Daniel 4:26, God is gracious, “And whereas they commanded to leave the stump of the tree roots; thy kingdom shall endure,” the words “be sure” in the Aramaic is the word continue, your “kingdom will continue unto thee, after that thou shalt have known that the heavens do rule.” And here is the issue, until you come to know that the heavens rule; that’s the issue, the sovereignty of God and that is the number one issue for the rest of history, from 586 BC on down to the return of Jesus Christ and even when Jesus Christ returns what’s going to be the issue. What’s going to be the issue when Christ comes back, when men look up and they see Him coming? What do you see in the book of Revelation? Is it oh, oh, I see Him? It’s not that, it’s the issue we won’t have Him rule over us; that’s the issue. Again it’s the concept of who has number one authority—the sovereignty of God!

Daniel 4:27, the Scripture always gives a balance, the Scripture never permits one to draw fatalism from them. So in verse 26, the beginning of several verses in this remarkable, no sooner is the sovereignty of God asserted in undeniable terms, no sooner is it made the central issue, but that Daniel comes up with an exhortation that seems to fly in the face of the whole decree. “Wherefore, O king, let my counsel be acceptable unto thee,” stop or “break off thy sins by righteousness, and thine iniquities by showing mercy to the poor; if it may be a lengthening of thy tranquility.”

Now several things about verse 27; the sins and the iniquity are not what we would call the moral sins. What these are are sins of power; power of the state. Notice how he defines it in the parallelism, let there be “mercy to the poor,” he’s talking about a political organization and he’s saying Nebuchadnezzar, show that you are not God by the way you administer your kingdom. That’s the issue; this involves a political, managerial, administrative type of repentance, repentance in his general ruling power or his administration’s characteristics. Change the concept of your administration Nebuchadnezzar so that you are not training these Gentiles to think that you’re God Himself. That’s what he’s saying. And then he says at the end, “if it may be that there be a length of your prosperity.” Now the word “tranquility” is the Aramaic word for prosperity and is the antonym of adversity. So what Daniel is saying, he’s saying Nebuchadnezzar, if right now you will change then the test of adversity will not come upon you.

You say how can Daniel make this kind of an exhortation in verse 27 when back in verse 23-24 he talked about a decree guaranteeing it would be perfectly certain that the test of adversity would come? Well for one reason, Daniel doesn’t think like most of us. He’s not a fatalist, he hasn’t absorbed this fatalism from his Greek background, he didn’t have any Greek background, we have some. The way he viewed this is that God would respond to Nebuchadnezzar if Nebuchadnezzar would change. Now in God’s sovereignty it’s certain that Nebuchadnezzar won’t change, yet he still exhorts Nebuchadnezzar to change in the face of a sovereignly certain point.

Now this shouldn’t seem too strange. Didn’t Noah do the same thing? What was the announcement the Holy Spirit gave to Noah. In 120 years I’m going to send a flood, and Noah, I want you to preach the gospel to the whole world. Now just suppose that Noah had preached the gospel to the whole world and instead of rejecting everybody accepted. Would God have sent the flood after 120 years? No, so there was a change, even though God sovereignly knew and had so set up history that it would work this way, He still maintains human responsibility inside history and still men will be judged because they reject. Let’s go back to Noah and look at it; here you have a 120 year period of time; during this time thousands and thousands of people have a chance to accept Jesus Christ as Savior. Thousands, millions of these people hear the Word of God, but God knows that there are only going to be eight people that are saved out from the flood. During this time, all the time that this is happening, there is this evangelizing, evangelizing, evangelizing and negative volition, negative volition, negative volition. Now what is the point? Why does it look like God assigns men a hopeless task? Why does he tell Noah to go ahead and preach, even though He knows that no one is going to do it. It goes back to what we dealt with on the Exodus; same thing. Why did God send Moses to Pharaoh when he knows that all it’s going to do is harden Pharaoh’s heart? Because one of the principles of judgment/salvation is grace before judgment. Now here’s a startling point; the preaching that looks hopeless, before the Exodus, before Noah’s flood, before this test of adversity, same principle to all three, this concept of grace before judgment is what brings the judgment.

Now watch how it works. In Noah’s day why are these people going to be doomed? Because they didn’t have a chance? Because these people never heard? No, because for 120 years they heard, that’s why the flood came. For 120 years these people have a chance to hear, a chance to hear, a chance to hear, and they reject, reject, reject and reject, so flood. So the very grace before the judgment is what brings the judgment. Same with Pharaoh; if Pharaoh hadn’t have hardened his heart there never would have been the fireworks of the Exodus. In other words, to some degree the Exodus depended upon Pharaoh’s rejection, just like the flood depended upon those people rejecting. And so here, the test of adversity depends upon Nebuchadnezzar’s continuing hardening of his heart.

Taking into a far more sober and eternally serious thing, our own generation, for 1900 years the gospel of Jesus Christ has been preached; for 1900 years God has said believe on My Son, believe on My Son, believe on My Son, because He is the coming judge. And so for 1900 years the world has heard and heard and heard again, and rejected and rejected and rejected. Why are people going to be doomed? Why is there going to be a great tribulation? Because the world has refused 1900 years of the teaching of the Word of God. Are people going to say well God, you’re unfair? Not at all, what have I been doing, I backed off from judging history, for 19 centuries I backed off and for 19 centuries I was silent, the prophets were silent. Why? Because the next words that God must speak after the resurrection are words of judgment; Christ the Savior is judged and the canon of Scripture will never be opened and there will be no continuing prophecy until judgment begins, and when judgment begins revelation will begin once again, the canon will be reopened but no longer will we have the ethic of grace, it will be the ethic of justice and judgment. And so we have this principle on a smaller scale with Nebuchadnezzar.

Daniel 4:27 is an exhortation, an address to his own responsibility, to respond Nebuchadnezzar, respond. And he doesn’t treat it like a hopeless case, he doesn’t think to himself… Daniel never could come to verse 27 thinking the way some amateur Calvinists do, I say amateurs because the real Calvinists don’t think this way, but the amateurs get hold of a partial truth and blow it all out of distortion. If Daniel thought the way amateur Calvinists do he’s say well Nebuchadnezzar, I’m going to buy seats for the show when you eat grass; that would have been their response; he could never have responded the way verse 27 reads. Verse 27 reads as though Nebuchadnezzar could respond, and as far as Daniel was, he could have. Yet it was also certain that he wouldn’t. So the combination of a responsible choice possible and certainty that it won’t is no conflict in the Biblical mentality. If you have problems here it’s just because you don’t have the Biblical mentality.

Daniel 4:28, the narration, “All this came upon the king Nebuchadnezzar.” He rejected the grace invitation of verse 27. He had an opportunity and now when he gets clobbered he’s going to say oh God, why did this happen to me. He probably did and if God were there He would have told him, because I told you it was going to happen and you didn’t respond. So at the end of 12 months, he had 12 months, an extra year, look at how long God’s grace is, 18 years probably, we’re not for sure, 18 years between chapter 2 and chapter 4, then comes the announcement of the test of adversity in his life to cut him down to size and God gives him another year to respond to this. So this gives you an idea of timing, how long God waits and waits and waits and waits. Now we all have to learn patience; that’s one of the lessons I’ve had to learn as pastor. Verse 29, “At the end of twelve months he walked in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon.”

Daniel 4:30, “The king spoke,” so as he’s walking in his palace one day he makes the fatal mistake, he gives voice to that part of his soul that God is attacking, as he walks in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon, the king “said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honor of my majesty? [31]While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee.” Now you see the precise location of sin? Look at it carefully because this is a model for the rest of the era of the times of the Gentiles. When the Holy Spirit goes to work on a heathen person, He will go to work centrally at the point of the essence of God. Don’t get into this Jesus stuff. God the Holy Spirit starts with God’s essence, then He works to the issue of sin and moral responsibility to God and then He works with the cross, then He gets the gospel. But you cannot walk up to a little child and tell them Jesus this and Jesus that and have a little baby manger scene, which is an emasculated version of the real thing; in the real thing you have all the smells, etc. that would be a realistic Christmas card because that’s real. The other kind of a picture that you never get that’s right is a picture of the crucifixion. The artists that draw pictures of Jesus on the cross ought to have their heads examined; I have not seen one picture of the cross of Christ that is doctrinal, because in Isaiah 52 and 53 it said His face was so smashed you couldn’t tell it was a face. That’s the way it was but you see what we do, we always make it to fit our own presuppositions, we’d like Jesus to die hanging there on the cross without a drop of blood, no bruises, nothing; He was beat up by Roman soldiers.

So here Nebuchadnezzar is saying that he has built all these things and then God says the kingdom is taken from you. Parallel studies would be Herod in the book of Acts, the same thing. Daniel 4:32, “And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee,” and the purpose, “until thou know that the most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomsoever he will.” In other words, who has final say, God or man? God does.

Daniel 4:33, “The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws. Now verse 34 is the conclusion of this tract. Chapter 4 was a document that was passed around the Babylonian kingdom after Nebuchadnezzar’s conversion.

And from Daniel 4:34 to the end we have what, for all the world, looks like Nebuchadnezzar’s genuine conversion. “And at the end of the days I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me,” see, he’d been rendered psychotic by the tremendous pressure of boanthropy, “and I blessed the most High, and I praised and honored him that liveth for ever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from generation to generation: [35] And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and he doeth according to his will” and look at what Nebuchadnezzar’s learned, “He does according to His will in the army of heaven,” or in or by the strength of heaven, it’s just a metaphor for the angels; the angelic forces of history, God does what He wishes.

Now how does this challenge Nebuchadnezzar, and how do we know he’s converted? Because these ancient men were polytheists, they believed in many gods and there’d be kind of a round table and for a while there would be one of these gods that would rule, he’d be chairman of the board. And while this god was a chairman he could make promises to his city and that city would prosper, but you could never tell the next day whether god C over here, he might be chairman and if he was chairman then he’d undo the promises of the previous chairman. So you never could get a God that would make promises that would endure. So when Nebuchadnezzar in verse 34 states this the way he states it, it tells us that he has clearly become monotheistic; he realizes that there is an army of heaven but that God in fact controls that, He does His will, that’s verse 35, “His will in the army of heaven,” plus the word “everlasting” in verse 34, His kingdom is not going to be upset when another god becomes chairman of the board. They don’t play musical chairs; God never is abdicated from the throne. No one can stay His hand, he says in verse 35, and say unto Him, what are you doing. “… and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay His hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?”

Now for a moment just compare Daniel 4:35 with Daniel 3:15, look at the difference in this man, how far he’s come in twenty years. Twenty years ago this is what he was saying, “And who is that God, that shall deliver you out of my hand.” Twenty years later he says “none can stay His hand.” How was Nebuchadnezzar changed? By gimmicks, by Daniel giving him tracts every day? No, He was converted by the Holy Spirit using a multiplicity of approaches and finally drilling home this central truth.

Daniel 4:36-37 is the closing of the tract, “At the same time my reason returned unto me; and for the glory of my kingdom, mine honor and brightness returned unto me; and my counselors and my lords sought unto me; and I was established in my kingdom, and excellent majesty was added unto me. Now the Bible ends in verse 37 with this story, but it leaves something out; it just says “Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, all whose works are truth, and his ways judgment: and those that walk in pride he is able to abase.” But you know the Bible leaves us here with an unanswered problem and the unanswered problem is this: If Nebuchadnezzar became a Christian, he became a believer, how come he didn’t transform the nature of the kingdom of man into the kingdom of God. Why is it that he didn’t bring in the kingdom of God, why didn’t he change things? Why didn’t he apply the Word to every area?

Apparently the unstated answer is that while God is retreating to His place, as Hosea puts it, during the entire era from 568 BC, the kingdom of man, until the return of Jesus Christ, during that period of time several things are happening. The first thing is that holy war has been suspended in the political physical realm. Israel is now in existence but she’s in existence only by Gentile authority; Israel exists only because of the United Nations mandate so that’s still true. So there’s a suspension of holy war. Why? God has granted amnesty to the world temporarily, until Jesus Christ judges the gates are open for those who will believer. There is a period of waiting, not forever, just a temporary period, but a temporary period of amnesty when holy war is dropped out of the picture; there’s no conquest of the Canaanites any more, that kind of thing. Holy war, incidentally, will be resumed with the return of Christ. During this time believers will encounter two oppositions; not only their own sanctification of their souls, that hinders believers in every era, but under the kingdom of man another limitation, and it will be the limitation that Nebuchadnezzar faced as a believer, the limitation of the form of culture throughout this period. Even believers… even believers armed with all the tools of the Word of God will not be able to change and transform the culture into the kingdom of God. They will be able to influence it to a degree, but that’s all; they will never successfully transform the culture, because if they could Jesus Christ would not have to come back and do His work.

So what does this mean? It means that during this era believers have a three-pronged program that we have seen Daniel function with. First, we can get the culture to adopt divine viewpoint; we can sell the divine viewpoint and have people say yes, that’s right, I want to design our legislation that way, I want to run my family that way, I want to run my business that way. That’s a freewill acceptance of the Word of God principle.

A second possibility that exists in our own generation is that we can sell the divine viewpoint approach to the unbeliever pragmatically; argue strictly on a pragmatic basis, the divine viewpoint works. Daniel used this approach in Daniel 1.

Or the third option is that we must adhere to our divine viewpoint and face persecution. Those are the only three program options that believers have in this day. Even Nebuchadnezzar faced this option, as the most powerful man in history who would become a Christian or a believer, he himself could not bring in the kingdom by his own efforts; genius though he was he could only influence it to a degree, but that’s as far as he could influence it. Why is this? How then does God hold the thing together?

The New Testament gives us two ways in which God holds the world together, one is found in Acts 17:26; in Acts 17:26 all during this period if we can’t transform the kingdom of God then how is the kingdom of man kept from going completely apostate. “And hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth; and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation,” that means their time/space boundaries. [27] “That they should seek the Lord if perhaps they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He is not far from every one of us.” Paul tells us that one way God [can’t understand word] keeps culture reasonably God-conscious, so the kingdom of man doesn’t fully develop, is through war and change, famine, disease, wars, that change and transform the boundaries of peoples and nations. That’s one way, horrible though it seems on the surface, there’s a reason for continuing war, and it’s given right here, “that they might seek the Lord.” When a culture gets too [can’t understand word] too prosperous, when it gets too apostate, God will remove it by playing off another culture against it in a form of nationalism, war versus war.

But there’s another way in which God is restraining that’s more directly related to us. 2 Thessalonians 2, He’s restraining by war and changes and He’s restraining in 2 Thessalonians 2:7-8, “The mystery of iniquity does already work,” throughout the times of the Gentiles this mystery of iniquity is constantly seeking to bubble to the surface, like a boiling broth on your stove, and the bubbles come up from the bottom of the pot and pop on the top of the surface, and the idea is that boiling inside history, human history in the times of the Gentiles is Satan’s plan to pop through to the surface, “the mystery of iniquity,” that when he can totally bring the kingdom of man under his control and he’s frustrated, “For the mystery of iniquity doth now already work; only he who now restrains will restrain until he be taken out of the way.” Who is the restrainer? The Holy Spirit in the church of Jesus Christ. The Church is the salt or the preservative of the culture. You, just your presence in the world system is restraining that boiling pot. Satan wants oh so badly to take over but he can’t, he’s blocked by the presence of the church of Jesus Christ. And of course one day the Church will be raptured, that’s prophesied here, the Church will be raptured and when that happens the lid is taken off the pot and then whoooo, and it boils over into the beast and the antichrist and they attain power.

So there are two restraints in the kingdom of man, the playing off of God’s sovereignty in war and here the Holy Spirit operating through His church. This is why Nebuchadnezzar does not change things in society, even though he’s a Christian, even though he’s a believer. He has influenced the kingdom, but even Nebuchadnezzar cannot totally change the kingdom.