View Entire Service by Clicking Here
They boasted, “God Himself could not sink this ship.” The Titanic, known as “The Millionaire Special,” left harbor on April 10, 1912. Four days later, April 14, at 11:40 at night, the 900 foot long behemoth of a ship hit an iceberg. At 2:20 AM on April 15 the ship that God Himself couldn’t sink, sank, taking 1500 crew and passengers with it.
Nebuchadnezzar was a king so self-confident, so puffed with pride that he thought nothing could destroy him or his vast empire. But he was wrong. God had warned him in a terrifying dream of a coming judgment. Daniel interprets it for him, urges him to repent of his evil ways, and now we hear the rest of the story. God is going to bring this proud ruler down.
Nebuchadnezzar is a mirror of our own proud hearts. We live in a time of incredible technological hubris or arrogance. America is proud of her great accomplishments – chocolate chip cookies, dental floss, electricity, the internet, email, mobile phones. As a nation we aren’t giving God the glory for all His blessings we’ve enjoyed.
God has always opposed the proud. If God passed a pride detector over our hearts, it wouldn’t take long to find a rich supply of arrogance and self-adulation in all of us. Pride runs thick and heavy, like giraffe saliva, through our hearts. God has heard all of us crowing like roosters over our little kingdoms, over our accomplishments. C. S. Lewis said pride is the great sin, the essential vice, the utmost evil. All the rest are fleabites. But thank God, as we’ll see, God knows how to humble the proud. And Jesus came to die for proud sinners like Paul, you, me.
We’re looking at Daniel 4:28-37. I’m dividing the narrative into three simple parts: the boast, the beast, and the blessing.
THE BOAST
Daniel 4:28-30 “All this happened to Nebuchadnezzar the king. 29 “Twelve months later he was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon. 30 “The king reflected and said, ‘Is this not Babylon the great, which I myself have built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?’
A full year has passed since God’s warning of judgment in that dream. God is patient with sinners. Jonah told the Ninevites in forty days the city would be destroyed. They repented and God relented. That’s how God is. His character never changes, but how he deals with people changes in harmony with His character. So for twelve months Nebuchadnezzar had opportunity to follow the counsel of Daniel to repent and turn from his wicked ways. He refused. God gave Noah’s generation 120 years to repent but they refused. So God brought the flood.
Now we come to Neb the Boaster in verse 30. He is jam-packed full of himself here. He is like the devil who said five times in Isaiah 14:12-15, “I will, I will, I will, I will, I will.” “I will be like the most high!” Nebuchadnezzar had this same “I” trouble. Just listen to him crow as he gloats over his accomplishments, taking all the glory to himself. He’s walking on the roof of his palace looking out over possibly the greatest city in the world, full of his building projects. “Is not this Babylon the great, which I have built? Am I not the greatest?” Doesn’t this sound like Cassius Clay, “I am the greatest”?
And why did he build all these glorious buildings, the massive double walls around the city, an outer wall of 11-17 miles, the inner wall wide enough for two chariots to pass each other? Along the walls were 260 towers and eight gates. One was the famous Ishtar Gate, 35 feet high decorated with hundreds of brightly colored animals against a glazed blue background. A ziggurat dominated the city, 288 feet high with a temple on top and a solid gold statue of Marduk weighing, according to Herodotus, 52,000 pounds. Not to mention Neb’s own spectacular palace with those hanging gardens built especially for his Median wife Amytis to make her feel more at home. All this for what? “For the glory of my majesty.”
Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! I built it, by my power, for the glory of my majesty. That’s the definition of pride. But he just epitomizes all of us. How proud we are of our accomplishments, our knowledge, our religious deeds, our nest egg. For whose majesty? For whose glory? Not for God’s glory, but for our glory. There’s a cartoon of Garfield droning on and on about himself when he finally stops and says, “Gee Pooky, I’m tired of talking about me…. You talk about me for a while.” Me, me, me, I, I, I. Preachers are not immune from this scourge of pride, making sure other preachers know how many people are attending their church or how much the new building project cost.
Well, everything is about to end for this arrogant, self-adulating proud piece of dust. Let’s put it right out there: Proverbs 16:5 flatly says, “Everyone who is proud in heart is an abomination to the LORD; assuredly, he will not be unpunished.”
THE BEAST
Daniel 4:31-32 “While the word was in the king’s mouth, a voice came from heaven, saying, ‘King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is declared: sovereignty has been removed from you, 32 and you will be driven away from mankind, and your dwelling place will be with the beasts of the field. You will be given grass to eat like cattle, and seven periods of time will pass over you until you recognize that the Most High is ruler over the realm of mankind and bestows it on whomever He wishes.’
While the word was in his mouth! God hears our bragging and boasting and stroking our egos. You can’t avoid the God of all flesh. For King Neb, it’s pay day! God raises up and puts down, and now it’s put down time. But notice how quickly it happened. Remember Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5? No sooner had they lied about their giving and BOOM, first Ananias drops dead, and then here comes Sapphira from her shopping spree with all that money they said they gave, and BOOM, she too drops dead. They praised King Herod in Acts 12 as “the voice of a god and not a man,” and immediately an angel from God struck him because he did not give glory to God! God doesn’t take a long time to get ready to do something. Six days for the universe and a moment for Nebuchnezzar.
Neb, you’re going out to live with the cattle like a beast for seven days, as God said, until you realize there is a God in heaven to whom you are responsible. Imagine if God did this to people today if they refuse to repent? This condition is called boanthropy, an ox-man. There have been cases like this. John Walvoord writes about a young man in a British hospital who spent his days roaming the hospital grounds eating grass and avoiding weeds. His hair grew long and his nails thickened. Today we’d call him a trans-animal, “I’m an ox in a man’s body.”
All this because God turned Neb’s mind over to insanity, to act like a beast because of his pride. Neb lost his mental faculties, but I don’t need to tell you that we as a nation are losing ours at a rapid rate. Carl Truman wrote his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self to answer the question, how have we come to the place where we take seriously the person who says, “I’m a woman in a man’s body?” God turns people over to a reprobate mind, which is nothing more than spiritual insanity. Insanity is when Disney removes “Welcome ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls” to their fireworks display because it might offend some people. Now it’s “Good Evening, Dreamers of All Ages.” Insanity is when government officials seriously opt for “birthing person” rather than mother. Spiritual insanity replaces the fear of God.
Daniel 4:33 “Immediately the word concerning Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled; and he was driven away from mankind and began eating grass like cattle, and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair had grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.
So God turned Nebuchadnezzar over to an insane mind in which he identifies with the cattle, eats with them, his hair grows long, wet and tangled looking like a bird’s feathers and his toe nails and finger nails look like a bird’s claws. Thomas Watson said, “He who does not love God is like a beast with a man’s head.” Psalm 73:22 says “I became like a beast before You.”
What does this tell you about pride, about boasting in your own accomplishments, about failing to give God the glory for your blessings? Whenever you hear yourself boasting to others about how much good you do, how good you are, how smart you are, how you don’t need God, remember King Neb, grazing with the cattle! They say America is guilty of systemic racism. No, America as well as all mankind is actually guilty of systemic sinful pride. The Humanist Manifesto of 1973 stated: “We find insufficient evidence for belief in the existence of a supernatural God. As non-theists, we begin with humans, not gods, nature, not deity.” Pride distorts, deceives, and destroys. How many people we know are too proud to even stop to consider the irrefutable evidence of the truths of the Bible, let alone humble their hearts before the Lordship of Jesus Christ?
THE BLESSING
Daniel 4:34-35 “But at the end of that period, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High and praised and honored Him who lives forever; For His dominion is an everlasting dominion, And His kingdom endures from generation to generation. 35 “All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, But He does according to His will in the host of heaven And among the inhabitants of earth; And no one can ward off His hand Or say to Him, ‘What have You done?’
God kept His Word. He always does. He was right on time. He always is. “At the end of that period.” God sovereignly worked in his heart so that he looked to heaven and God restored his reason and the king began to bless and praise and honor God for Who He is, the Most High and eternal God. He had a completely new view of God and of himself.
That’s what happens when God restores your reason to you. If you think you can live without God; if you believe God doesn’t exist or God doesn’t have anything to do with you; if you believe you can live your life without looking up to Christ in faith, you are living a false life. You will not be thinking properly. You’ll be living with a depraved and darkened mind, as Paul describes it in Ephesians 4:17-18.
But when God restores your reason and you look to heaven in faith, everything changes, like it did with this ancient Gentile king. The effect of God-given reason is to worship and praise and thank God. Listen to Neb: “I raised my eyes, my reason returned, and I began to bless and praise and honor God.”
Now, let’s see how Nebuchadnezzar sees God after this transformation. And ask yourself, do you see God like this? Do you have a high view of God like Nebuchadnezzar had? I think Nebuchadnezzar had a higher view of God than many professing Christians. We can learn from him.
First, God lives forever (v. 34). He is self-existing. No one made God. He is from everlasting to everlasting. As far back as you can imagine, before the sun warmed and shone on this earth, before the planets spun around the sun, before the galaxies speckled the night sky, before there was anything, there was God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Second, God’s sovereign rulership will never end, never be invaded by a superior force. His dominion and kingdom are everlasting (vs. 34).
Third, God is infinitely greater than any of His creatures (vs. 35). We humans are counted as nothing. In Isaiah 40:15, Isaiah says the nations, so mighty in their own eyes, are like a speck of dust on the scales. Have you ever shone a bright flashlight up into the sky and seen all those almost microscopic bits of dust passing through the beam? Compared to God, that’s us! Isaiah 40:17 says the nations are less than nothing. That’s a lot of nothing.
Fourth, no one tells God what to do (vs. 35). Nebuchadnezzar could have reacted to his ordeal with, “How dare God treat me like this? What did I do to deserve this? What kind of a God is this, to turn me into a beast for seven years? Who does He think He is?” No, no, no. God does whatever pleases Him and notice, no one can stop Him. “No one can ward off His hand” has the idea of a parent slapping the hand of his youngster who keeps trying to put the fork in the electrical outlet.
We don’t slap God’s hand. God is the potter, we are the clay! He is everything, we are nothing. Praise Him. We didn’t elect God; God elected us; we didn’t regenerate our own hearts; God gave us a new heart to believe in Him. Even our faith is a gift from God. You cannot deny the absolutely sovereignty and justice of God in all that He does, even though it may hurt and cause hardship. You can’t question God, “What have you done?”
Daniel 4:36 “At that time my reason returned to me. And my majesty and splendor were restored to me for the glory of my kingdom, and my counselors and my nobles began seeking me out; so I was reestablished in my sovereignty, and surpassing greatness was added to me. 37 “Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise, exalt and honor the King of heaven, for all His works are true and His ways just, and He is able to humble those who walk in pride.”
In verse 36 you see the gracious kindness of God, who restored Nebuchadnezzar and God gave him surpassing greatness. Where sin abounds, grace superabounds. What does verse 37 say? What an incredible change of heart. Instead of crowing like a rooster, Nebuchadnezzar is giving God all the glory! That’s a humbled man. He praises, exalts, and honors God as King of heaven. He justifies all God’s ways. They are true and just. God does nothing wrong, whatever the world of God-haters think or say. And best of all, God in His good grace knows how to humble the pride! Being turned into a beast was the best thing that ever happened to King Nebuchadnezzar.
SO WHAT?
We leave Nebuchadnezzar here. He died in 562 BC. He ruled 43 years. We may see him in heaven. He has become an amazing theologian. This is the same God we worship and serve today. This is the same sovereign God who brought His own Son to the cross through the hands of wicked men to purchase salvation for all those who would call upon the name of the Lord. The same God who resists the proud today gives grace to the humble. May God crush our pride. With our pride crushed, we’ll give God all the glory. We won’t even be thinking, “How great I am.” We’ll be jealous for God’s glory, not our own.
What about you? Do you walk in pride, strutting about in your own thinking, assuring yourself that you are just fine without a Savior? Won’t you bow your own heart to God in humility and receive Christ into your life as your Lord and Savior?