Daniel: God's Statesman

Lesson Transcript

Morning, indeed. Good morning, and I invite you to turn to the book of Daniel. We've been following a series, Men of God Who Molded the Kingdom. We started with Abraham, the man who was first promised a kingdom, that there would be a nation from his people. And then we looked at but he only saw one child and two grandchildren. That's how much of the kingdom he saw. All right. But he believed God. He believed things he didn't see. He believed what God said.

As an example of the fact that God only needs one man, I think of a lot of people in history that made a difference, and it was just one person. Somebody said to D.L. Moody one time, "The world has yet to see what God can accomplish through one man who loves nothing more than God and hates nothing more than the devil." And Moody took that challenge and did what he did. And there have been many other people that aspired to that kind of love and that kind of hatred for the right things.

So anyway, we had Abraham, and then we had Moses who actually began to build this nation. And then we had David who was the ideal king of this nation. And now we want to look at Daniel who was God's statesman. That's going to be the title of the message, God's statesman when the kingdom was in exile. So that's what we want to look at this morning. A statesman is someone who's actively involved in conducting the business of government or shaping its policies.

And that's exactly what Daniel was doing in Babylon, only it was the government of God that he was conducting in Babylon. Unknown to the Babylonians, they soon began to realize that there was another government here in operation that was greater than theirs, and it was something that they could not control. And Daniel had a lot to do with what was happening there. So he was truly a statesman operating or conducting a government in Babylon. And that's just a tremendous blessing.

Now, there are some differences, of course, between what he was doing and what we do with the two-kingdom concept, and we don't have time to talk about that. But we have some tremendous insights as to what God's statesman does, what we do. We're sort of a kingdom, not in exile necessarily, but not the kingdom that most people think about. It's sort of a kingdom that's secret in most people's minds. So a little bit of historical background. The builder of Babylon was Nebuchadnezzar.

Now, his father had overthrown the Assyrians a few years earlier, but Nebuchadnezzar, his son, was the builder of the nation of Babylon. And basically, Babylon rose and fell with him. It only lasted for 70 years, and he was the ruler of that Babylonian kingdom for 45 of those years. And when he died, the whole thing began to fall apart, and we could talk about what happened. There was a series of assassinations.

And finally, his father, Nabonidus, became the king, and he somehow fell out with the heathen pagan clergy, and he was exiled, and his son Belshazzar was left. And you know what happened to Belshazzar. So now we have Daniel who was carried away captive when Nebuchadnezzar basically won the historic battle of Carchemish against Egypt and basically conquered Egypt. Then he swung down into Palestine and carried away the first captives from Judah in 605 BC. All right.

Of course, Babylon took credit for this, but we see immediately in verse 2 that that's not what was happening. Look at verse 2. "And the Lord gave Jehocam, king of Judah, into his hand with part of the vessels of the house of God, which he carried into the land of Shinar, to the house of his God." So this was not Babylonians to Babylon's credit that they conquered Israel. It was the Lord allowing it to happen. All right. And in fact, what was happening was a fulfillment of what God had told Israel.

He said, "If you obey me, I will bless you," and he describes all the blessings. And then in Leviticus 26:33, he makes it very clear that if they don't obey him, what happened here is exactly what would happen. So this is a fulfillment. Now, if you had looked at the Babylonian media, they would have been celebrating their pagan gods for this tremendous victory.

But they were soon to learn through Daniel and other events that took place in Babylon that God was alive and a force to be reckoned with and had not been conquered. So we have this statesman in Babylon, statesman of God's kingdom. And I'll put my outline on the board. I don't want you to be intimidated by this outline. I want to move through it very fast, but it looks like a rather formidable outline for one message. We're going to call this a statesman's. And I'll just put the words here.

You can put that in front of each of these, the statesman's culture. One of the most important things on my desk is my whiteout. I make a lot of mistakes when I write because my mind is going faster than I'm writing. Okay. And that's chapter one. Okay. Number two, we're going to look at a statesman's worldview. And that's chapter two. And number three, we're going to look at a statesman's council. Chapter three. And four, we're going to look at a statesman's rebuke.

These are all things that statesmen basically, these are functions that statesmen have. A statesman's loyalty in the next chapter. I'm sorry. We're skipping chapter three because that's not about Daniel. That's about his three friends. So this is chapter four. And this is chapter five. And this is chapter six. And then we have a statesman's prayer. Chapters 9, verse 1 through 23. And hold your breath on this one, a statesman's eschatology. And that's chapters 7, 8, and 9, 24 through chapter 12.

And that's the shortest point, by the way, and the one I have the least to say about Itzel, so you can relax. All right. Well, I'm planning to stick to the Bible. I always do. All right. Let's talk about a statesman's culture. We find here that the king wanted very special people. If you look at verses 3 and 4, and I'm not going to read all these verses. You can look at them as I'm talking. He wanted men who had good looks, brains, presence, and status. They were to be princes. They were to be smart.

They were to be skillful in language. They were just to be the cream of the crop. Okay. And he planned for these men to be thoroughly acculturated, that they would learn all the ways of the Babylonians. That would include their mythology, their astrology, how they told things from the stars, their medical omens, cut animals apart and figure out future events by looking at their entrails, interpretation of dreams. They were to learn all this Babylonian information.

But you see in this book, right here in this chapter beginning, and you see it throughout the book, that Daniel purposed not to be acculturated. Okay. In the first place, they gave him a different name, and it didn't stick. We know him as Daniel. We do not know him as Belshazzar. That name is used a couple of times in the book, but the name they gave him didn't even stick. He was Daniel the whole way through. All right. He would not, of course, eat the king's food. He would not go by their time scale.

We find that he was still following the evening sacrifice in his routines. We find that later in chapter 9, that his routines were based on what he was taught, the evening sacrifices, and all of the Jewish ways of doing things. You find Daniel doing them in this chapter. He refused to be acculturated. I think Daniel realized that if Babylon gets into you, the show is over.

And I wasn't planning to say this, but the thing I told Peter Reichert, I said, "Well, the ones who have maintained the Anabaptist witness down through the generations in our country have been those who had the courage to create a counterculture." I said, "Those are the ones that survive. The ones that don't have the courage to create a counterculture do not survive." I mean, that's just all you have to do is look. You don't have to be very wise or very smart, or you don't have to look very far.

And I could name you denominations that basically were lost. In fact, Wesley was complaining at the end that if only he had created a counterculture, the Methodist Church would have perhaps maintained what he tried to teach. So anyway, Daniel was determined not to be acculturated. And that has to be something that we purpose, not to be acculturated. We will not surrender to the values and the practices based on those values in the world around us. We will live a counterculture. All right. He set his heart.

It says he purposed. A cultural distinction must be deliberate. It must have routines. It must have things that are the exact opposite of the world's opposite values that remind us of the distinctives of our belief and practice. All right. Somebody has said, "Small commitments," and we're talking about the things in life that people say, "Well, that's not important." Small commitments prepare us for the big challenges, and we find that later. All right.

On the other hand, I need to say this yet, and that is Daniel did not have a belligerent attitude. He was not defiant. He was not just out there just challenging everybody. That wasn't his attitude at all. In fact, in this chapter, he seeks for alternatives. He doesn't say, "Well, I'm not going to eat the king's food." Nope. I'm not going to do that. That wasn't his attitude at all. His attitude was, "Well, can we think of some alternatives here that will be acceptable to my beliefs and practices?" All right.

And in this chapter, we see some wonderful ironies of God's sovereignty in the midst of all of this. These subjected men who had been conquered become the palace royal service. We see a temple that had been pillaged, but the captives were next to the throne. We find losers that became winners, and we find that these people who were supposed to be inferior to the Babylonians end up being their deliverers and actually the persons who were able to deliver them when the magicians were not.

Verse 21, I think, is an important statement. Let's read it. "And Daniel continued even unto the first year of King Cyrus." Kings die, but Daniel continues. All right. "Babylon, the brute of the world," and they were a brute of the world, "drops into the mausoleum of history, but God's people go on." And I think, as you've heard me say before, I think of the Soviet Union, who so proudly demonstrated their superiority in 1987 with a great military parade celebrating the 70th year of communism in Russia.

In 1988, they had dropped into the mausoleum of history as far as the Soviet Union concept. Daniel's refusal to culturally assimilate. He knew that the tangible things of this world are the things that are connected to their values, and he avoided them. Number two, a statesman's worldview. We look at chapter 2, and of course, that's the story where he interprets Nebuchadnezzar's dream.

It's interesting to me that this chapter begins with "and." Everything that we read in the rest of the book is connected to verses 17 to 21. All right. I'm going to read those. These verses basically are played out in the rest of the book, and the word "and" in chapter 2 connects us with what we just read, and here it is. "As for these four children, God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom, and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams.

Now, at the end of the days that the king had said he should bring them in, then the prince of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar, and the king communed with them, and among them all was found none like Daniel, Hananiah, Michael, and Azariah.

Therefore, stood they before the king, and in all matters of wisdom and understanding that the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers that were in all his realm." And Daniel continued, and the kings went by in succession. Okay. It's interesting what you see here. You see the theme of revelation. You see the theme of showing and declaring and making known and telling. I mean, go down through this passage.

You will find the word "reveal" in five verses, 19, 28, 29, 30, and 47. You will find the term "show" and "declare" in verses 4 and 6 and 7, 9, 10, 11, 16, 24, and 27. Now, you don't have time to write those down. I'm just trying to show you that God is trying to get a message across to these people. The worldview here is that God's people have the secret, and the kingdoms are helpless in the face of those secrets. Okay. The key note is verse 28.

If you'll look at verse 28, "There is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets and maketh known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the latter days." Okay. So what are some observations we can get from this passage? Well, number one, the failure of paganism. They never can receive any word from outside. They desperately need a word from outside, and they never get it. The king has doubts, and he tests his sorcerers, but they have nothing to say to him. And so what is the lesson we learn?

Don't be awed by paganism. Paganism is dark. It can't see past the end of its nose. I mean, it comes up with things like defund the police. Come on. So the police cause problems. So the solution is defund the police. Well, you don't have to be very smart to figure that one out. It's dark. Paganism is dark. It has no light. Okay. God tells us what we need to know, and we can walk into the future with certainty. All right. Number two, human power is fragile. Kings have their authority only as God gives it.

Daniel made it clear to Nebuchadnezzar in verses 37 and 38 that he had the power he had only because God gave it to him. Okay. And then he sees this monstrous vision that terrifies him. This man that's in control of everything is terrified by a vision of a great metallic monster standing there. Oh, what's this mean? Okay. And we find that that monster that represents kingdoms as he knows them is standing on a very rickety base. It's steel mixed with clay.

And then Daniel said something that should really have jolted him, verse 39. He says, "Thou art this head of gold, and after thee." Ooh. So something's coming after him. He is not the last and greatest of reality. Okay. But Nebuchadnezzar did not repent. You find at the end of the chapter, he's worshiping Daniel, not worshiping God. And Daniel's revelation didn't get much traction with him. We find in this vision, though, hope for Israel, but we find it's at the end of a whole series.

It's not going to be immediate, and that's basically going to be the eschatology at the end. And that is God's people are going to have to go through an awful lot of difficulty, an awful lot of tribulation, an awful lot of evil they're going to have to experience before they finally see the promised end of their nation. Okay. So human power is fragile. The third thing that we learn here is God's kingdom is overwhelming, supernatural, indestructive, and final. And you'll find that in verses 44, 45, 34, and 35.

God does not build his kingdom through the kingdoms of this world. And I think that's where people who have mixed the church and the state and think somehow they can use the state to build something have completely gotten it wrong. God never uses the kingdoms of this world to build his kingdom. It's not by their development that God's kingdom prospers. It's by their destruction.

Julian the Apostate, who tried to reinstate paganism after Christianity had taken over the Roman Empire, at least officially, and he asked a Christian in Antioch sarcastically because at first it looked like he was having some success, and he said, "Now what's the carpenter's son doing?" And the Christian answered him, "He's making a coffin for the emperor." Within days, Julian the Apostate was dead. And Jesus has a coffin for every emperor, and I cringe when I hear them boast.

I must admit, I cringed when I heard our last president boast. I thought, "Oh, does he not know the verse? He that exalts himself shall be abased." The only security is in the kingdom of the carpenter's son, and Nebuchadnezzar's dream will come true. All right. We're skipping chapter 3 because it's not about Daniel. We're going on to chapter 4, a statesman's council. Here we have another scary dream, and the narrator is Nebuchadnezzar. He states at the beginning of this chapter what he finally learned. What was it?

"Nebuchadnezzar the king, unto all people, nations, and languages that dwell in all the earth, peace be multiplied unto you. I thought it good to show the signs and wonders that the high God hath wrought toward me. How great are his signs? How mighty are his wonders? His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion is from generation to generation." All right. He says, "I learned something.

I learned that God sets up, and he casts down, and it's his doing that establishes kingdoms." Well, that was a good thing for Nebuchadnezzar to learn, and he keeps repeating this. You see it throughout the chapter. Let's look at verse 17.

There he's still saying, "The most high ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will." Verse 25, "And 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 and oxen, and they shall wet thee with dew from heaven, and seven times shall pass over thee till thou know that the most high ruleth in the kingdom of men." And verse 32 is another repetition of that idea. All right.

Now, Nebuchadnezzar's pictured as a very impressive tree that seems universal with benefits for everybody. All right. But verse 13 says, "It was all for nothing." All of the animals skedaddle. Everybody leaves this tree because it's doomed. All right. It's thoroughly chopped down. It's stripped, and it's, yeah. And the animals, like I said, they leave, and the king's rest turns to terror. Again, he's terrified by this dream. That's all it takes to terrify this.

And we learn later that Nebuchadnezzar's told he's the greatest of all kings, or never was a king as great as him. Here's the greatest of all kings, the man that has the most power, the most authority, and he's trembling at a dream. Okay. Again, paganism fails. It has no light. He has to call Daniel, all right, to talk to him about this dream. Daniel is God's kindly light to Nebuchadnezzar, and he truly is a godly counselor. And we find some beautiful examples of what a godly counselor is in this passage.

If you look at verses 19 to 22, you find that Daniel is a very compassionate person. "Then Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, was astonished for one hour, and his thoughts troubled him. The king spake and said, 'Belteshazzar, let not the dream or the interpretation thereof trouble thee.' Belteshazzar answered and said, 'My Lord, the dream be to them that hate thee, and the interpretation thereof to thine enemies.'" So he really felt bad about this. He really did have a genuine compassion for Nebuchadnezzar.

And counselors who are doing what they're supposed to be doing are people with compassion. He's appalled and terrified by the interpretation, and it takes him a whole hour before he's able even to articulate it. He wishes the dream were applied to the king's enemies. He's not rejoicing at all in this prophecy of punishment and retribution that's coming on the king. So compassion is one quality of a good counselor. Number two, he is truthful. The sorcerers probably were afraid to tell the king.

They may have had some concept that this was a bad omen, but they. Well, look what it says in verse 7. It doesn't say they didn't understand the dream, and maybe they didn't. But in verse 7, it says, "Then came the magicians and astrologers, the Chaldeans and the soothsayers, and I told the dream before them, and they did not make known unto me the interpretation thereof." It doesn't say they didn't know it. They didn't make it known to him if they did.

Whatever they understood about this dream, whatever vague concept they might have had about it, they didn't want to tell the king. It was too bad. Okay. But a counselor is truthful. He's willing to tell a hard truth. He lets the king know he's compassionate. He doesn't like the interpretation. I mean, it wouldn't have been his wish for the king, but this is what it is, king. This is the truth, and you need to know the truth. Number three, he offers straightforward counsel. Look at verse 7.

He says, "O king, let my counsel be acceptable unto thee and break off thy sins by righteousness and thine iniquities by showing mercy to the poor." That's interesting. "If it may be a lengthening of thy tranquility." Well, he had good precedent for this. Remember Ahab after that horrible thing that he did to Naboth, and Elijah came and thoroughly excoriated him and pronounced judgment upon him and his family.

And it says, "Ahab dressed himself in sackcloth and went softly." And the Lord said, "Did you see what Ahab did? Well, because of that, this judgment that I pronounced won't happen while he's still alive. I'm going to show him that much mercy." So God does give mercy when people show genuine repentance. And not only did Daniel give him straightforward counsel, which wasn't encouraging at all, it was very frightening. He says, "But you can plead for mercy.

You can make a response that may give you mercy from God." So counselors are compassionate. They're truthful with that compassion, and they give the person they're counseling some course of action that has some positive hope to it. Okay. A great gift is sometimes a severe word of reality, but it should be coupled with a word of hope. All right. He had been warned that after you, you're not going to exist forever. There's a caution here. You don't take for granted your continued power. Okay.

His arrogance was rebuffed. In 3:15 and 25, we see the arrogance of Nebuchadnezzar. "Who is this God that can deliver you from my hand?" His arrogance is basically rebuffed and rebutted. Okay. And so now we have a 12-month delay. This didn't happen immediately. All right. But people presume, and Nebuchadnezzar had a lot to presume about. I'm going to read to you a little bit about his Babylon. It says he got up and boasted about this great Babylon that he had built and how wonderful it was. Well, let me read you.

This was not an empty boast. Babylon was a rectangularly shaped city surrounded by a broad and deep water-filled moat. So it had a moat, and then beyond the moat were two walls. All right. The first was a double wall. There was a double wall system encompassing the main city. Its inner wall was 20 feet thick and reinforced with defense towers at 60-foot intervals, while the outer wall was 11 feet in width and also had watchtowers. Later, he added another double wall beyond the double.

So you had a moat, you had a double wall, and then he added another double wall. All right. And that one was even more formidable. The outer wall was 25 feet thick, and the inner wall was 23 feet thick, and it was wide enough that chariots could actually pass each other on the top. The height of the walls is not known, but the Ishtar Gate was 40 feet high. By the way, that Ishtar Gate is in what is the museum in Berlin? Anyway, I saw that gate.

The Ishtar Gate was 40 feet high, and the walls would have approximated this size. A 40-foot wall would have been a formidable barrier for enemy soldiers, and there were four of them and a moat. The Ishtar Gate was on the north side. It led into Procession Street, 62 feet wide, 1,000 yards long, paved with imported stone.

A bridge 400 feet long spanned the Euphrates between the east and west sectors of the city, and Nebuchadnezzar enjoyed at least three palaces there and had constructed the famous hanging gardens, apparently so his wife, Amitris, could enjoy the taste of her native media, which she had left for the flatlands of Babylon. No wonder it all had Nebuchadnezzar talking about himself. All right. His pagan theology was that he had been raised by the gods and made a god. That was pagan theology.

If the gods raised you to the highest position, then you had become deity, right, along with them. And he had to learn that the most high ruleth in the kingdom of men. He is not deity. There's another deity that is beyond him. Okay. And that it's Israel's God who gives kingship even to pagan kings. All right. Rulers have not learned this very well. Louis XIV, the French king, who reigned longer than any other king, now Queen Elizabeth is close.

He reigned 72 years, and he was known as the great son king, and his age was known as the age of absolutism. I mean, what he said went. And when he died, the funeral was in Notre Dame, and it was darkened except for one candle on his casket, and that was to symbolize that he was the only light. The court preacher, Massalin, was to give the funeral oration, and this was his funeral oration.

He marched up, took the candle, and blew it out and shouted, "Only God is great." That was the funeral oration, and it's a message that every leader of this world will learn the hard way if they don't learn it the right way. All right. What do we learn from this passage? We are not to be impressed with human governments. I think some of us are tempted to look at certain governmental authorities in our country and think there's more hope here than there is here.

That's our tendency to think, but there is no certainty. There is no hope with worldly governments. Okay. Sane people adore the God of heaven alone, including its kings. Atheism is actually insanity. It's unreality. It's unreasonable. I tell people that on the phone every day. To believe that matter turned into life all by itself is insane. That's an insane statement.

I tell them when I was a student in high school back in the early '60s, the first thing we read in their biology books was about spontaneous generation, that the ancients believed that rats were generated in trash piles because they came out of trash piles. And I said, "We all laughed at that. That was ludicrous." But I said, "What you believe is just a sophisticated version of that same ludicrous idea that matter, mindless, inert, inanimate matter turned into life all by itself." Atheism is insanity.

It's unreasonable. The kingdom does not belong to the one who can make the biggest boast, but to the one, you know who the kingdom belongs to? I was thinking this morning of Philippians chapter 2. It belongs to the person who could have kept the highest position, but he chose to give it up. That's who the kingdom belongs to, and it still belongs to the person with that mentality. Okay. And Philippians 2 says, "Because of that, wherefore God has exalted him." I like that wherefore in Philippians chapter 2.

And then he goes on to say, "Therefore, work out your own salvation." I think there it means your own exaltation by doing the same thing. He that humbleth himself shall be exalted. Then we move into chapter 5, a statesman's rebuke. Okay. Up to now, it has been Nebuchadnezzar. Who is Belteshazzar? Well, I told you that when Nebuchadnezzar died in 532 BC after a reign of 43 years, it only was another 25 years till everything was lost. Okay.

There was a series of assassinations, and this fellow who was the second ruler in the kingdom, his father was basically exiled, and he was left in charge. He's the person in charge, and he presides over the last stages of Babylonian civilization. And by the way, I want you to notice something, and that is the last stages of a civilization is turmoil in government. I'll let you think about that.

Belteshazzar is only a de facto king, and that's why he promises Daniel that he can be third ruler in the kingdom because Belteshazzar himself was only the second ruler in the kingdom. This story comes on the scene abruptly. There's no warm-up for this story. And even though we had a lot of sympathy for Nebuchadnezzar because Nebuchadnezzar was sort of teachable, and he could make some acknowledgment, this man is just totally arrogant, and he's treated with no sympathy whatsoever in the biblical passage. All right.

While he's boasting, the Medes and the Persians are outside the city, but he is so confident because of what I described about the city. All right. So what are some things we can learn from this passage? All right. We can learn that humans can be defiant. This man was going to drink and honor his gods using the vessels from the temple. Well, what's so bad about using the temple vessels? Well, 23, Daniel makes it very clear to this man that contempt for anything belonging to God is a contempt for God himself.

All right. Belteshazzar's mistake was that he believed that Israel's God had no reality or power in Babylon. But with just a couple strokes of a hand writing on the wall, this man is reduced to a sniffling mess, and he doesn't know what to do, and all his losers come traipsing in, and they can't help him. So that's human defiance. That's what happens. It is quickly brought down. Okay. Number two, we see human desperation met by divine foolishness. Okay. Belteshazzar knew Daniel.

He said, "I've heard of you," but he had relegated him to such a low position in his kingdom that he almost didn't remember that he existed. He had him in a very minor role. He ignored Daniel's indispensable role, and yet this despised Jew that apparently he had no respect for is the only person who can help. All right. And so that shows that the foolishness of God is wiser than men. Number three, human denseness is met by divine judgment. Okay. In God's eyes, Belteshazzar is a lightweight.

He says, "You've been weighed in the balances, and you've been found wanting." Okay. His kingdom is flimsy, fractured, and finished. The kingdom wanted an interpretation, but Daniel gave him much more. Daniel knew that he had to understand why God was saying that to him, and so he gives him an understanding of the interpretation. And by the way, that meany, meany, tark, tikkel, a parson, they say, is Aramaic. It was Daniel's native language.

It's another evidence that he never allowed himself to be completely acculturated. He kept his native language, and that was just ordinary words to him, not to the king. All right. There's a history lesson in verses 18 and 19. God gave Nebuchadnezzar this kingdom, and like he said to Palate, "You have no authority but what God gives you." And we have to remember that. We have to remember that with all the machinations of political intrigue, it's God that finally decides who's going to be there.

I think Biden is there because that's who God ordained to be our president, and we can talk about all the stuff that happened that maybe shouldn't have happened, but that was God. In fact, it happened in spite of what everybody predicted. Okay. Whether we like it or not, that's the order of things. God sets up the authority. There is no authority except God gives it from above. He had to make a donkey out of Nebuchadnezzar to teach him that. And Daniel says to Belteshazzar, "You knew all of this.

This was not information you didn't know. You knew all of it, and yet even with that knowledge, you had the audacity to disgrace the vessels from the temple." This is not ignorance. This is insolence. He was giving praises to his God, according to Daniel in chapter 22. The very breath that you were using to praise your gods came from God. You were using the very gift God gave you to praise your gods. So this man had all the information he needed, and what do I learn from that?

Information does not represent a solution to anything. This country believes that we just got a little more education. If we could just teach young people what premarital sex involves, the diseases they can get in the pregnancies, if we could just get them to understand that, then they would be wiser in their sexual behavior. That's what this country believes, that if we have a problem, what we need is more information. No.

We have enough examples of people who had PhDs in economics that ran their companies into bankruptcy. We have all kinds of examples of people who had lots of information but were not wise at all. Okay. Information does us no good, according to verse 23b, if it does not lead us to worship God, and that is the danger of education, that it will lead people to put their confidence in something other than God. True education leads people to worship God.

I always like to give the little story about the little boy who sang "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," "How I Wonder What You Are," when he was a six-year-old in Sunday school, and then he went to high school, and he had one chapter, to mind you, one chapter in his physical science book that was about astronomy, and then he strutted out and sang, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, How I Know What You Are." And then he went to college and decided to get a PhD in astronomy, and after that was all over, he marched out and

he said, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, I still don't know what you are." That's true education.

If it doesn't do that to a person, I mean, they may have a lot of information they can use, but if it does not give them a sense of how much they don't know, then they haven't gotten a true education. All right. Clear information does not guarantee a right response. The truth, the information we get, should humble us. The more education, the more understanding, the more facts we get, the more humble we should become.

Isaac Newton, who was the father of modern science, said, "You folks credit me with a lot of understanding of the physical universe, but I was only a person walking along the beach, picking up a shell here and there and looking at it. That's all I know, just the knowledge about a few shells on the beach." He was truly an educated person. So truth should humble us. The transition from Belteshazzar and the Chaldean kingdom to derise the Medes took one night, this very night, he says.

And so what is the statesman's rebuke that we're talking about here? Knowledge ignored leads to judgment, and that's something we all need to take to heart. I mean, we have been given, of all people in Western civilization, we probably have been given the best and the most complete knowledge of the gospel of any people in the world. What are we doing with it? What are we doing with it? Knowledge ignored will lead to judgment. Chapter 6 is about a statesman's loyalty.

This is the story about Daniel and the lion's den. It begins with a miracle, a politician that they couldn't find any fault with, a squeaky clean politician. I think that's the greatest miracle in this chapter. I think that's even greater than the lion's night eating Daniel, and we're going to get it in the next Sunday's lesson. A leader should have nothing that anybody can get a hold of. All right. What are the lessons we can learn from this chapter?

I'm assuming you people all know these stories, but if you do like I did this morning and go read through them all, it's amazing the little details that are tucked in here that show you the things that I'm talking about. Number one, the world's favor is unpredictable. Here was Daniel, who at one point was the highest of the king's counselors, and he ends up in the lion's den. We have to be ready to let everything go to be faithful to God. All right.

Apparently, he was not liked because he gave an account of everything that was happening to the king. He was the king's whistleblower. He was the person that told on everybody that did wrong, and he also was preferred above all the others, and he would have been tempted to keep that position by compromising. All right. But he knew that his first loyalty was to God. All right. And it was interesting. Ironically, their plan depended on that. Daniel's dependable loyalty to God was the secret to their getting him.

Okay. So all out of the blue, he's the head of all the presidents and princes, and all out of the blue, he's in a lion's den. That's how quickly the world's favor can turn. Don't ever depend on it. Okay. Out of the blue, it may turn. It says all the presidents agreed to this. Well, he was one of the presidents, so that obviously wasn't true, but the princes set a trap. They appealed to the king's vanity that he could be a surrogate God, at least even if just for 30 days.

But I think the most important lesson in this chapter is that spiritual habits will sustain you. Daniel's decision didn't seem difficult to him. We don't read anything about him. Oh, he has to agonize over this. No, nothing of that. He simply did what he had been doing day after day after day. I've called this a momentum of custom. If you have a custom of praying at a certain time every day, it'll be easy for you to do that. That's a custom.

And so I'm calling for us to establish habits of holiness and habits of true worship and spirituality. His habit was in line with Solomon's. I mean, David was aware that Solomon had said in his dedication of the temple, if this group of people were ever carried away captive, if they pray, and he described exactly how they were to do it. He said, "If they pray toward this land, God will hear them." And so that's why Daniel didn't change.

He knew that that was what he had to do to be in the place where God wanted him to be. He had to pray toward the land. He could not pray somewhere else in a different direction, in a different situation. Okay. His prayer apparently was not focused on the lions.

If you turn to chapter 9, I mean, he knew he was going to the lion's den, but the impression is that that was not the content of the prayers that he prayed, and if that was not the habit, the kind of habit that he prayed for his own protection, then he probably wasn't. Look what it says here in verse chapter 9, verse 1. In the first year of derise, the son of Ahazari was the seed of the Medes, which was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans.

In the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood by the books the number of the years where of the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah the prophet that he would accomplish 70 years in the desolation of Jerusalem. So from the very first year of Darius' reign, he was praying for the restoration of Jerusalem. That was the content of his prayers. He wasn't thinking about himself.

He was thinking about that prayer that he prayed every day from the first day of Darius' rule, that God would honor his promise that after 70 years, he would restore Jerusalem. His prayer was focused on intercession. All right. Somebody has said the greatest miracle in this chapter, besides the squeaky clean politicians, is not that God closed the mouth of the lions, but that nobody could pry the praying hands of this prophet apart. He refused to make an idol out of his safety.

His habits set him free to be faithful. It's a false dichotomy to say that godly habits and practices are legalism. He did this every day. It wasn't legalism. It was a genuine prayer of intercession. Number three, don't put your trust in princes. They can tie themselves in knots by intrigue, which is what Darius did. He never saw it coming. Darius was completely taken by surprise. All right. The people who accused him described him in ways that were not true. They said he was hostile to the king.

He regardeth not thee, and the king was powerless to help him. Okay. The focus of this chapter is on the king's anguish, not Daniel's. That's interesting. You cannot depend on rulers, even if they are not hostile towards you. Politically, the best political friend will throw his friends under the bus if it furthers his political career, and that's what we learn in this passage, and that's what we learn as we observe history, even current history. And the fourth thing we learn is salvation belongs to the Lord.

Not only did the king fast, but so did the lions. Daniel's only words are in verse 22, and that's all that needs to be said. Look what it says, verse 22 of chapter 6. My God has sent his angel and has shut the lion's mouths that they have not hurt me, for as much as before him innocence he was found in me, and also before thee, O king, have I done no hurt. That's all Daniel says in this whole passage, and that's all that needs to be said. Okay.

The truth about God's kingdom is he makes the nation prove the glory of his righteousness, like we sing. That's my favorite verse in joy to the world. He rules the world with truth and grace and makes the nations prove the glory of his righteousness. God is loyal to his loyal statesman. Number six, I promised you we'd move through this fast, and I'm trying to do that. A statesman's prayer. Apparently, this was Daniel's routine prayer. You want to know what he prayed every day with his windows open toward Jerusalem.

This is what it is. Okay. And there's some lessons we can learn from this prayer. I think we should read this, so I'm going to read this passage, chapter 9, verses 1 to 19. In the first year of Darius, the son of Ahazoeris, the seed of the Medes, which was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans, in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood by the books the number of the years where of the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, the prophet that he would accomplish 70 years in the desolations of Jerusalem.

And I set my face unto the Lord God to seek by prayer and supplications with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. So we have every reason to believe this was the content of his prayer every day.

And I prayed unto the Lord my God and made my confession and said, "O Lord God, the great and dreadful God, keeping covenant and mercy to them that love him and to them that keep his commandments, we have sinned and have committed iniquity and have done wickedly and have rebelled even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments.

Neither have we hearkened unto thy servants the prophets which spake in the name of our kings, our princes, and our fathers and to all the people of the land." O Lord, in other words, God had sent them message after message after message after message, and he said we didn't listen.

"O Lord, righteousness belongeth unto thee, but unto us confusion of faces as at this day to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to all Israel that are near and those far off through all the countries whither thou hast driven them because of their trespass that they have trespassed against thee. O Lord, to us belongs confusion of face to our kings, to our princes, to our fathers because we've sinned against thee.

To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him. Neither have we obeyed the voice of the Lord to walk in his laws which he set before us by his servants the prophets. Yea, all Israel have transgressed by thy law, even by departing that they might not obey thy voice. Therefore, the curse is poured upon them and the oath that is written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, because we have sinned against him. And he hath confirmed his words which he spake against us.

Now, what he had told us came true and against our judges and judged us by bringing upon us a great evil, for under the whole heaven hath not been done as hath been done upon Jerusalem, as it is written in the law of Moses. All these evils come upon us, yet made we not our prayer before the Lord our God that we might turn from our iniquities and understand thy truth.

Therefore, hath the Lord watched upon the evil and brought it upon us, for the Lord our God is righteous in all his works which he doeth, for we obeyed not his voice. And now, O Lord our God, thou hast brought thy people forth out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand and hath gotten thee renowned as at this day. As at this day, we have sinned and we have done wickedly.

O Lord, according to thy righteousness, I beseech thee, let thine anger and thy fury be turned away from the city of Jerusalem, thy holy mountain, because for our sins and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and thy people are become a reproach to all that are about us. Now, therefore, O our God, hear the prayer of thy servant and his supplications and cause thy face to shine upon thy sanctuary that is desolate for the Lord's sake.

O my God, incline thine ear and hear, open thine eyes and behold our desolations and the city which is called by thy name, for we do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousness, but for thy great mercies. In other words, we have no righteousness to please. All we're pleading is your mercy. We've sinned. Oh, and now it becomes really intense. O Lord, hear. O Lord, forgive. O Lord, hearken and do. Defer not for thine own sake, O my God, for thy city and thy people are called by thy name.

All right. Number one, what is the stimulus to prayer? A promise. We're told in first John that if we pray anything according to his will, he hears us, and if he hears us, and he hears us if we pray according to his will, we have the petition we desired. So Daniel's basing his prayer on promise just like Elijah did. God had told them that if they sin against him, he will dry up their land. He'll send drought, and all that was promised.

And Elijah, I think, prayed that and then marched into king Ahab to say it's going to happen. I've been praying this, and God promised this, and that promise is going to come true. So successful prayer gets hold of the promises of God and holds to them. All right. God's promises to us drive our prayers. They indicate us to us what God's will is. And so we should remind God of his promises. All right. Number two, and so the motivation for prayer, the stimulus for prayer is the promises that God has made to us.

Number two, we should begin with thoughtful adoration to God. Too many times we start praying for our requests. I want you to turn back to Daniel's prayer before he interpreted the dream. Would you turn? Let's read that back in chapter two. We can learn something from the way he prays. Daniel answered and said when he was praying for an answer to Nebuchadnezzar's dream. He said, "Blessed be the name of God forever and ever for wisdom and might are his." And he changeth the times and the seasons.

He removeth kings and seteth up kings. He giveth wisdom unto the wise and knowledge to them that know understanding. He revealeth the deep and secret things. He knoweth what is in the darkness, and the light dwelleth with him. I thank thee and praise thee, O God of my fathers, who has given me wisdom and might and has made known unto me now what is desired of thee, for thou hast made known unto me the king's matter.

And so the request is right there at the end after lots of praise to God, and our prayer should be filled with that. In fact, I think our prayer should start with song. It says, "Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, into his courts with praise." Well, that doesn't necessarily have to be song. It's what Daniel did here. God takes special attention when he hears us give honor and praise and worship to him. He listens very carefully when that happens. So our prayer should begin with thoughtful adoration of God.

All right. This God makes us tremble even as he makes us secure. The security is in proportion to how much we tremble before him. Number three, the sad content of the prayer, a confession of gross guilt, defiance, and rebellion. He mourns the obvious consequences. His only hope is in God's mercy. He's not asking for any consideration at all for anything they have done. It's all bad. It's only God's mercy. All right. They had ignored the pleadings of the prophets. They were concerned more.

He was concerned more about God's reputation, if you notice, than he was about their return. At the end, he says, "Hear us. Hear us. Hear us because it's your name that's at stake." When we pray, can we honestly say that the request we're making is so God's name would be glorified and that he would be exonerated and he would be vindicated in what he has told us about himself and his promises? He said little about a return to the land. He said almost nothing about it. All right.

A mark of a true Christian is he truly mourns for sin. Blessed are they that mourn because they'll be comforted. Something will happen as a result of that mourning. Okay. Loathing sin is an evidence of the new spirit God gives to us. In that passage in Ezekiel, where it talks about God putting a new spirit in us, one of the things it says is we loathe our sins. Okay. We loathe missing the mark. We loathe doing anything that comes short of the glory of God. There are many people that don't seem to loathe that.

They seem to go right on with their own selfishness and whatever. Okay. This is unique. The United Nations doesn't loathe their sins. The Rotary Club doesn't loathe their sin. I don't know of any organization in the world that loathes their sins except God's people, and they're the only people that get the results that that brings. Daniel's concern, 13A, they have gone through disaster, no home, no temple, but still no repentance. It's amazing how judgment can happen and people don't even see it.

I think of the people in Egypt. The magicians themselves come to Pharaoh and say, "Pharaoh, don't you know that Egypt is already destroyed? What does it take to get your attention?" And people cannot see the judgment of God. They can't connect cause and effect. Things happen, and they somehow can't connect that it's God's judgment, even if it's very obvious it's God's judgment. Okay. And then his primary concern is to turn away his fury and anger from Jerusalem for God's sake.

Beyond God's compassion, he appeals to God's reputation. Babylon is reading it all wrong. What they see happening is a victory for their gods, and that makes Daniel extremely jealous. Why should they be thinking that? God, you have to change this picture so they see that it's not their gods, it's you. Okay. Yahweh's reputation should be the driving concern of our prayers. We should be thinking about the glory God would get from restored marriages, from deliverance of addicts.

We should think how that's going to give God glory. Of course, we should be thinking about the needs of the people, but most of all, we should think about God getting glory to see that change. We were in Indiana, and there were two boys in our services, and I didn't know this till after the first couple of services. Those two boys, just not too long ago, were on the streets with pink hair, wrinkles in their noses, and a defiant attitude.

And I didn't hear all the details of how the first boy got converted, but then he led his second boy to Christ, and there they were sitting, closed in their right minds, and just sitting there. I noticed this in when I was speaking before I even knew what the situation was. They were sitting there drinking it in, taking notes. I mean, they were just totally different people, and what wonderful glory God gets out of that. All right. A statesman's eschatology. What do you make of all the rest of this book?

Well, eschatology is the theology concerning the final events in the history of the world. What do we learn from this? Number one, human governments are beastly and vicious. On April the 24th, 1915, that date was set by the Turks as the day when all the Armenians would be liquidated, and on that one day, 600,000 Armenians were slaughtered. In 1932, Stalin demanded that Ukrainian grain deliveries would be more than the entire crop, and when it was not delivered, he slaughtered five to seven million people.

Human governments are beastly. Revolutions produce other men, not new men. The American Revolution, much celebrated, was not a happy day for the Blacks and for the Native Americans. The British had actually tried to protect them, and when the British were out of the picture, they got the full brunt of things that happened in this country. I thought I had to refer even to our own government, which has given a lot of privileges to a lot of people. It still has had a beastly side to it.

Number two, that's what we learn. I mean, you read about these kingdoms. They're beastly. They devour. They stomp on the residue, and they're just beastly governments, and that's what God wants us to learn about government. The kingdoms of this world are not a friend to grace. They are beastly when all the chips are down. Number two, the kingship of heaven guarantees final victory. You see that the whole way through here in all of these prophecies. And last, there will be a great trial before there's victory.

There's promise for Israel here, but Daniel is seeing a tremendous amount of meat-grinding sorrow and pain that the nation will go through before that final victory. In fact, the horror of this made him sick. Look in verse 27 of chapter 8. And I, Daniel, fainted and was sick certain days. Afterward, I rose up and did the king's business, and I was astonished at the vision, but none understood it.

But he gave the vision to prepare God's people so they wouldn't be taken by surprise, and Jesus told us we would be persecuted. I mean, there is suffering involved here, even though there's a beautiful picture of what's going to happen till it's all over. And Daniel wanted to know more. He wanted to know more details, but God told him. He said, "I've told you enough. Let's look at the end of the book, verse 13.

But go thou thy way till the end be, for thou shalt have rest and stand in thy lot at the end of the days." He said, "Daniel, you can rest. Despite all the stuff that you don't understand that sounds pretty scary, the future is secure. The king wins. The kingdom of God is the last word." So there we have it. We have a statesman culture. He refuses to be acculturated. His worldview is that God sets up kings. They don't set up themselves.

His counsel is that there's judgment coming, but you can do some things that will bring God's mercy into the situation. The rebuke, the defiance of kings is going to be completely defeated, and loyalty to Darius and loyalty to God despite all the temptations, and finally, a prayer of repentance and a guarantee that there will be future victory after lots of suffering and pain. Anybody have any comments? I knew it would be a marathon to do the full.