As I have studied through the first six chapters of this book of Daniel, he has become my favorite Bible character. Even as I’m typing these words, I’m marveling that nearly 39 years ago, the Lord moved Joan and me to name our son Daniel! I see the Lord has that little smile. “Ah, now you get it,” He says to me! Our Daniel is and always has been everything any father could ever dream his son would be. Now here on the latter end of my life, the Lord leads me into this relationship with the Daniel of the Bible and I see the circle closes! What a fine man our Daniel is! (You can decide which one you think I’m talking about!).
I know I’ve said this before, but it absolutely floors me to know this man Daniel (in the Bible) who was drug away from home as a young man and inserted into the absolute worst possible culture on the face of the earth. Babylon. The mother of harlots. He was taken from Jerusalem, the City of God, and dropped into Babylon, the very epicenter of evil in this world, the City of the devil. He was enrolled in Babylon U., where he was forced to learn the craft of a warlock, a necromancer, a soothsayer – an occupation for which, back in Israel, he would have been put to death. In Babylon, he was lured by every temptation known to man. Riches, pleasures, power, immorality – they were all rubbed in Daniel’s face all day every day.
And yet, how did he do? “At this, the administrators and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his conduct of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him, because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent. Finally, these men said, ‘We will never find any basis for charges against this man Daniel unless it has something to with the law of his God’” (6:4,5). How did he do? Sterling integrity. “Blameless and harmless, a child of God in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom he shined as a light in this world” (Phil. 2:15).
Our man Daniel teaches us all that we can do it. No matter when or where we live, no matter where we work, who we work for and who we work with. NO matter even what our occupation is. No matter how much temptation is literally rubbed in our face, we can do it. Daniel did and you and I can too.
How encouraging is that?
Now what amazes me is to come to this chapter 7 and once again, sit back and observe this man Daniel. As I’ve noted earlier, here in the “first year of Belshazzar” (v.1), he is about 67 years old. I just turned 66, so basically, he and I are the same age as he writes. Here he gets to see the entire sweep of human history from his day all the way to the Second Coming of Christ and the eternal kingdom! He actually gets to see God sitting on His throne surrounded by “thousands and thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand” (v. 10). He gets to see the Son of Man given “authority, glory and sovereign power” with “all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiping Him” (v.14). He gets to see the beast “slain and its body destroyed and thrown into the blazing fire” (v. 11). He even gets to personally ask angels to explain the vision to him!
Notice how it all affects him: “I, Daniel, was troubled in spirit, and the visions that passed through my mind disturbed me” (v. 15). “I, Daniel, was deeply troubled by my thoughts, and my face turned pale, but I kept the matter to myself” (v. 28). Can anyone else see, according to our modern evangelical theology, that is not supposed to be the script? That is not how the story is supposed to go. Daniel just saw a vision of heaven itself. He got to see how, in spite of this world’s unspeakable evil, yet, in the end, God wins! He’s supposed to break out into almost uncontrollable praise and head back to work with a big smile, right? Why doesn’t this Daniel follow our script?
Could it be because he was far more mature than we are? We have this notion in our heads that, the more we grow, the more we know God, the closer we get to Him, the more we’ll be one of those people who is just always happy, always serene and peaceful. We think we’ll trust God so much that we will simply rise above this world and all its troubles and just enjoy an ethereal, imperturbable relationship. Daniel would teach us to step back and take a second look. Oh, he would be the first to remind us Isaiah said, “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed upon Thee, (26:3). It is true the Lord says to us, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). And yet, maturity would remind us that Jesus Himself was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3). What does knowing God do for us? It makes us like Christ. So if I become more and more like Him, what will be true of me? It means I’ll become “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Kind of like Daniel.
What I’m saying of course totally offends our modern conceptions of Christianity. No doubt, many would accuse me of being negative or even morose. Personally, I don’t care. I’m going to get my theology from the Bible, not from our half-baked, unstudied, immature perceptions of who God is and what we should be. I personally find these observations from Daniel to be wonderfully liberating. This is exactly what I am finding in life. The closer I get to God, while that in itself brings wonderful peace and joy to my soul, yet it gets harder and harder just to be here in this world. The more I know God, the more clearly I see my own sin and sinfulness, the more I see just how broken our world is, the more I see the self-destruction, the cruelty, the corruption. It just gets more and more painful. You’d think I was becoming “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief!”
Daniel teaches me that’s okay
I ask us all, how could that not be true? How could it not be true that the more I know the Lord the more this world’s sin grieves me? How could Daniel see the evil of thousands of years of earth history, see beasts that “crush, and devour, and stamp the remainder with their feet,” and not be grieved by it all, even though he got to see that God wins in the end? Yes, God wins in the end, but in the meantime, the horror of sin is unspeakable. How could anyone not be grieved to see that?
Daniel, the man, and his example
grants to you and me the freedom to actually have a real relationship with God.
He’s been encouraging me ever since chapter 1. He’s still doing it. Lord, help
me to be like Daniel, the man.
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