Today I am beginning a series on the Book of Daniel, the last of the four Major Prophets in the Bible, after Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, were contemporaries: Jeremiah remained in Israel till after the destruction of Jerusalem, while Ezekiel and the teenage boy Daniel were taken to Babylon after Babylon’s first invasion of Judah in 605 BC. Ezekiel lived in Babylon as a priestly prophet, while Daniel served in the court of Babylon under both Babylonian and Persian kings.
These three prophets were raised up by God at the end of Judah’s kingdom to speak to the remnant of His people during a time of siege and maximum distress. Put yourself into the shoes of an ordinary, reasonably devout Israeli. You are supposed to be the Chosen People, but rulers, nobles and the sinners in your community continually revel in idolatry, wine, women and song. They weren’t so different from people around us today, were they? We were supposed to be God’s holy people; but in the end, we’re not much different from all the heathen peoples around us.
Try to imagine the stress to your faith that you are still God’s Chosen People when the promise of an everlasting kingdom of David’s descendants, sung about for centuries in their psalms, appears to be coming to a crushing end. You realize that Moses’ warnings about being trodden under the heels of Gentile nations for your people’s infidelity are being fulfilled; your sins have found you out. How confident would you be that the God sung about in these psalms really intended to keep that promise, or was even able to do so, or to resist the Accuser’s persistent lies that these psalms were just fanciful myths invented by bygone Levites to make something more of Israel than they really were? Where is the God of Israel?
What do we think today, when our culture slowly turns its back to the God who inspired these words in our nation’s founding document?
“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
God’s message through Jeremiah and Ezekiel was bruising – Jerusalem would certainly be sacked and its people brought to Babylon. But God would ultimately liberate the Jewish people from Babylon and restore them to their land; and one day, God promised, He would raise up a righteous “Branch” from the descendants of King David would be their deliverer, the Messiah, and the everlasting King of Israel.
The decline and captivity of Judah and Jerusalem was certainly the most traumatic era in their long history; and it’s a message we should take note of as our Christian heritage recedes and is being replaced by a secularized culture that is largely ignorant of the Bible and its teachings. But Daniel’s experience within Babylon is also full of lessons for us who seek to honor God. We have to live in two kingdoms: the kingdom of this world and its predominant secularism and the kingdom of God with its precepts for godly living.
Let me give you a little historical perspective of where Judah and Babylon were in Daniel’s time. As the 7th C. BC drew to a close, the little kingdom of Judah was under duress. Its northern neighbor, Israel, had been sacked by the Assyrian empire a century earlier; and Judah had narrowly escaped the same fate when Sennacherib, King of Assyria, invaded Judah and captured every city except Jerusalem. Divine intervention, in response to the prophet Isaiah’s intercession, saved the righteous King Hezekiah and Judah for over a hundred years from foreign subjugation. You can read about this in 2 Kings 18 and 19, and Isaiah 36 and 37.
But Judah fell into disastrous apostasy under the rule of Hezekiah’s wicked son Manasseh, who reigned until 642 BC. It is said that Isaiah was sawn in two by wicked Manasseh’s decree. It appears that Jerusalem’s nobles reacted to the suffering of Sennacherib’s invasion by pulling Judah back into the idolatry that prevailed under wicked King Ahaz, Hezekiah’s father. Manasseh catered to their selfish pursuit of pleasure, using idol worship as good luck charms, and ignoring the warnings from Moses of the judgments that would eventually befall them.
This spurred a godly counter-reaction against the wickedness of their times. Manasseh’s capture, humiliation and repentance – recorded in 2 Chronicles 33 – opened the door for a renewal of righteousness in Judah. His son Amon, practiced open idolatry, but he was murdered by his servants and Josiah became king at the age of 8.
Josiah was under a regency led by the high priest, Hilkiah, and godly Jews in the royal court who set the tone for the national reformation conducted in Josiah’s name. Once Josiah assumed authority at age 16, he led Judah on a national revival for 23 years that was unmatched in Judah’s history. But by that time, Judah had committed so much blatant idolatry, oppression and injustice that God declared that it would be sacked by the rising kingdom of Babylon that succeeded Assyria.
Babylon, which stood upon the Euphrates River was the wealthiest city in southern Mesopotamia. Babylon had once been the center of a Middle Eastern empire around 1500 BC under the renowned King Hammurabi, but had fallen under Assyrian domination over two centuries later. She became a repeated rival to Nineveh in the north – the capital of Assyria.
In 626 BC, a new King of Babylon named Nabopolassar arose to challenge the overextended Assyrian empire. He made alliances with surrounding kingdoms, including the Medes to Nineveh’s East, to weaken their northern rival. Babylon sacked Nineveh in 612 BC, and the Assyrian king fled north to Haran and then west to Carchemish on the northern Euphrates River.
In 609 BC, Pharaoh sent an army north to assist Assyria, and King Josiah unwisely attacked them at Megiddo. He was killed in the battle and his Army was defeated. Egypt’s army continued north to support the Assyrians against Babylon. They were finally crushed at Carchemish in 605 BC, by Babylon’s young king, Nebuchadnezzar, putting an end to Assyria’s kingdom.
Josiah’s son Jehoahaz briefly reigned in Jerusalem, but Egypt replaced him with his brother Eliakim, who changed his name to Jehoiakim. After the battle of Carchemish, Nebuchadnezzar descended upon Judah and forced Jerusalem to surrender. He plucked his southern rival Egypt of one its tributaries, and made it his own. At the same time, King Nebuchadnezzar took four of the sons of Jerusalem’s nobles with him to Babylon to be trained as court advisers. These were Daniel, Hannaniah, Azariah and Mishael; and they were probably teenagers when they were brought to Babylon.
Babylon was the wealthiest and most powerful kingdom of its time, and King Nebuchadnezzar built walls hundreds of feet high and wide enough for four chariots to ride abreast. Her hanging gardens were regarded as one of the wonders of the world. Babylon became a symbol of the world’s system of accumulating wealth through injustice. We see the name Babylon the Great reappearing at the end of Revelation, as the world’s wealthiest city and center of false religion called “Mystery Babylon.” Babylon here was a type of Rome, an even greater center of power and wealth, which like Babylon, sacked Jerusalem in even crueler fashion. Babylon, which crushed the city of Jerusalem, became a metaphor for powers that oppress and corrupt God’s people.
Daniel and his three Hebrew friends were thrust into the heart of this Middle East hegemon, which gave them both privilege and placed them in peril. For by being close to the center of power, they were subject to the whims and wrath of their mighty king when he was disturbed.
None of us here face the temptation of being close to political power the four Hebrews encountered; but all of us may face the ethical challenge of how to respond when people around us, or above us, put expectations on us to conform to unchristian values and attitudes. Will we continue to separate ourselves from the attitudes and practices, but not the ungodly people, who surround us?
God calls His people, first the Jews and now the Church to be a separated or holy people. First and foremost, we are to separate our hearts toward God – to revere Him above all things on earth or in life. God alone transcends any and everything in this universe; therefore, nothing in this universe should compete with Him for our devotion. Second, we are to separate ourselves from anything that is profane or sinful that would sully or dishonor our relationship with God. If we are God’s people, we must aspire to be holy as He is holy.
I perceive three great character attributes of God, revealed throughout the Bible, fulfilled almost perfectly in the character of Prophet Daniel and in perfect balance in the life of Jesus the Messiah: God is holy, God is wise and God is love. Holiness, wisdom and love encompass all the virtues of God; and God possesses these in infinite quantity and perfection.
The Book of Daniel declares through story a truth that is patiently revealed throughout the sacred history of the Jews – our Old Testament. That God is Sovereign: He rules over the earth and the destiny of all nations, and everyone on earth.