Sermon starts at 27:04
Welcome to Daniel 2, one of the great prophetic chapters in the Bible. Someone has said, “If Revelation is the XYZ of prophecy, Daniel 2 is the ABC.” As we’ll see, God gives us an outline of history in that great statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream from the Babylonian Empire all the way down to the second coming and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. Daniel 2 gives us a sneak preview.
Daniel 2:44, In the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that kingdom will not be left for another people; it will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it will itself endure forever.
Only a sovereign God who determines and rules all of world history could possibly give us this information.
Daniel 2 is 49 verses long, so we’re going to divide this chapter into three messages. The chapter starts with a Gentile king, Nebuchadnezzar, having a nightmare that has scared him skinny. He calls in his brightest and best minds the world has to offer, and they are unable to help him. They represent man at the end of his tether. Man in himself cannot reason his way to the truth about God. He is unable to perceive spiritual things. I recently read in The Valley of Vision this powerful statement: “No human mind could conceive or invent the gospel.” You could line up the brightest human minds and they are utterly helpless to grasp the true meaning of the gospel. Only God can reveal Christ to the heart of sinful man. So here in Daniel we’re looking at the limits of human reason. Let’s get started.
A TERRIFIED KING
Daniel 2:1, Now in the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams; and his spirit was troubled and his sleep left him.
Daniel and his friends have already gone through the three years of the Royal Academy. The Babylonians measured a king’s year as his first full year. That’s why it says in Nebuchadnezzar’s second year. Now he has dreams, plural. It was probably the same dream repeated. This dream has Nebuchadnezzar so terrorized he can’t even sleep.
A word about dreams. God communicated through dreams especially in the Old Testament. The words “dream or dreams” are used over 80 times. God used dreams to communicate to Joseph and the baker and butler and Pharaoh and Solomon and more. Joseph, Jesus adopted father, had four God-given dreams. Interestingly, we don’t read of dreams in Acts. Peter and Paul both had visions, but no dreams. So if you had a nightmare recently, it wasn’t sent to you as special revelation from God like Nebuchadnezzar’s dream was. If you have a dream you think is from God, keep it to yourself; don’t write a book about it. And if you want God to speak to you, open your Bible and read!
Nebuchadnezzar’s dream is battering his soul. He’s terrorized. He had never dreamed anything like it before. It was scaring the tar out of him; he couldn’t even sleep. Here you have the greatest human ruler on earth up against the wall in desperation over a dream. Daniel describes the setting for us.
Daniel 2:29 As for you, O king, while on your bed your thoughts turned to what would take place in the future; and He who reveals mysteries has made known to you what will take place.
God is so able to affect the soul that you realize you are in trouble and need help. That’s exactly where Nebuchadnezzar is. He must have answers to this dream. The dream is fearsome and dreadful: a huge metallic image smashed to smithereens by a stone cut out without hands. What does it mean? He wants the truth. So he turns to the brightest and best minds in the Empire.
THE KING’S BRIGHTEST AND BEST
Daniel 2:2-4, Then the king gave orders to call in the magicians, the conjurers, the sorcerers and the Chaldeans to tell the king his dreams. So they came in and stood before the king. 3 The king said to them, “I had a dream and my spirit is anxious to understand the dream.” 4 Then the Chaldeans spoke to the king in Aramaic: “O king, live forever! Tell the dream to your servants, and we will declare the interpretation.”
So here they come, a parade of paid professionals in their various hats and cloaks, lining up before Nebuchadnezzar. These are the cream of the crop: scholars, conjurers who talk to the dead, sorcerers who cast spells, astrologers who study the movements of planets, phases of the moon, looking for messages from the gods. These men have great minds. One Babylonian astrologer actually calculated a year to be 365 days, 6 hours, 15 minutes, and 41 seconds, just 26 minutes and 55 seconds too long. That’s an amazing feat without modern technology. The Greek astronomer Hipparchus got it right in the second century BC.
Notice in verse 4, “Aramaic.” From this point to chapter 7:28 Daniel writes in Aramaic. Why? Aramaic was fast becoming the lingua franca or common parlance for the Middle East, and these chapters will be focusing on Gentile history. Amazingly, two fragments of the book of Daniel found in the Dead Sea Scrolls show this switch to Aramaic and then back to Hebrew in chapter 8 (John Whitcomb, Daniel, p. 39).
These guys were dream-interpreting experts. They had manuals to help them piece together symbols in dreams to show the meaning of the dreams. That’s why they are so confident, “Tell us the dream and we’ll declare its interpretation.” Ever notice how arrogant brilliant men can be? They declare without batting an eye that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, it began out of a Big Bang, and that the first human ancestors appeared between 5 and 7 million years ago. As Charles Darwin said, “Man is descended from a hairy tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in his habits.” They just pontificate with incredible authority. These wise men in Daniel’s day are sure about their interpreting skills, but they’ll shortly begin to squirm as the king throws them a curve ball.
The Great Test
Daniel 2:5-6, The king replied to the Chaldeans, “The command from me is firm: if you do not make known to me the dream and its interpretation, you will be torn limb from limb and your houses will be made a rubbish heap. 6 “But if you declare the dream and its interpretation, you will receive from me gifts and a reward and great honor; therefore declare to me the dream and its interpretation.”
Suddenly a murmur rises out of this bunch of state-paid officials from the Department of Dream Interpretation. Why? Nebuchadnezzar is no dummy, as we’ve said. He probably had suspicions about these prognosticators before. So he turns the tables on them. Now, I believe he knew what he had dreamed. He hadn’t forgotten it and wanted them to remind him. No, he’s putting these bureaucrats to the test. “I’m paying them to reveal the unknown, so if they are really good at what they do, they could not only interpret my dream but tell me what I dreamed. If I tell them, they’ll come up with some hocus pocus interpretation and how can I refute it?” Plus, he is desperate. “I don’t want your guesses, hunches, opinions, or flattery; I want the truth. Tell me the dream.”
Neb is a typical eastern monarch and capable of horrific methods of killing people. Jeremiah 29:22 tells us he roasted two Jewish rebels, Ahab and Zedekiah, in the fire. We’ll see his fiery furnace in chapter 3. So here, he’ll have them torn limb from limb. Gleason Archer describes this gruesome fate, “Their arms and legs would be tied to four powerful trees, temporarily roped together at the top. When these ropes were cut, the victim would suddenly be torn into four pieces.” Not only that, but he’ll turn their homes into rubbish heaps, maybe public latrines.
Unknown to Nebuchadnezzar, God is at work here. Proverbs 21:1 says, “The king’s heart is like channels of water in the hand of the LORD; He turns it wherever He wishes.” God is providentially moving the king to insist on them telling him the dream, which they can’t do, to lead us in the story to Daniel. God has Daniel waiting in the wings. More of that next week.
Of course, if they can tell him the dream, he’ll lavish high honors on them all. That will prove they are truly able to divine the unknown. So are they genuine or fakes? Do they really have supernatural abilities or just tell the king what he wants to hear? But Neb isn’t interested in their flattery. He is desperate and wants to know the truth. If they can’t tell the dream, he has no need of them.
MAN AT THE END OF HIS TETHER
Daniel 2:7-9, They answered a second time and said, “Let the king tell the dream to his servants, and we will declare the interpretation.” 8 The king replied, “I know for certain that you are bargaining for time, inasmuch as you have seen that the command from me is firm, 9 that if you do not make the dream known to me, there is only one decree for you. For you have agreed together to speak lying and corrupt words before me until the situation is changed; therefore tell me the dream, that I may know that you can declare to me its interpretation.”
One commentator notes this was “God’s way of showing us that the very best that men have to offer in the realm of worldly wisdom is utterly insufficient to solve even the most basic spiritual needs of the human heart” (Whitcomb, Daniel, p. 37). To whom would you go to have your spiritual concerns answered? Who could tell you about your main problem in your life, which is sin? Who could tell you that the only way to have your sins forgiven is through Jesus Christ alone. Who could tell you that the only way to eternal life is through faith in Christ alone? I looked up the thirty smartest people alive today. Would I go to them for spiritual help? Would I go to an atheistic astrophysicist for help in my walk with God? No, the preaching of the cross is foolishness to the wise of this world. The natural man’s mind is at enmity with God. The brightest and best are at the end of their tether when it comes to grasping spiritual truth.
And these smart boys, Neb’s brightest and best, have suddenly reached the end of their tether. They are getting the idea that the king wants them to actually tell them the dream, so they repeat, “Tell us the dream and we’ll gladly interpret it.” They sound like, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help. Trust us.” Whether Neb doubted them before, he does now. If they can’t tell him his dream, then he’s not going to put up with their flowery interpretation. He is desperate and demands the truth. And he knows they are stalling. He knew they colluded and are blowing smoke with their lying and corrupt words. This is kind of like a Senate hearing with Rand Paul going after Dr. Fauci about Covid government mandates. Calvin has Nebuchadnezzar saying, “Your rashness and fraud are herein detected, because you are clearly deceiving me!”
This is a bad day for these guys. You can feel the heat rising in the royal court. They’re hoping he’ll change his mind with a little more time, get this silly notion out of his mind.
10 The Chaldeans answered the king and said, “There is not a man on earth who could declare the matter for the king, inasmuch as no great king or ruler has ever asked anything like this of any magician, conjurer or Chaldean. 11 “Moreover, the thing which the king demands is difficult, and there is no one else who could declare it to the king except gods, whose dwelling place is not with mortal flesh.”
This isn’t helping. They are charging the king with injustice, unfairness, gas lighting, trying to change things around to blame the king. Dumb. Here is the bankruptcy of human reason. By way of application, man cannot penetrate the secret things of God. Unbelieving experts and professionals, scientists and financial and psychological wizards have no clue about the answer to sin and eternal judgment, just like these guys are at the end of their human powers. They knew all along they had no supernatural powers. They never have gotten messages from the gods. In fact, their gods don’t even exist.
You’ve probably heard about Bel and the Dragon, a chapter added to Daniel, part of the Apocrypha. The priests of Bel claimed their idol ate large amounts of food every night. Daniel said, “No way.” The king believed the hoax. So one night after the priests set the food out for Bel to eat and had left the temple, the king sealed the door with his king’s seal. But Daniel had ashes spread out over the floor. The next morning the seal was unbroken and the food was gone. “See,” said the king. “Bel does eat the food.” “Not so fast,” says Daniel. “Look at all the footprints on the floor, big ones and little ones.” The priests and families had entered a secret entry under a table and chowed down every night. The king was convinced and had the priests, women, and children executed. Dead gods have no power.
THE DECREE TO DESTROY THE WISE MEN
Daniel 2:12, Because of this the king became indignant and very furious and gave orders to destroy all the wise men of Babylon.
One description of Nebuchadnezzar’s wrath wasn’t enough: “indignant and very furious.” He was raging mad. What good are they if they are fakes? Neb was desperate about his dream and he wasn’t about to be hoodwinked by a bunch of hocus pocus clowns. They have played him with their tricks and gimmicks long enough. And now they have criticized him, accusing him of asking what no other king ever asked. “Kill them all.” Away with them if they can’t do what we pay them for. But God had arranged for Daniel and his friends to not be among these magicians in the court at this time. This kept them separate from the fakes and now ready to enter the story as genuine, god-fearing, God-led young men.
ONE MAN WHO KNOWS GOD
Daniel 2:13-14, So the decree went forth that the wise men should be slain; and they looked for Daniel and his friends to kill them. 14 Then Daniel replied with discretion and discernment to Arioch, the captain of the king’s bodyguard, who had gone forth to slay the wise men of Babylon;
Nebuchadnezzar had apparently forgotten about these Hebrew youths who performed so well on their oral exam. They were considered part of the royal cadre of wise men. Some think the killing of the wise men had already begun; others think they were at the point of arresting them to bring to a public execution. Either way, the wise men couldn’t tell the king his dream can be thankful that one man knows God. When no one else could give Nebuchadnezzar an answer, Daniel knew there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries (vs. 28). He will tell the king what he dreamed, as well as the interpretation.
SO WHAT?
What do we learn from this narrative? Situations like this are arranged by God to demonstrate man’s spiritual bankruptcy and impotence. The greatest intellects cannot reason their way to God’s truth. Romans 8:7 says man’s natural mind is at enmity against God. 1 Corinthians 2:13 says the natural man cannot receive the things of the Spirit; they are foolishness to him. Left to yourself, you would never come to truly know God. So where will you go for the answers to life’s big problems like sin, guilt, forgiveness, death and the after-life? Like Nebuchadnezzar, you must know the truth.
Just as God will give Daniel the answer to Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, we have a greater Daniel, Jesus Christ, who gives us the answers to eternal life.
John 11:25-26, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me will live even if he dies, 26 and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?”
Jesus also assures us.
John 6:44, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.
The Father draws us by His Spirit through His Word so that we find our forgiveness and our assurance of eternal life through faith in Christ alone. Have you put your trust in Christ alone?