Daniel in the Lion's Den - A Resurrection Story
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger, and we have come to the most famous story of Daniel, I think. Would you agree?
I think so. I think every small child raised in a Christian home has heard of Daniel in the lion’s den.
Some of us have even seen it portrayed by talking vegetables. There was the song about, “Oh no, what am I going to do? Looks like I might end up as lion’s stew.” It was one of the most kickin’ Veggie Tales songs, all the evil counsellors getting together and conspiring against Daniel, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
We’re in Daniel 6 and we have come to quite a late point in Daniel’s life. He’s not a kid at this point.
Despite what the Bible picture books might tell you. The Babylonian empire lasted about 70 years. He was probably about 17 when he was taken captive, so he may be pushing almost 90, late 80s.
We’ve talked a little bit about his role in Babylon and how he was part of the government. He had an official role, despite being a member of God’s kingdom.
And interestingly enough, he had no problems with it. Well, I shouldn’t say he had no problems with that – he had quite a few problems with that.
He had very specific problems, but in the day-to-day operation he did not think that he was betraying Yahweh his king, or the hope of the Messiah, or the worship of God or any such thing, and there are some interesting things there.
If we knew a little more about what he actually did we could work it out, perhaps, but as more or less secular ruler of the kingdom eventually, all of the wealth of the empire was passing through his hands, and that wealth came largely from conquest of other nations.
True, God approved of those conquests to a degree, but they weren’t done nicely, and I think a lot of Christians would have trouble with that, but Daniel sort of didn’t ask, didn’t tell, and just managed what was given to him along the way.
It’s kind of strange that we have a concept of ethical warfare. Is it warfare or is it ethical? But we have the Geneva Convention and everything.
Because of the influence of Christianity. The pagan world did not have that. There was no such thing in the ancient world. You fought to survive or you fought to destroy. It was that simple, and the strongest nation won, or the most clever, as the case may be.
With the death of Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel had been not forced into retirement, but sidetracked into other work. We find him in one of his later visions as apparently an ambassador in Elam, a city which would belong to Persia shortly. So even Belshazzar, who tried to pretend he didn’t know him, apparently thought he was too valuable of an asset to just dump in an old folks’ home or something, and he’s within call on the night that Babylon falls.
He had to know what was coming and, interestingly enough, he didn’t leave. He knew the armies of Cyrus were out there. He seems to have known. We’ll talk about his possible relationship with Cyrus later, but he apparently knew who Cyrus was and knew that his armies were coming, and rather than go over to the other side, he didn’t betray Babylon. He stayed at his post. He stayed in the city when it went under siege.
He knew that the Persians would win, but he didn’t know exactly on what terms or how long it would take or what would happen to him along the way. He stuck to his duty post, an old man in a pagan empire that doesn’t appreciate him, that sidelined him, and yet he keeps doing his thing.
I always wondered about Joseph. He had a job to do, which was basically enriching Pharaoh. That was his job, and he did this by abolishing private property, and I don’t feel good about that. I mean on behalf of Pharaoh and in a time of famine, he just bought up all the land and all the food, and then everyone was dependent on the Pharaoh.
Well, one problem is that our idea of the state and theirs were very different, because ours has been influenced by Christianity. For us the state is a construction of the people by contract or covenant, that exists in the abstract and which we fill with different officers from time to time. You can be president for four years and then never serve in public office again, and you’re probably not going to get rich just by being president. You have to have a side hustle.
Yeah, potentially. But in the ancient world if you were king, you were king by divine right and by divine nature. You were the son of a god, and therefore you automatically deserved everything, owned everything, and private property was a much vaguer concept. But still, taxes were not paid to a government of the people, it was paid to one particular man, who then decided to what degree he wanted to encourage, bless, and provide for his people, because if he didn’t do it at all there’s the problem of revolution and assassination and such.
The money that the king got was actually the king’s money. It wasn’t money held in trust for the people, to be used for the people. It was his own stuff, so it is after a manner capitalism, but you’re right. It’s the capitalism of the god-king sitting on the throne, which is not American capitalism either. This is the problem when you start comparing across worldviews and timelines. Sometimes you just can’t.
As to your question, “Was Joseph justified?” – I have not worked that one out myself. I’ve seen justifications and I have not found them totally convincing, but then there’s also the possibility that Joseph’s action is not meant to be a blessing to a basically pagan people, that he is enslaving them to the Pharaoh who actually confesses God to be God.
But the problem is that the Hebrew people were also enslaved, the next generation when the Pharaoh arose who knew not Joseph. He still had all those riches, and the Hebrews did not.
But then that was the set-up for God coming in with all of the miracles from Moses, and smashing the greatest empire on earth down to nothing so that God could be glorified. So arguing from providence is always chancy when God has not spelled out exactly why he has done things.
One of my elders at church would say, “It’s like Hebrew. You can only read it backwards.”
So Daniel is a lot like Joseph, and no doubt really early on when this whole thing of interpreting dreams came on Daniel probably thought, “Wow, this is a lot like Joseph. I wonder if…” That has been played out to a good deal.
We’re not told exactly if Joseph outlived his Pharaoh or not. The only hint about the Pharaoh’s age perhaps is that when he sees Jacob he basically says, “Wow, you’re old,” but it’s hard to tell what that might mean in the context.
It’s an ongoing thing in our family. My girls say, “Yeah, the guy was really old,” and then they look at me, I look back, and then they say, “Well, no, that’s not fair because you don’t look old.”
Joseph died apparently in peace, because his bones weren’t destroyed or anything. They were left alone. Then eventually – maybe immediately or soon after – there arises a Pharaoh who doesn’t know him, that is doesn’t acknowledge his God. He certainly knew who he was.
Here we have Belshazzar who came up and did not know Daniel, or pretended not to know him, and refused to know his God, but now this is a new thing. God never tells the same story twice. So just when Belshazzar is there, we don’t have an exodus of God’s people, and yet we do now that I think about it, because that is the next story. But to accomplish that, we don’t have God come in and destroy Babylon. We have God hand it over to the Medes and the Persians, to Darius or Cyrus, and he then arranges for a second exodus, so there is a lot of similarity, but it’s not quite the same story.
Again, you can’t look back at what God has done in the past and predict exactly how God will tell the story this time. Trust the storyteller, but don’t expect him to be predictable.
And so we come to chapter 6, and I guess this is a good time to start reading it –
It pleased Darius to set over the kingdom an hundred and twenty princes, which should be over the whole kingdom, and over these three presidents, of whom Daniel was first, that the princes might give accounts unto them, and the king should have no damage.
We saw in the last chapter that Babylon fell in a night. The secular historians, particularly Herodotus, tell us that Cyrus had his engineers divert the waters of the Euphrates that ran through the city, and sent his shock troops in underneath the gates, through the mud and the reeds, and they went and opened the gates and then the army came in, and basically Babylon fell without much of a struggle because they didn’t see it coming and they were all busy getting drunk, actually.
Belshazzar died that night, but Daniel didn’t die, even though Daniel was wearing this ribbon and medallion that say third ruler in the kingdom, which again suggests a link here. In chapter 8 of Daniel we read –
In the third year of the reign of king Belshazzar a vision appeared unto me, even unto me Daniel, after that which appeared unto me at the first. And I saw in a vision and it came to pass, when I saw, that I was at Shushan in the palace, which is in the province of Elam…
And he goes on and tells about a vision of a ram and a he-goat and some other things that prophesied the coming of the Persians and what lies beyond that, Greece. But for our purposes here, he was in Shushan in the palace in the province of Elam. At that point, Elam was a province of Babylon. Shushan, the palace, is where the book of Esther is set.
It’s the Persian capital at that point, so Daniel had been traveling in those regions. The obvious thing – unless he was turned into a simple messenger, which at his age would be kind of dumb – is that he was probably there as an ambassador of some sort, and it is not unlikely that a rising star like Cyrus might bump into him. At least they would hear of each other.
Daniel no doubt had the same kind of reputation out there as he had at Babylon for honesty, integrity, wisdom, and fair dealings – you’d get a good deal from this guy – so that when Darius takes the kingdom and his guys bring the rulers one by one in front of Darius, there would be this, “Wait…Daniel? Is that you?”
“Okay, okay. Come talk to me. We’ve got to have coffee and I have work for you.”
He’s been working for Belshazzar and for Nebuchadnezzar before that, and Darius simply says, “You’re going to be my right-hand guy because I trust you.” There’s got to be some background there. There’s got to be something whereby he knows. You might reach down into the hierarchy and pick some – what was the show where the only surviving member of the Cabinet was…
Yeah. There are times when you pick the designated survivor and make him president because he knows the rules but he’s got no political aspirations. But Daniel, third ruler of the kingdom? Trusting such a guy?
Given Daniel’s integrity, I don’t think so in any meaningful sense of the word, unless you count being honest and fair and equitable playing both sides. I’m sure that when he tried to negotiate peace, he actually tried to negotiate peace rather than hostile takeover. Whatever he had done, he had done in such a way that Darius could depend upon him to be faithful to whoever he was working for. He knows he’s not a Babylonian, not Chaldean, that he’s Jewish.
Exactly, and it was not uncommon for kings to pull into their Cabinets people from other countries, and into their bodyguard and their cup-bearers as well, because someone from your own country may be from another noble family and have aspirations for the throne, so it’s good to have outsiders, as it were. Whatever the case, Daniel is put at the top of these people.
Darius’s first concern here is reorganizing the bureaucracy so that it is answerable to him in a reliable and speedy fashion, and he’s thinking of putting Daniel even higher up. The king thought to set him over the whole realm, probably at least over Babylon, the whole province if not just the city, maybe over the entire empire, depending how you want to read that. Well, the other people involved in this were jealous.
Then the presidents and princes sought to find occasion against Daniel concerning the kingdom, but they could find none occasion nor fault, forasmuch as he was faithful, neither was there any error or fault found in him.
That speaks to his integrity, and also to his intelligence and wisdom. Not only was he a good ol’ boy, he knew what he was doing. You couldn’t catch him on, “Well, that was well-intended, Daniel, but that was really politically very stupid.” There was none of that. He was wise, he was savvy, he knew what worked and didn’t work, he knew what would benefit his king and what wouldn’t. He knew what was honest and what was a lie, and he pursued all of it with intelligent integrity. This frustrated his enemies because they’re used to, “There’s got to be some way to blackmail the guy or get some kind of dirt on him,” but there was nothing.
We’re never told if Daniel had a wife or not. He doesn’t seem to have had, but possibly, but there’s no hint of any kind of sexual scandal or anything like that. Probably in that world it wouldn’t have mattered. So they try to come up with something else.
Then said these men, We shall not find any occasion against this Daniel, except we find it against him concerning the law of his God.
The one thing they realized that he was a stickler for was what his God said. Now, they didn’t know the law particularly, so they would have to go for something pretty straightforward and simple, and it would not be hard to find out about the whole idolatry thing. Stories of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego were still probably circulating, because if they wanted to find out anything about Daniel they would find out about his friends and the whole thing of, “We won’t bow down to this idol no matter what.” Maybe they’d seen the Veggie Tales on that one. So they have a brilliant idea.
Then these presidents and princes assembled together to the king, and said thus unto him, King Darius, live forever.
We’re going to come back to that phrase, because it means absolutely nothing from a pagan point of view. Everyone knows that kings die, and if you mean “We wish for your eventual deification,” okay, but it’s just flattery. Daniel is going to use the words later and they’re going to mean something.
All the presidents of the kingdom, the governors, and the princes, the counsellors, and the captains have consulted together to establish a royal statute and to make a firm decree, that whosoever shall ask a petition of any God or man for thirty days [it takes about 30 days to form a habit or unform one] save of thee, O king, he shall be cast into the den of lions.
This would seem strange to us if somebody said, “Congress is making a law that all prayers and other formal requests of any sort must pass through the President’s office.” We would look at them like they’re crazy. This did not sound crazy in this world because – back to the very beginning of our podcast – continuity of being. All reality is one, but some reality is more real than others – and the Cream of Wheat analogy, which I won’t repeat.
Divinity is spread in all of reality, but it’s clumped together in some places and things and objects more than others. Some objects have more divinity, more divine essence, than other things, and some people do and some structures do.
From that point of view, exactly. Sometime we should do an episode on Gene Rodenberry’s view of Jesus and Christianity and such. It’s basically Universalist Unitarianism. There’s that episode where Kirk says of the planet they’ve just left, “Christ and Caesar, they had them both, and the word is spreading only now, a philosophy of total brotherhood and total love.”
Maybe that should be our next podcast, Halting Through Star Trek. I would actually watch Star Trek if we did that.
That would be interesting. With the original series came out, a lot of young Christians said, “Oh, this is so good! They have Jesus.” They have another Jesus who is also the Son of God, and when Rodenberry was asked about this he said, “Yes, of course Jesus is divine, just like my mother is divine and my wife is divine and I’m divine and you’re divine.” It was just more continuity of being. Some people are just more in touch with their divinity. Like some people are more in touch with their feminine side, some people are more in touch with their divinity than others.
In that ancient world, divinity especially expressed itself in the king, the emperor, who was often called the Son of God. It wasn’t in Medo-Persia. Medo-Persia was a little more humble than that, but not a lot. They were servants. They would come and take the right hand of the gods and thus speak knowledge, because they’re the representatives, the mediator between the gods and men, but there was no sharp division. It wasn’t the Creator reaching to a mere creature and endowing him with covenantal responsibilities. It was a contact. Think of the picture of ET reaching out to little Elliott and touching him finger-to-finger.
In the original of Michelangelo’s work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, God’s finger does not touch Adam’s. He recognized that there’s an eternal barrier there. But here the gods touch you and ignite your divinity.
So since this was Darius’s position by nature, he did not immediately see any problem in taking this next step. Besides, in addition to the fact that he was more divine than anybody else, Babylon had brought all of the gods of the lands it had conquered back to Babylon, and they were all in the temple of Bel or Marduk, so he had immediate access to them.
Now, sometimes liberals make a big deal of this – “Yes, he sent the Jews home and sent back the temple treasures, but that was no big deal because he sent everybody’s idols back home and everybody’s stuff back home.” He did, because he saw no particular need for it, and probably after his conversion he really saw no need to have them and just sent them back their merry way.
But right now he was there, and to the Babylonian mind he had to confirm himself as the servant of Bel, and all the other people who did not have access to their idols or gods would be comforted knowing that they had a representative who would go in and speak for them. They had a mediator between God and men, so they didn’t see any political problems with this. This sounded good on all sides, with no philosophical issues.
There was a little thing that the presidents and princes had said, “We all agree.” That was a lie because they had not asked Daniel. If they had honestly said, “We all agree, except Daniel,” that probably would have caught his attention.
You said if this were to come about today where we’d have to send all our petitions to the President’s office, that would seem absurd because formal prayer has disappeared. Prayer today is internalized and silent. It’s thinking in God’s direction, rather than actually saying anything that anyone else might hear.
Yes, unfortunately often so, or when it is spontaneous and free and out loud it’s more of a ramble than any kind of formal organized petition, or it becomes for some of us very rote as we say the words either of the prayer book or the Lord’s prayer or some such thing for the millionth time, without thinking what we’re saying. There’s always that danger of turning our relationship with God into something purely mechanical and magical, or simply imaginary. We just say these things. “You mean God’s listening? I didn’t expect him to listen!”
Now, O king, establish the decree, and sign the writing, that it be not changed, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not.
The Persians did demand one thing of their king. If he’s going to represent divinity, divinity must be self-consistent and immutable. God can’t change his mind, so if this is in truth a word representing the divine mind, then once you say it it’s said and you can’t undo it. Here it’s the Medes and Persians. In Esther, by the time the Persians have asserted themselves more thoroughly, it becomes the law of the Persians and the Medes, but the same thing.
As we go through Ezra and the other books – not so much Esther, but Ezra – when another Darius comes to the throne, he is very careful. “Tell them to shut down this temple-building stuff until you hear from me again.” He learned the lesson. Always leave the loophole. Always leave yourself a way to turn the thing off once you’ve started it.
Yes. Ahasuerus trusted Haman too much on that one, so they have to find another way around that in the book of Esther.
Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.
He would climb up the stairs into some upper chamber and open his windows toward fallen Jerusalem. Solomon had spoken about the day when God’s people would be in captivity. If they prayed toward this place, even though it’s desolate now, God had promised to hear, so Daniel is observing the externals, but he’s also doing it faithfully from the heart. Like the psalmist, he prays three times a day, morning, noon and night, and he does not try to hide it. He could have. There’s nothing that said he couldn’t close the windows, but at 90 who cares? “Oh, they’re going to throw me to lions. I am so scared.”
He’d settled the issue of ultimate allegiance way back when he was a teenager. He’s not going to change things. This is not to say there’s not a time for the church to go underground, but he did not see that this for him was an issue. We don’t know what anybody else did, whether the other Jews in Babylon met together secretly or didn’t meet together for a little while, but Daniel had no problem with going on and doing what he was doing.
He knew he was being watched. The whole thing was obviously a trap. He was probably sorry that Darius got caught in it, because he would know the man and know that he didn’t mean him any ill will, but he’s going to go ahead and do what he’s going to do.
Then these men assembled and found Daniel praying and making supplication before his God.
By the way, notice it says that he prayed and gave thanks. Sometimes in the midst of tribulation and persecution that’s not the first thing on our minds. We don’t do a lot of that, but he did.
Then they came near and spake before the king concerning the king's decree. Hast thou not signed a decree that every man that shall ask a petition of any God or man within thirty days, save of thee, O king, shall be cast into the den of lions? The king answered and said, The thing is true, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not. Then answered they and said before the king, That Daniel [yeah, that Daniel] which is of the children of the captivity of Judah [yeah, that slave], regardeth not thee, O king, [they’re trying to make it personal] nor the decree that thou hast signed, but maketh his petition three times a day.
Then the king, when he heard these words, was sore displeased with himself…
Unlike Nebuchadnezzar and the whole Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego thing. This is a different sort of man we’re dealing with, and he does love Daniel and values Daniel and realizes, “I was so stupid. I walked into a trap. I didn’t see it coming. My friend’s going to die. What can I do here?” He’s probably not too happy with the people who tricked him either, but right now he’s more upset with himself for being stupid.
…and set his heart on Daniel to deliver him: and he laboured till the going down of the sun to deliver him.
So he was going through the laws and looking for a loophole, a stipulation, a precedent, something that would allow him to get around his own decree, and at the end of the day the other guys come back and say, “Uh, no. You know how this works.”
Then these men assembled unto the king and said unto the king, Know, O king, that the law of the Medes and Persians is that no decree nor statute which the king establisheth may be changed.
He has some kind of respect, we’re going to see, for Daniel’s God, but not enough to take on the assembled nobility at this point, and so he caves. He does what he said he would do. Think of Herod, “I know I swore an oath that I would give you whatever you wanted, but I didn’t realize you’d want John the Baptist’s head. Oh well, an oath is an oath, guess I have to do it.”
Then the king commanded, and they brought Daniel and cast him into the den of lions.
Why a den of lions? Because they had one, the zoo maybe, where there was a den of lions.
I’d be curious to know more about the Persian symbology, I guess. You know in ancient Roman stuff you see the leopard and it’s like, “Oh, there’s Julius Caesar.” I wonder if there’s any significance to lions.
I don’t know. There is significance in terms of the book of Daniel that we’ll get to in a bit, but I don’t know if there was within Persian culture. I’ve never run across it.
Now the king spake and said unto Daniel, Thy God whom thou servest continually, he will deliver thee.
I think the first thing to notice is that Darius knows that Daniel faithfully serves his God. How would he know that? Because Daniel didn’t make a secret of it. Daniel spoke about his God openly.
Well, he’s already broken it, but I never got that before. That’s good. That’s exactly what he’s saying. “Forget the stupid law, call in your God. Maybe he can do something, because I can’t.” Now of course he could have, but he was not psychologically in the place where he believed he could.
And he would have lost his reign, wouldn’t he, if he broke the laws of the Medes and the Persians?
Well, maybe, maybe not. There are ways of engineering things, like getting rid of all of these people all at once in a morning hour, and no one being the wiser.
Daniel had made no secret of his faith. Darius is well aware of it, and he understands very well how Daniel got to be where he is.
And a stone was brought and laid upon the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own signet and with the signet of his lords, that the purpose might not be changed concerning Daniel. 1
So everybody who comes will see, “Oh, this is tamper-proof. The emperor and all of his guys have sealed it. If we mess with it, the combined might and power of the Persian bureaucracy and Persian army is going to be after us. Uhh, we’ll leave it alone.”
Now, a couple things here before we reach the climax of the story. First of all, Satan. There’s more than meets the eye here.
Yeah, a roaring lion. He’s managed to get the emperor of the world – the Jews’ world, anyway – to shut down all prayer for a month. That would include formal worship, synagogue worship, as well as private worship, done out loud at least. And as I mentioned in passing, psychologists tell us it takes a month to establish a habit.
What Satan was wanting was a silent world, a world that stopped calling up to God, that just gave up on God and was content to appeal to the state for all of its needs.
Exactly, especially from someone who might actually be able to help you – in this case, the only one who can help.
The other thing is the mere facts of what has befallen Daniel. He is God’s prophet, and in that sense an anointed one, a messiah, and he is taken from an upper room. He is brought rather against his will, but he offers no resistance, before the man who rules the area, where he is sentenced to a death he does not deserve, and he ends up in a cave with a stone rolled in front of it – the stone sealed by the emperor. This is the story of Jesus. Like the fiery furnace, the lion’s den should remind us of the nature of sin and death.
The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings. I beheld till the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man's heart was given to it.
We’re told later that that is Babylon. Babylon is a lion. In the person of Nebuchadnezzar it had its animal heart removed and was given a human heart. That is, Nebuchadnezzar was born again. But when it first seized on Judah it was a lion, and Judah went into the lion’s mouth, as it were. It went into the lion’s den and that’s how Daniel and Israel got to be where they are. They’re in Babylon because the lion swallowed them up.
What happens? Isn’t that death when the lion swallows you? When you find yourself in the lion’s den with hungry lions, isn’t death certain? How do you get out of that? It takes a miracle. It takes resurrection.
Here you can think also of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones, and they were very dry.
The lions were very hungry. We’ll see the bones of the other people here in just a second. Babylon like Egypt was not simply the land of bondage, it was death, it was Satan’s kingdom, it was hell, it was God’s curse, God cutting his people off from his presence.
And yet, as in the case of the fiery furnace where the Son of God appeared amongst them, with them, here God sends his angel to be with Daniel throughout the night, that though he is in fact there, he survives and he’s coming out again. It’s the enemies that are going to be destroyed by the lions.
There is a further preaching of the gospel here. The fiery furnace and the lion’s den both point to the exodus that Cyrus is about to initiate when he sends God’s people, resurrected as it were, out of captivity and back to the Promised Land, but it points beyond that to the resurrection of Christ, who described his own death and resurrection as an exodos in his conversation with Moses and Elijah at the Mount of Transfiguration.
So this is not just a good morality tale, that if you are faithful to God and pray three times a day no matter what, God will save you from everything. That’s not the point here. The point is to preach the gospel to us. We have a God who can bring us back from death, from the most horrible kinds of bondage, and he will not desert us. We’re even shown in picture form what that looks like when Jesus went to the cross and into the tomb.
Then the king went to his palace and passed the night fasting, neither were instruments of music brought before him [he’s really in a bad mood, he’s very sad], and his sleep went from him. [It’s a long night.] Then the king arose very early in the morning and went in haste unto the den of lions. [As soon as it qualifies as morning by any technicality, he’s there.]
And when he came to the den, he cried with a lamentable voice unto Daniel, and the king spake and said to Daniel, O Daniel, servant of the living God [as opposed to all of the gods of wood and stone, which are definitely not living] is thy God whom thou servest continually able to deliver thee from the lions? Then said Daniel unto the king, O king, live forever.
In his mouth it’s not vain flattery. He really means it. He’s offering him the gospel. “King, receive my God as your God and have eternal life.”
Side note on living God: There’s a book in the Apocrypha called Bel and the Dragon, which is fan fiction on Daniel. In both cases, Daniel is confronted with some thing, an idol that seems to consume food. Even if you put the food and lock the room, the food is gone the next day, so obviously it’s the idol that’s eating it. In another case a dragon, which either could have been one of the last dinosaurs in that area or it might have been mechanical, depending on how you read it, but in that story it’s Darius again, and the contention of both points is, “This is a living god,” Darius says of his idols. Now, he didn’t have idols. The Persians didn’t worship idols, but for the sake of the fan fiction that’s the storyline.
In both cases, Daniel is able to, in one case, reveal the secret of how the idol actually works, and the other of blowing up the dragon by stuffing its mouth full of gooey stuff.
Yes, but again the point of contention with the pagan world is, “Our God is alive. Your god is not. Your god is dead. Your god doesn’t do anything. Your god just sits there.”
“Yeah, okay. He’s like a giant lizard. Let me stuff something in his mouth and you’ll have a gas attack at night.”
The fact is that our God is a living God. He’s not an abstract concept, he’s not an idea, he’s not a force, he is life itself. He is living and therefore fruitful. He begets his Son. He breathes forth his Spirit. He is at rest and yet ever-active, as Augustine says at the end of his Confessions.
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.
A lot of people would say, “You did. You were a rabble-rouser. You got your friend in trouble. Why couldn’t you at least just close the windows and make it all nice?”
“Because my God did not require that of me. Obeying the civil authorities doesn’t go that far. It’s not my fault that he walked into the trap or that they sprang it on him. I didn’t do the hurt, they did.”
And interestingly enough, the king realizes this. He’s not at all upset at Daniel. First of all, Daniel is alive, and secondly, miracle!
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, [sounds like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego] because he believed in his God. [He was saved by faith.]
And the king commanded, and they brought those men which had accused Daniel…
Now, we’re not told if the king simply sent his soldiers to their homes, knocked on their doors, grabbed them and brought them here. It’s possible. I know if I was one of these wicked men I would want to be there to make sure the king wasn’t pulling a fast one. I mean, Daniel comes up and there’s no scratch, then I would be inclined to say, “Well, I bet the lions weren’t even hungry. Someone drugged them or fed them or something. Let’s get some new lions and…oh…really? Aaagh!!!”
But whether it was that or whether the king just had them dragged out of bed and brought there, he figures, “They tried to get an innocent man killed. That’s murder. The punishment for that should be execution by lion.”
…and they cast them into the den of lions, them, their children, and their wives [we don’t know the context; Darius thought it was just, and Daniel doesn’t seem to protest] 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. [These bones aren’t getting any better.]
It took multiple chapters for Nebuchadnezzar to come to faith in the God of Israel, the God of heaven. Darius writes this –
Then king Darius wrote unto all people, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth; “Peace be multiplied unto you. 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 forever, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed, and his dominion shall be even unto the end. 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.” So this Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius, and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian.
That confession of faith is not unlike Rahab’s confession and Nebuchadnezzar’s. When Gentiles come to know the true living God, one of the first things they pick upon is, “This God is absolutely sovereign. He’s above all gods. All other gods are nothing compared to him. He reigns in heaven and earth. He does according to his will. He overrules kings.”
Again, for Americans that doesn’t carry the same weight. “Well, yeah, a lot of people can overturn the president’s decree or executive order or veto or a bill through Congress.” No, the king was god walking on earth, and this is a God who can shut them down and overturn everything they’ve done and everything they intend to do. He’s that sovereign. There’s nothing and no one who can stand up to him.
And the context of sovereignty in kingdom terms – I think the Calvinist tradition, or the neo-Calvinist tradition, the emphasis there on sovereignty without defining it as it has been defined throughout history, waters it down.
It’s tempting to think that sovereign means God is the one who arranges everything. He’s the one who makes sure you find your keys when you lose them. That’s not the gospel. Yes, God does that, but that’s not what it means for him to be sovereign. It means he’s the ruler. It means he has all authority.
And the ability to accomplish his purposes and his will, both in heaven and in earth. Without such a God, we have no Savior. If God is just a senior citizen of the universe, the first among many powers, then we’re stuck. There’s nothing.
Another thing here is he delivers, he saves, he rescues, and he worketh signs and wonders. Signs and wonders from a pagan point of view were simply bubblings up of chaos from underneath, and it was a normal part of the way the world worked, because the universe is some kind of dialectical synthesis of chaos and order.
But Darius understands that signs means, “Here’s the sovereign God who orchestrates the universe, and yet can change that any way he wants it any time, to emphasize what he’s doing or what he wants done or who he approves of right now in this instant, and no one can thwart it. No one can turn it back. No one can stop it.”
It’s this kind of God he’s willing to trust and to whom he commends his entire empire. This is an official document. This is not simply a personal statement, although it is certainly that. But he has written to all peoples, nations, and languages that dwell in all the earth and is in all of his kingdom, which was fairly large at the time. And notice what he says to them, that men tremble and fear before the God of Daniel. “Be afraid of this God. Take him seriously. Don’t blow him off.”
Later in the book of Revelation when an angel goes out and proclaims the everlasting gospel, he does so in words that are a little unusual. He says, “Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of judgement has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth and the sea and the fountains of water.”
He calls it the everlasting gospel, which is to be preached to “them who dwell on the earth, and to every nation, kindred, and tongue and people,” which is not very far from what this says. So a key element in gospel preaching is to teach people the fear of God, but it’s not taught by the precepts of men, it’s taught by the death and resurrection of Christ, the spirit and power of the preaching of the gospel.
Darius, as far as I can see, is at this point a convert, and that brings us to the last verse.
So this Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius, and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian.
Historians have worried this to pieces. First, secular historians know Cyrus. They don’t know Darius, and there are things like, “Who is Darius anyway?” Evangelicals tried to come up with some good responses, based on the limited knowledge they had at the time. John Whitcomb wrote the book, Darius the Mede. It turned out later on that archeological evidence turned up that showed that his argument didn’t hold water.
There was Cambyses, Cyrus’s son, who was a candidate. There was a man who was a governor about the time, but died before any of this really happened. There was someone else who was a middle man, but none of them really fit the mold, because Darius obviously is claiming total power. He’s not saying, “Send it to me and I’ll pass it on to my boss, Cyrus.”
Back in chapter 5 the last verse says threescore and two years – he’s 62, so he’s young enough to be Cyrus, and he’s old enough to not be anybody else. So when we come to this last verse, the word ‘and,’ as happens many, many times in scripture, probably ought to be translated as ‘even.’ Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius, even in the reign of Cyrus the Persian, because way back in chapter 1 we were told that Daniel continued even unto the first year of King Cyrus.
Well, here we are and here the story of Daniel ends. There’s not enough time for someone named Darius to briefly be king and then pass it on to Cyrus. And Isaiah, when he prophesied of the coming of the Persian empire, said it will be Cyrus who will do all these things.
It’s kind of like a sandlot, where all the kids are like, “The king of crash! The Sultan of swat!”
Yeah, and we should know by now that the kings of the ancient world often had throne names and were called different things by their conquered peoples, and sometimes not all the names were polite. There are other examples in scripture, but I don’t want to waste our time with that right now. That’s a study for another time and more technicalities, but the assumption that that’s what’s going on here pulls everything together.
We’ve been dealing with Cyrus all along by his title that the Medes apparently knew him by, which was Darius. His given name was Cyrus. He is the son on the one side of a Mede and on the other side of a Persian, so he is both a Mede and a Persian and pulls the two things together, which was basically how he came to power.
As a Mede he fulfills the prophecy of Jeremiah that the Medes would destroy Babylon, and as Cyrus he fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah, who said that someone named Cyrus is going to let God’s people go and rebuild the temple. And it answers to the beginning of the book, where we’re waiting. Daniel is going to outlive the Babylonian kingdom to see Cyrus, and he does, which now makes all the more sense when we come to Ezra, which I think is where we go next.
Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying,
Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, The LORD God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all his people? His God be with him and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the LORD God of Israel, (he is the God,) which is in Jerusalem.
How did Cyrus know that God had charged him with this? The obvious thing is someone walked up to him with a scroll of Isaiah and said, “Boss, there’s something you’ve got to read,” and the obvious person to do that would be Daniel. We know that Daniel had the scrolls of Jeremiah. They’re mentioned later on, that he had been tracking the Babylonian captivity and that he knew by the prophets that the time was up, and yet things weren’t moving.
This would have been a great time for him to go in and say, “Um, in case you didn’t get the word, in case the office memo didn’t come through from heaven, here’s what God wants you to do.” Notice that although it’s true that Cyrus sent the vessels and idols of other temples home, he didn’t say this about them. He did not say, “The Lord God of heaven hath given me a charge and given me all the kingdoms of the world, and he is the God.”
It’s the problem of every time-travel movie ever. If I know this is going to happen, I shouldn’t tell the person because you can’t mess with the time strip, but it’s like Daniel has been waiting and he’s like, “Hmm, it’s not happening. Maybe I should tell him.”
According to Josephus, the priests showed Alexander the prophecies concerning him and sped him on his way to defeat the Persian empire.
Thus ends our studies in Daniel, and I believe next time we will pick up with Ezra and with the second great exodus, the return out of the Babylonian captivity.
Very cool. I look forward to that. We should probably have Bryan back with us by that point. We can hope so.
I’m going to recommend P.G. Wodehouse. I know we’ve probably already done this, but I was just thinking the other day how I want to be a better writer, so the two things I should be reading are the King James Bible and P.G. Wodehouse.
Alright, since you threw that one in my lap, I’m going to recommend reading the King James Bible, because if you can’t read it, I’m sorry, you’re to a certain degree functionally illiterate.
I know, but as a teacher, again and again I encounter people who cannot read simple English that was written not in the time of King James, but that was written 100, 200, 300 years – the Constitution, the Federalist Papers. People cannot read it. They say, “I don’t know what this means.”
In fact, one young pastor I was talking to who was kind of asking if his kids could not memorize their memory verses from the King James, but instead use the New King James or something else, and I said, “Well, we can do that, but please understand that this is going to deprive them of struggling with the root of our language, and it’s going to affect their ability to understand things that were written later.”
He said, “Yeah, you know, that’s funny. I have people in my church reading the Puritans and they really are just having trouble understanding the English.”
Maybe. That’s not even to mention all the commentaries and theological books that have been written based on the King James.
Honestly, the King James Bible is so much easier to understand than the Puritans, speaking from experience.
Yeah, and sometimes Dickens, for that matter, or the Federalist Papers. It’s not that hard.
If you want to read the New King James because it’s more comfortable, that’s great. I’m not arguing King James only, I’m simply saying if you want to understand literature in the English language, you need to read the King James and become familiar with it.
I’ve been reading Dorothy Sayers and P.D. James and Agatha Christie, and these are people whose minds are soaked in British literature. They got to be good writers, and one thing they read along the way was the King James Bible, the Authorized Version. They also read the prayer book, which comes up countless times, and is also a beautifully-written book.
There are turns of phrase that you’ll read in random places, and you’re like, “That’s from the Bible, do you know that?” I think it was in Bleak House there was one passage where he’s like, “This is like moving the ancient land markers,” and I’m like, “Why was that a big deal? Because that’s from the Bible. It’s biblical law.” Dickens is bringing in this whole religious context and communicating the weight with which this person viewed the action, and you just don’t pick up on that if you haven’t read the pages.
Yeah, if you’ve never read the Bible in the King James version, read it probably more than once, because it’s heavy going and you don’t remember it all the first time. If you’re going to read the New King James and you’re going to be faithful to that and you can only fit in one, okay, that’s great. I’d rather have you read something you do understand, but for being educated, for being literary, for understanding the literary tradition of England and America, it is the foundation. It’s the keystone. It is not Old English. It is modern English.
No, neither is Chaucer or Malory. They’re Middle English. If nothing else, pick up the Psalms and just start reading. Pick up the Sermon on the Mount and find out where common phrases came from.
This is very different from this discussion, but we’ve started reading the Inferno with my students, and some of them were talking about the so-called impossible tests that no one ever really passes. One young lady said, “Abandon all hope,” and I looked across the room and said, “What did you just say? Abandon all hope? Do you know where that comes from?”
This is a very different discussion from what you should read for devotional reading. It’s a different conversation. I can jump on-board with that recommendation, to the surprise of no one. Read your King James Bible.
We should wrap up there. Thank you so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
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