Daniel Lesson 22
Daniel Testifies God did it All – Daniel 6:18-28
The book of Daniel is a book of wisdom, is a book that is designed to equip us with principles for living in the kingdom of man. The kingdom of man is the structure that sinful men try to erect in society. There are certain things to recall about the kingdom of man. First of all, that it promises men the opposite of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is promising men an eternal destiny in God’s presence forever. The kingdom of man is promising man independence from God; that man can be free, free of God’s laws, free of God’s judgment. So therefore the great motive behind a lot of social reorganization reform is simply to bring in the kingdom of man, bring in something that will keep men from having to face God’s claims upon their life.
The kingdom of man, since it is independent from God is not relying upon grace, and this promise, unlike the promise given to Abraham, will be fulfilled by human works. Much human good is included in the kingdom of man and many fundamentalists have never understood this, and that’s why many fundamentalists are way out in the toulies when it comes to applying the Word of God. Many fundamentalists have the idea that God is interested only in what we’ll call the moral sins, and usually by that they consider a few overt sins that happens to shock the person who happens to be teaching. And because fundamentalism has the view of sin that it has something only to do with a few taboos it misses the whole point. God hates that which is good when it is organized in the kingdom of man. The kingdom of man is that which is evil; associate the kingdom of man and evil but evil can include good. There’s numerous examples of this, where supposedly good things are done to win people to Christ, comprises are made with the kingdom of man, privacy is invaded and all sorts of things go on in order to promote (supposedly) evangelism. It’s not promotion of evangelism at all, what it is doing is promoting human good. Human good is part of evil; human good is that which is part and parcel of the kingdom of man.
The kingdom of man is the answer to getting oriented in the Christian life. This is why we have Christians who are businessmen, reputable, solid pillars of the community and they’ll be concerned about pornography and yet they participate in their business in multiple indebtedness and that is considered theft in Scripture, but that never crosses their mind. We have a lot of good church-going people who have a very weak and limited view of sin and therefore they consign it to the taboos and completely miss the point of the kingdom of man. Daniel is written to insulate us against the tactics that Satan is using to set this thing up. In our day the tactics are increasing; Satan is more and more interested because he is closer and closer to his last trump card in history of bringing this to pass. He’s tried century after century.
The birth of the kingdom of man in all of its attempts down through history from Nimrod through Egypt, through Assyria, through finally New Testament, the Medo-Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the various empires of the west, there’s always been destruction of freedom. This is always how the kingdom of man starts. You can always find it because you will always have someone destroy freedom. It will be destruction by economic bondage, by selling people a program that will guarantee that they will be forever in debt, and the Bible says if you’re in debt to someone the person to whom you are in debt is your master and you are their slave. So indebtedness is the way the kingdom of man proceeds. Conquest by military power is another way the kingdom of man proceeds.
So everywhere that we find the rise of the kingdom of man’s attempt, communism, the Third Reich and various other organizations and attempts, we will always see the destruction of freedom. As the kingdom of man takes greater and greater form in our country you see the destruction of freedom. We have the invasion of privacy of the home when school children are asked at school, does your father and mother get along together, etc. the so-called confidential questionnaire. This represents a violation of the family. So all around us we see the violation of the spheres of authority that God set up and everywhere we do we see the rise of the kingdom of man.
The kingdom of man has further things that we want to study and understand. One is that the kingdom of man has a program of ethics. We said the kingdom of man is not all alcoholics and sex maniacs or anything else; Satan isn’t primarily interested in that. There’s only one objective that Satan’s interested in and that’s separation of man from God. And if he can do it by morals he’d much rather do it by morals and do you know why? Because most people never see it happening. See if you do it by some obvious overt system, people are going to be tipped off as to what you’re doing, but if you proceed slowly and put on the moral façade that we’re all for good, we’re all for peace, we’re all for this, we’re all for that, then you can sucker most people into going along with the program. And obviously this is what Satan does, so 95% of the program in the kingdom of man is his ethics, and the ethics are what man thinks is good, not what God thinks.
What is the difference between the ethics of Oliver Cromwell and Madelyn O’Hare? And the difference is that Oliver Cromwell makes his ethics from God as the source and Madelyn O’Hare makes her ethics from Madelyn O’Hare. And this is the way it is because one is using an infinite source for ethics and the other is using a finite source for ethics. It’s always that way, always will be that way, and ethics is a question that divides. Man who is finite legislates what ought and ought not to be for the universe. The kingdom of man has a system of conquest or expansion and we can always spot the kingdom of man in history in such movements as communism, socialism and so on, because the kingdom of man always wants to glorify the state. The attraction must always be to the state, to what man has made, to man’s programs, to man’s legislation. So the state receives the glorification.
And finally, the leadership of the kingdom of man from Nimrod until the present moment is always that the leaders are usually good men, they are usually sincere people, (sincerely wrong), but they are people who have amazing amounts of moral good and works, but they are the most satanic people that you’ll ever run across. Satan is a promoter of good; he is not primarily a promoter of the taboos. He is a promoter of getting men to operate independently of grace and the best way of getting men to operate independently of grace is to go the good route because then men will never wake up to the fact that they need grace. So this is the structure overall of the kingdom of man.
Now the kingdom of man took on a new form in 603 BC, and the book of Daniel is about this and since the 6th chapter of the book of Daniel deals with the kingdom of man, and it’s the last chapter in Daniel’s career, because the next chapter is going to start in on prophecy, this is the last chapter in this book on Daniel’s career so we want to use this as an opportunity to distinguish what happens through the kingdom of man in 603 BC. Certain things happened that forever changed the structure of the world; this was a profound moment. If you have had occasion to study the world’s religions notice something about that date. When did Confucius have his ministry? When did Buddha have his ministry? When were the Hindu reforms accomplished? When did the pre-Socratic philosophers arrive in Greece? When did Zoroaster basically have his ministry in Persia? It was all in the 6th century, exactly the time that the kingdom of man took on this new form. The repercussions were felt around the world. What happened? First of all, we know that in 603 BC political sovereignty was transferred from the hands of Israel into the hands of the Gentiles and that was the dream of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2. From this point forward the name of the game among the international community of nations will be imperialism. That is the modus vivendi of the international community and it is prophesied in the book of Daniel. It will be one nation trying to conquer other nations. Though men like Kant have envisioned a great democratic world government, such will never occur; it will always be by imperialism.
This means that we have a sequence of four kingdoms. We have the Neo-Babylonian kingdom under Nebuchadnezzar, this was the first one. Then we have the Medo-Persian, then the Grecian Empire, the Roman Empire, those are the four primary kingdoms and Daniel foresaw in his vision that the Roman kingdom would leave its mark and imprint on history, would deteriorate but the quality of metals of the fourth kingdom would change. Remember each one of these kingdoms had a metal; there was gold for the Neo-Babylonian Empire; it was silver for the Medo-Persian; it was bronze for the Grecian Empire, and it was iron for the Romans. Now it just turns out that all four of those metals, in ingot form, were used in world trade, shipments between nations to balance the payments, to pay for goods sold on the world market, were paid for by these precious metals in the form of ingots. In fact, they’ve found boats that have been sunk in the Mediterranean with even iron ingots aboard. So we know that these metals have something to do with trade.
We also know from Daniel’s visions that each of these metals increases in strength until Daniel foresees the last part of the fourth kingdom as a kingdom which crushes the others, that is ferocious, that is fierce. And so the strength of the metal is increasing but the value of the metal is decreasing. Now put the two together and what do you have prophesied about the course of western civilization. You have prophesied something about the military characteristics and something about the economic characteristics. Economically the nations will decline in value, the currency will decline in value which is tantamount to inflation; inflation is part and parcel of the kingdom of man because obviously the kingdom of God grounded on theft must eventually steal from the currency and so we have a continued form of inflation.
Then in the military you have increasing power and with increasing power to maintain the unity of the kingdom of man; remember, you have a small kingdom here, the Neo-Babylonian kingdom; the Medo-Persian kingdom was larger, at the time that Cyrus attained the unity of the Medo-Persian Empire the world had never seen an empire this large. Cyrus reigned from the Indus River in the east all the way to Thrace in the west, it was a tremendous empire, and obviously to control that empire he needed vast, vast hordes of soldiers, and to pay for these soldiers the Medo-Persian Empire had the largest military machine the world had even seen up to that point.
Then we have the rise of the kingdom of Greece under Alexander. You have Philip of Macedon start, develop a fine system of discipline and then you have Alexander who in his 20’s conquered the world. He was a brilliant man, one of the most brilliant ever to live. And he conquered the world before he was 30; he had another system of taking Greek wherever he went, and he forced the peoples that he conquered to learn the Greek language. Alexander didn’t know what a favor he was doing for the coming church of Jesus Christ by unifying all the world’s languages. But Alexander under the sovereignty of God Hellenized the ancient world. Then we have the rise of Rome and the Roman Empire extended north up into Europe and Britain, and so the Roman Empire was even larger than that of Alexander.
Now each one of these empires, as they became larger, had to employ a more expensive military to maintain the unity. And the more expensive the military machine employed to maintain the unity the more effect it had on the currency of the kingdom. Rome was not destroyed by the Christians, as so many Christians say, as Gibbon tried to assert and so on. Rome was destroyed because Rome could no longer seize and steal property to finance itself with its deficit financing. So it’s not surprising in Daniel’s vision the more powerful military and the decreasing value of the currency are linked together under metallurgy. So you have a metallic imagery of these dreams.
What does that tell us? It tells us that something happened when the sovereignty was transferred into the hands of the Gentiles in 603 BC. Now what can we say? The first thing we can say is that from that point forward the world would be dominated always by one nation or its cultural block. So in history we have these four dominions and the Roman Empire gradually phased over through the European powers, the European powers clustering together, that includes the USA, as one block that comes out of the Roman Empire, has basically dominated the world. Russia has not dominated the world in a literal way because after all, who financed Trotsky? Trotsky was financed out of Wall Street. Trotsky was given all the gold he needed in 1916-1917 to go and form the communist state; the gold was American and the Canadians intercepted his boat off Newfoundland; the United States government intervened and told the Canadians you let Trotsky go right on ahead. Trotsky and Lenin went over and Lenin came through in the famous sealed train across the state of Germany, with the Emperor’s full knowledge and his protection, and so basically the Russian Revolution is a product of the west, it is not a product of the Russians; it was financed in the west, the arms came from the west, during World War II the Russians survived because of our lend-lease program, now the Russians are surviving collectivization of the agricultural program because we’re selling them grain at credit; we have always bailed out Russia at every point. Her technology comes from IBM, her truck factories are made from Detroit. So Russia is basically not an independent entity as far as the Scripture is concerned because her cultural and economic and military roots are in the west, not in the east.
So the picture of Daniel 2 still holds true. The European powers financially and in all other ways are calling the shots. So Daniel 2 as far as the imagery goes is a valid picture of history and since 603 BC the theme of all history will be imperialisms. That is the way to world peace given the situation; not to ultimate peace but to temporary peace. When Christianity has flourished in the world it has always been when the world has been under the throes of a vast imperial empire. Christianity had its heyday under the Pax Romana, when the Roman Empire controlled the world, then the Christian missionaries were able to use one language, a vast system of transportation and able to teach the Word and carry the Word of God to various peoples all over the place. The next time Christianity had its heyday in missions was the heyday of the British Empire. When the British colonized India, when they colonized Africa, and when they colonized the North American continent the missionaries followed and Christianity had a great outreach. So whenever you have had a strong form of imperialism, ironically it may seem to some, Christianity has always flourished. Why? Because of the prophecy of Daniel 2.
We also know certain other things about world history from the kingdom of man. What else happened in 603 BC? In 603 with the political sovereignty turned over to the hands of the Gentiles Israel no longer existed as a nation. She would exist temporarily as a small state but always at the mercy of the Gentiles, the Maccabean period, the Bar Kochba period were times when Israel had some freedom; today she has some freedom but even the modern state of Israel is due to Gentile documents such as the United Nations declaration, and the Balfour Declaration. So we have minus Israel on the world scene which creates a new issue for the Gentiles. Now the Gentiles can come to the Word of God, which in Daniel’s day would be the Old Testament, and they can say yes, we trust in the Word of God without having to bow their political knees to the king in Jerusalem; there is no king in Jerusalem after 603 BC, or after the beginning of the 6th century.
So the Word of God is free to go forth into the world without a false issue. Before the 6th century, for a king, say Assyria or some other country, to trust in Christ under the Old Testament economy he would have to be swallowing his national pride. He’d have to say I’m giving up the gods of my nation in order to adopt the God of the nation of Israel. So there would be a nationalistic factor; that factor dissolved in 603 BC because there was no longer a nation. A Jew in Persia was a Persian; a Jew in Greece was a citizen of the Greek city-states. A Jew in Rome was a citizen of Rome. Paul was a citizen of Rome and so the Romans could have accepted the Word of God from their own citizens; something new then happened after 603 BC. The kingdom of man had the Word of God disseminated by dispersed Jews throughout their areas and could trust in the Word of God directly. Then there were some other changes that came in but these are the two major ones that occurred in 603 BC.
Daniel is representative of a Jew separated from his land who has no national home any longer, and who was isolated inside the kingdom of man; in this case the form is the Babylonian kingdom. You recall what happened to Daniel; he was head, one of the three men that ruled the Medo-Persian Empire, and he did so well, he excelled so well that we have people with mental attitude jealousy, hostility, bitterness, toward someone who was better than they are, and therefore they can’t stand someone to excel, so they want to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator; the spirit of socialism, everybody ought to be a moron, everybody ought to be lazy. Then everybody will be on welfare, who’s going to pay for it; we don’t know, we’ll find it some place. As someone once said the program is that Robin Hood steals from the rich and don’t pay the poor; finally Robin Hood steals from both rich and poor alike to pay Robin Hood. That’s ultimately what happens in these kinds of programs because they’re grounded on the least common denominator approach. That was what got Daniel into the lion’s den here.
Daniel was a brilliant person; he was a person that excelled, he was head and shoulders above the other people of his time and he wasn’t embarrassed to be better than someone else. We Americans have a problem about this, we always think that equality and political rights somehow means that you have to be equal in all ability. Nonsense; this has invaded the education system; the kids has certain kids I the class and she spends 90% of her time with the two morons and the 28 kids that are trying to do something are penalized for being smart. This is the way it always is and probably will be until Christ returns. Daniel found no difference in his day.
So in Daniel 6:18 we find him in the den. Remember King Darius tried to get him out but the particular form of the Medo-Persian Empire, the ethics of the Medo-Persians were that you elevated a human law and made it into a divine decree that was immutable. The law of the Medes and the Persians is an expression used in literature until this day. When you use the expression, that isn’t the law of the Medes and the Persians you mean you can change your mind. So the law of the Medes and the Persians means that once made, that law must forever stand. Darius had made the law, here the most powerful man on earth was trapped by his own system. He worked until nightfall to try to work out some way to get Daniel out of the den and nothing happened.
You can see from Daniel 6:17, “And a stone was brought, and laid upon the mouth of the den; and the king sealed it with his own signet,” that was to make sure that no one went into this den, it was to seal it out of respect for the law of the Medes and the Persians, “and with the signet of his lords, that the purpose might not be changed,” there’s the law of the Medes and the Persians, “that the purpose might not be changed, concerning Daniel.
Now in Daniel 6:18 this is what happened that night. It happened at sundown, Daniel was thrown into the den of lions, and “Then the king went to his palace, and passed the night fasting: neither were instruments of music brought before him: and his sleep went from him.” Now verse 18 is the most beautiful illustration of two men, two different situations, one with the Word, one without the Word. Over here you have Darius; here you have Daniel. Darius is in a palace, Darius in his environment has wealth, power, Darius has all the means for human enjoyment. Darius has everything that most people could want. Daniel is in a dirty den, a den of lions, full of manure, full of dead bodies that have been thrown down there, the flies are eating the skin off the people that had been thrown down there before, I just want you to get the picture of it, and it’s not just the sweet little den that you see in your Sunday School material. Sunday School artists never did read the Word too carefully and when they come to these scenes they don’t present them in all their gore. Now the Holy Spirit, when He writes Scripture He lets it all hang out so you’ll get the point.
This den was a cesspool is what it was; you had decaying human flesh in this place; it was the execution chamber and that is where Daniel spent his evening. Now look at the two men; one is using the faith technique relaxed, sacked out, sleeping fine. And the other one is surrounded with wealth, power, fame, and he can’t sleep. One man has stability in the den, this is really the den of happiness, and the other is a palace of misery. So environment does not determine your happiness. Here’s a beautiful illustration of it. Daniel is relaxed. Do you know why Daniel is really relaxed here with the lions? It’s not just because God has stopped the mouths of the lions; the other reason is that he is now free from the human lions, the people with their snide remarks, the people with all their little political deals, working to remove him from office; the people with their lying and all the gossip that’s been going on about Daniel. Daniel actually is safer with the lions than he is with people and their sin nature. See, lions don’t have a sin nature; people do. And for that reason Daniel enjoys the company of lions here much more than he enjoys the company of people.
Darius is in the palace, Daniel is in the den. Daniel has a divine viewpoint framework that he has built in his soul over many, many years. Remember, do you know how old this man is, he’s in his mid-80’s, about 87 when he was down there, and Daniel as an 87 year old man is a magnificent illustration of a believer who doesn’t give up in the end stages of his life. Daniel doesn’t get down there like some older people would and say oh, my life has come to an end, this is the last chapter. Nonsense! This is the best chapter, Daniel is not going to give up; Daniel is going to go on and Daniel is going to survive the younger people that put him there. Daniel is a man of tremendous stability and he’s a model for you. If you have problems, you think of Daniel in the lion’s den. God hasn’t changed since this book was written; God is still able to close the mouths of lions.
So Daniel is in the den, and it says the king went to his palace. And the king “passed the night fasting,” and this doesn’t mean he’s fasting because he’s praying; he’s fasting because he’s worrying. Fasting means not in the religious sense, it just means that he goes without his evening meal. There are two things mentioned in verse 18 that shows you how shook up Darius was; he was a monarch that was used to wealth, power and good times, and there are two things that he gives up, the King James says “instruments of music,” there’s a dubious word here but most commentators believe… it’s a feminine plural and it probably is concubines, and Darius was the kind of wine, women and song, and it was just part of the palace routine that you had a good party and you picked out the prettiest girls and took them to bed. That was just the way it was. Now Darius doesn’t have his party and he doesn’t have his pretty girl. It’s really funny what the King James does with “instruments of music.” They are so euphemistic it gets ridiculous; in fact it gets down right humorous. If they just put the original word the way it was it wouldn’t be half as humorous as it is; now people say “instruments of music,” how did he play music?
So he’s rejected his food, he’s rejected the wine, he’s rejected the good times, he’s rejected all the party girls, no girls, no food, nothing And this is how shook up he is, he can’t think of but one thing, I have been trapped, I have been trapped, I have been trapped, the one man that can administer my kingdom, with all the 120 satraps, the one man who’s the brilliant organizer of my political machine, what have I done to him, he’s in the den of lions. And Darius right now hates himself, he realizes that Darius is basically a subjectivist; he reacted emotionally when the people came to him and he allowed himself to be taken for a ride and allowed himself to ruin his administration because you remember, for 30 days these people tied up the administration of the Medo-Persian Empire; no one could do anything without personally going to Darius. All the brilliant systems of communication broke down in the empire; everyone had to funnel everything through Darius. So this most wonderful administration came to a halt for thirty days. This is what jealousy and maligning can do to any organization, business, political, or religious.
So the king is fasting, there were no instruments of music or concubines brought before him, “and his sleep went from him.” So he got nothing done that evening. Daniel on the other hand, we don’t have it explicitly stated but he’s apparently relaxed, he’s trusting the Lord, he’s learned Philippians 4:11, “I have learned in whatsoever state I am in this to be content.” That’s one of the great promises of Scripture. You ought to know that one. Now that doesn’t mean that you have to passively accept all the situations; that doesn’t mean you have to just sit there and do nothing about it. You can do something about it, but it’s the mental attitude that you have in the situation. There is no situation that you will ever face as a believer for which God has not made total provision; 1 Corinthians 10:13 guarantees to you that God will never allow you to be in an overwhelming situation. God has always made provision ahead of time for you. Do you know why? Because God loves you and God is sovereign, and God has to screen every test before you get it. You may have gotten a trial when you got up but last night that was already screened by God. And last night God knew this morning you would face a situation and you would think that you would be overwhelmed and God said no, I have made ample provision; there’s X Y Z down there, it’s time they had a trial, I want to see if they’ve learned any of the Word. Oh, they haven’t? Fine, give it to them five more times and see if after five times they’ve learned to accept My promises. Haven’t learned it yet, fine, let’s give it more. And that’s the way God taught Israel, so He’s going to teach us the same way, God hasn’t changed His basic character. If we don’t learn to trust Him at His Word He’ll just keeping giving the same pressure, in different form, but He’ll keep it, and you can look back in your life and see this pattern. Often times you can see exactly the same problem come up again and again. It comes up with different people and different situations but ultimately it’s the same thing. Now why do you suppose that thing seems to haunt you? There’s somebody watching you and it’s not Big Brother, it’s your heavenly Father and He is not only watching you but He loves if you, if you have trusted in Christ, so much that He wants to get that human viewpoint out of your soul and He’s going to keep after you and after and after you and work you over until you learn to become a grace oriented individual; until you learn to put aside all the gimmicks and all the human good, all the façade and just relax in what He’s told you to do in the Word.
Now Darius, we can’t tell whether he’s a believer or not, he doesn’t show too much sign, though he is a great friend of Daniel, he has been exposed to the Word and we have evidence in verse 18 that God is working him over.
In Daniel 6:19, the morning finally comes; it was probably the longest night that Darius ever had. “Then the king arose very early in the morning, and went in haste unto the den of lions.” Now it’s interesting that all that night, as he lay awake, Darius was thinking, thinking, thinking, is there some gimmick, some device, some thing that I can use to solve this problem. Now he himself sort of anticipated there wouldn’t be any answer that night by verse 16, remember when his last words were spoken to Daniel as they lowered this old 87 year old man down into this human cesspool? As they let him slide down Darius called down after him, and he said this: “Thy God, whom you serve continually, may He deliver you.” It was a wish; Darius didn’t have the faith to believe that God would take care of him. So he just says “may He deliver you.”
Now Darius was a man who had to have, besides the promises, a gimmick. See, this is the way Darius worked. He knew a little bit of the Word, he couldn’t help but know some of it from Daniel, but he had a lot of gimmicks. Now the usual gimmicks, the wine, women and song, they didn’t work, obviously, in verse 17. So in verse 19 he’d come to the end of that long night and he couldn’t find one gimmick. Now there’s a lesson there: God will put you in a situation, it may not be a big one, maybe just a little picky one, but there will always be designed with one point in mind—to destroy the gimmicks. These tests, that’s why they’re frustrating. Usually you’re frustrated because you’ve met something that you can’t cope with like you’re usually used to; that’s what’s frustrating about it. The things that worked before aren’t working in this situation. So it’s frustrating to you. Now why is that frustration there? It’s simple, to rid you of the gimmick, to discredit the gimmick. Now we have a lot of good gimmicks, we have them all around us. It goes from the alcohol, drug, sex, gambling route, travel, some people when they get frustrated they just go traveling, they have a lot of money and they go to Europe and other places and they have to go, go, go, go all the time rather than solve their problems. That’s a gimmick. Now instead of walking around saying [can’t understand words] what we ought to be talking about is let’s make some corrections. If we have a family problem let’s solve it; if we have a business problem let’s solve it, rather than going around talking about it.
So Darius is the gimmick man and he is getting his gimmicks stripped off. Now verse 20, “And when he came to the den,” ant this shows you what a pathetic state this man was in; keep in mind the ironic picture, the most powerful man in the ancient world, he ruled from the Indus River west to Thrace or modern Greece, from the north in the Caucuses all the way south to the Egyptian border. That’s the extent of the domain; the ancient world had never seen anything like this. Here he is, power incarnate, wealth incarnate, and he tiptoes up to this cesspool and looks down at an 87 year old man and he calls; in the King James it says “he cried with a lamentable voice unto Daniel,” now the lamentable voice means that it was a very flimsy voice, it was a very frightened voice, he had no trust in God’s Word and so therefore because he had no trust he acted this way.
“…and the king spoke and said to Daniel, O Daniel, servant of the living God, is thy God,” you see his this phrase, see he’s still upset, like in verse 16 he said “may your God take care of you,” and now he asks again, is your God “whom thou servest continually, able to deliver thee from the lions?” The ability of God, and it goes back to the essence of God and let’s look at this. Every person ought to know the attributes of God; God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, God is omniscient, omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, and eternal. That’s the character of the Biblical God and it’s that character that Daniel trusted in.
Turn to Hebrews 11, this tells you what was going on in Daniel’s soul. While Darius was falling apart in the palace, Daniel was relaxed, comfortable, facing the trials of life with stability and why? Because Hebrews 11:33 says, “Who, through faith, subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions.” Now I want you to look at verse 33 and how that’s organized in the grammar. What is the subject of that? “Who,” it’s a clause, “Who” and the “who” here would be Daniel, “Who by means of faith,” that’s the use of the faith technique, Daniel knew the promises of God, he knew that his promotion was in the hands of God, Daniel had the same attitude to the situation that the men did in Daniel 3, remember the three boys, we don’t know whether God is really going to physically deliver us or not but our eternal destiny is locked down. We’re assured of that so if God wants to glorify us by treating us as martyrs and causing us to die, then we’ll die and we’ll glorify God in death; or if God chooses to deliver us in life then we’ll glorify God by our life, but we’re going to glorify God either way, it doesn’t make any difference. If it’s God’s will for me to die in this situation I’m happy about that because I’ve learned in whatsoever state therewith I am to be content. If it’s God’s will that I be delivered I’m happy about that too because it’s God’s will that I be delivered. Now that’s an expression of the faith technique.
So Daniel, by means of faith, now look, the verb, he “stopped the mouth of the lions.” Now Daniel didn’t go up there and stick his hand in the mouth of the lions, yet this verb seems to indicate that. Now why is this verb structured this way? Why doesn’t the verse read “Daniel believed and God stopped the mouths of the lions.” That’s what it means but why isn’t it written that way? Why doesn’t the author of this text just come right out and tell us, Daniel believed and then God stopped the mouth of the lions. Why does he skip that and say “Daniel stopped the mouth of the lions?” Do you know why? This verse is structured so we know something about Daniel. If Daniel had not trusted God in that den, had he not at that point trusted the Lord he would have died; that’s what that verse is saying. In other words, it was Daniel’s faith that changed history. Had Daniel not personally appropriated God’s promise in the den, the lions would have eaten him. We’ll see that in the text, the lions are not full, they’re very hungry and there’s something that comes over these lions that apparently shorts out their system and they stand there apparently almost paralyzed and dumbfounded while this big gob of human meat is right in front of them. Now why do the lions do this? God’s doing it, yes, but why is God doing it? Because Daniel trusts him. Daniel is a grace oriented believer, so in Hebrews 11:33, where we have Daniel as the subject of the verb, the author is saying yeah, Daniel stopped them, yeah, I know God did it, but it was Daniel’s faith. Had Daniel not believed the mouth of the lions would not have been stopped.
Let’s turn back and finish the section in Daniel 6, the king comes and he peers over the edge of this cesspool and he looks down into it. And then up from the bottom, maybe not in a real strong voice because the man is 87 years old, the salute. Daniel 6:21, “Then said Daniel unto the king, O king, live forever.” Now usually in this kind of a situation, if somebody yells hey, you okay, you say yeah, I’m doing fine. But Daniel comes back and says “O king, live forever.” And that shows you something; he always respected bona fide authority. Even though this man, if he’s a believer he’s a mouse, and if he’s an unbeliever he’s all shook up, either way he’s not a very good specimen of a stable person. It would have been very easy for Daniel to have scorn in his heart, why you big slob, yeah, I’m all right, why don’t you hop in here with me, see. I would have been tempted to do that, come on big mouth, get down here, we’ll have some fellowship, ha-ha. Now Daniel didn’t do that, he respected his authority, and said “O king, live forever.
Daniel 6:22, and notice the testimony, it starts off recognizing the authority of an unbeliever or a person in legitimate authority, the fourth divine institution of government, and then he goes on and immediately he does not say I’m okay, he says, “My God,” immediately grace oriented, he gives credit to the Lord publicly in front of this person, “My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths, that they have not hurt me: forasmuch as before him innocency was found in me; and also before thee, O king, have I done no hurt.” Now verse 22 is a picture of diplomacy. Look at what Daniel does. Daniel relaxes, he respects bona fide authority, he’s firm in his conviction and he does not compromise and yet he’s gracious. You see what he does? “My God,” that’s testimony to God’s grace. “My God” has defended me, and then the second part of verse 22 is a reaffirmation of his stand, he still insists that Darius is wrong; he still insists that the accusations are wrong. The Medo-Persian court ruling is wrong, the Medo-Persian law is wrong, Daniel is not compromising but he’s being diplomatic in the way he says this. He says I am innocent before God, and I’m innocent before you. So he holds his line.
And then in Daniel 6:23 we find the king reacting the other way, and this is typical of an unstable person; he’s depressed in verse 19-20, and now he’s high in verse 23, that’s the yo-yo concept, up down, up down, up down, and that’s the way his life looked, always a victim of circumstances. Now isn’t this a lovely way to go through life, bad day, you’re bad; some good thing happens, y you’re high; some bad thing happens you’re low. You’re a slave; you’re a victim of your circumstances. Instead of subduing the earth like you’re supposed to as a man made in God’s image you’re a little wimp responding to circumstances. Up and down, up and down, up and down, that’s exactly what’s going on here with Darius, up and down. This exceeding gladness isn’t just an innocent gladness; he’s really high, probably doing a jig up at the top of the cesspool.
“Then was the king exceeding glad for him, and commanded that they should take Daniel up out of the den. So Daniel was taken up out of the den, and no manner of hurt was found upon him,” and notice what the Holy Spirit adds just to make the point clear, “because he believed in his God.” That’s why Hebrews 11:33 is written, so we get the point, and the implication is if he had not believed his God, if he had not appropriated the promises, the lions would have eaten him. He would have gone to be face to face with the Lord, he’d have gone to Abraham’s bosom, he’d still be saved but he’d die out of fellowship, and this says no he was protected because in that trial, in that pressure, he trusted the promises.
Daniel 6:24, “And the king commanded, and they brought those men which had accused Daniel, and they cast them into the den of lions, them, their children, and their wives; and the lions had the mastery of them, and brake all their bones in pieces or ever they came at the bottom of the den.” Now that verse is put in there for several reasons and there’s some vital lessons out of this. Number one, of course, it shows you the lions were not satiated, they were hungry. It was a miracle. Remember how the Jews look… the Jew is a skeptic at heart, and that’s why they’re the greatest people for God to have picked to reveal His Word to because if He could convince the Jew He could convince anybody else, and the Jew was always interested in the empirical data. Why? Don’t believe it, show me! Sign on the dotted line.
And what is the point here? Remember, Jews wrote this book and they were interested. I can imagine some Jewish rabbi looking at this, yeah, I know what happened, the lions were full, that’s how we can explain it. So the Holy Spirit says no, the lions were not full because right after that we saw these people crunch, crunch, crunch; you could hear them cracking the bones; lion jaws are very powerful, they just eat bones and all. And somebody drops down there, apparently it’s an inclined place so they just don’t fall down to the bottom of the pit, it’s slanted, and as these people kind of roll down, swoosh, and then crunch; this is an awful picture, it’s horrid. Get the picture; this is what the Holy Spirit wants. It’s a horrible picture but to demonstrate something to us today, that there was a genuine miracle that happened.
God’s angel was in there and he did something to quell the hunger of these lions, but also to show us something else and this gets to the final lesson of this passage. Daniel is subordinate to divine institution number four, which is the state and government. It was instituted after the flood. Daniel has to stand by and watch Darius make an unjust law. The Hebrew law would not have tolerated this; there’s no reason why the wives and the children should suffer for the sins of their husbands. In the Jewish law it was always you stand for the sin that you’ve committed, with a few other exceptions and that gets into learned behavior patterns. But here we have the absolute vengeance and annihilation of these people. And Daniel would not himself ever have tolerated what you see in verse 24. Daniel was a gracious man, he was grace oriented, he would have pressed for conviction of lying but he would never have done this.
And Daniel has another trial. The trials of Daniel 6 do not stop when he gets out of the den; Daniel’s greatest trial comes right here; he has to stand there and watch people slaughtered in front of his face; that’s his greatest trial. Do you know why it’s his greatest trial? Because it would be very easy for him to do one of two things; yeah, get them, tear them. He didn’t do that. Or he could have tried to intervene and stop it and he didn’t do that either. Daniel had to stand by as the law was decreed from the Emperor and he had to put up with it. And that gets us back to a point that we’ve seen again and again in this book; how does the believer apply the Word of God inside the kingdom of man? What do we do when we see things like these unjust laws being applied? All we can gather are some principles from Daniel, and the principles start with this: when the issue is directly a matter of higher loyalty to God in worship, we have no other choice but to defy the authorities. When laws are made that would interfere with (1) prayer, (2) teaching of the Word, the meeting together of the local church, baptism and communion. These would be things we do in the Church Age analogous to what the Jew did by his Sabbath keeping, by his synagogue worship, by the reading of the Torah and so on. They would never compromise that, regardless of how many people be slaughtered, they would not compromise that.
Now in the other areas we get into the gray and that is the design of society, and here the principle we seem to find over and over in Scripture for the believer is that you try to change it toward the Word out to the limits of your authority. As one voting citizen you’ve got some authority but you don’t have much. You have an authority to vote one way or the other; all right, that’s where you can do something. You can exercise your authority there to change and influence, but you are not authorized to begin a revolution. Daniel did not start revolution; Daniel did what he could and that was all. And at this point he was over-ruled. Verse 24, that last trial of Daniel, he has to stand there and watch a superior order for mass extermination of women, children, babies as well as his accused, and take it, because he has been over-ruled.
Then in Daniel 6:25 and following is Darius’ tract, and this closing observation just shows one more thing about Darius. “Then king Darius wrote unto all people, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth; Peace be multiplied unto you. [26] I make a decree, That in every dominion of my kingdom men tremble and fear before the God of Daniel: for he is the living God, and steadfast for ever, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed, and his dominion shall be even unto the end. [27] He delivereth and rescueth, and he worketh signs and wonders, in heaven and in earth, who hath delivered Daniel from the power of the lions.” Now verses 25-27 show you the further evidence of Darius’ subjectivity.
Darius is a person who, as many naïve believers when they first become Christians, think you can decree conversion. You can’t, the church has tried it in times and places and failed miserably because this represents a violation of the first divine institution. At no time in teaching the Word of God are we to violate people’s individual responsibility. A person can come in here it’s their right to come in here and hear the Word of God, and it’s their right to sit there and reject all they want to. That’s their privilege, and nobody is to arm twist, buttonhole or coerce. This is why we don’t have invitations in this congregation. It’s a form of interference in your privacy. You have the greatest privacy right where you are, in a large assembly, and you can sit there with a poker face. You are free to believe or disbelieve; my job is to communicate the information, and my job isn’t make a decree that everybody accept Christ, and that’s what he’s doing here. I make a decree that everybody accept Jesus Christ as Savior; you will all be baptized at 7:32 tomorrow morning. That’s Darius, subjectivism. Before he was making decrees about Daniel not praying; now he’s making decrees about everybody ought to pray. And in both cases Darius is wrong; it is a violation of volition, a violation of freedom.
Remember what we said in the introduction; the kingdom of man glorifies the state and will always expand its power so as to destroy human freedom, and here again, for a good cause but bad means, it violates freedom. So Daniel 6:28, “So this Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius, and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian.” We think both of those men are the same as I indicated at the first part of the chapter. Daniel prospered and he was promoted. Do you know how he was promoted? He used the faith technique, he didn’t hustle, he didn’t push, he didn’t have dossiers prepared on what a great man he was, he didn’t flaunt his authority, he didn’t use 108 different gimmicks that believers are fond of using. Daniel just encountered one trial and out of that trial the king heard the word, and the entire kingdom, though it was sloppy, at least everybody in the Medo-Persian Empire had read this decree, and now everybody had heart about this other deity. Now God-consciousness had an opportunity on the part of the citizens of this vase empire, from the Indus on the east to Thrace to the west, to hear about this new God, the God of Daniel and the God of the Jewish Diaspora.
So the gospel did go out. Did it go out because Daniel had a program? Knock on five doors and get ten points; bring somebody to church and get a kite, bring them on time and you get a string. No, Daniel used one thing: trust in God’s word, that’s all that was needed, God took care of the rest.