Daniel 2 The Heads Are Rolling

Daniel 2  What to do when the heads roll

1 In the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams; his spirit was troubled, and his sleep left him. 2 Then the king commanded that the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans be summoned to tell the king his dreams. So they came in and stood before the king. 3 And the king said to them, "I had a dream, and my spirit is troubled to know the dream." 4 Then the Chaldeans said to the king in Aramaic, "O king, live forever! Tell your servants the dream, and we will show the interpretation." 5 The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, "The word from me is firm: if you do not make known to me the dream and its interpretation, you shall be torn limb from limb, and your houses shall be laid in ruins. 6 But if you show the dream and its interpretation, you shall receive from me gifts and rewards and great honor. Therefore show me the dream and its interpretation." 7 They answered a second time and said, "Let the king tell his servants the dream, and we will show its interpretation." 8 The king answered and said, "I know with certainty that you are trying to gain time, because you see that the word from me is firm— 9 if you do not make the dream known to me, there is but one sentence for you. You have agreed to speak lying and corrupt words before me till the times change. Therefore tell me the dream, and I shall know that you can show me its interpretation." 10 The Chaldeans answered the king and said, "There is not a man on earth who can meet the king's demand, for no great and powerful king has asked such a thing of any magician or enchanter or Chaldean. 11 The thing that the king asks is difficult, and no one can show it to the king except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh."

 12 Because of this the king was angry and very furious, and commanded that all the wise men of Babylon be destroyed. 13 So the decree went out, and the wise men were about to be killed; and they sought Daniel and his companions, to kill them. 14 Then Daniel replied with prudence and discretion to Arioch, the captain of the king's guard, who had gone out to kill the wise men of Babylon. 15 He declared to Arioch, the king's captain, "Why is the decree of the king so urgent?" Then Arioch made the matter known to Daniel. 16 And Daniel went in and requested the king to appoint him a time, that he might show the interpretation to the king.

17 Then Daniel went to his house and made the matter known to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, his companions, 18 and told them to seek mercy from the God of heaven concerning this mystery, so that Daniel and his companions might not be destroyed with the rest of the wise men of Babylon. 19 Then the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision of the night. Then Daniel blessed the God of heaven. 20 Daniel answered and said:

"Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might.
 21  He changes times and seasons;  he removes kings and sets up kings;  he gives wisdom to the wise

and knowledge to those who have understanding;
 22  he reveals deep and hidden things;  he knows what is in the darkness,  and the light dwells with him.
 23 To you, O God of my fathers,  I give thanks and praise, for you have given me wisdom and might,

and have now made known to me what we asked of you, for you have made known to us the king's matter."

 24 Therefore Daniel went in to Arioch, whom the king had appointed to destroy the wise men of Babylon. He went and said thus to him: "Do not destroy the wise men of Babylon; bring me in before the king, and I will show the king the interpretation."

 

1.     How do we develop sufficient confidence in our faith to face the greatest horrors of life with a dependence on prayer?

2.     How do we see God setting up and deposing kings (and politicians) in our day, and how do we respond to what we see?

3.     Name some ways and places we pray with other people besides the familiar public prayer sessions at church.

Video sermon  https://youtu.be/lA3YT9Ov7d4

Zoom Online Bible Study Meeting Tuesday evening at 7:30   https://us02web.zoom.us/j/2402286476

 

Dreams can be quite weird.

Sometimes they are related to areas of stress. When under stress I get optical migraines and weird dreams. I also get weird psychedelic dreams with codeine.

In Psychology there is a whole realm of dream interpretation schemes. 
Dream analysis is a therapeutic technique best known for its use in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud viewed dreams as "the royal road" to the unconscious and developed dream analysis, or dream interpretation, as a way of tapping into this unconscious material.

Carl Jung shared some commonalities with Freud, he felt that dreams were more than an expression of repressed wishes. Jung suggested that dreams revealed both the personal and collective unconscious and believed that dreams serve to compensate for parts of the psyche that are underdeveloped in waking life.

Unlike Freud, who often suggested that specific symbols represent specific unconscious thoughts, Jung believed that dreams can be highly personal and that interpreting these dreams involved knowing a great deal about the individual dreamer.

Calvin S. Hall proposed that dreams are part of a cognitive process in which dreams serve as "conceptions" of elements of our personal lives.⁴ Hall looked for themes and patterns by analyzing thousands of dream diaries from participants, eventually creating a quantitative coding system that divided what's in our dreams into a number of categories.

According to Hall's theory, interpreting dreams requires knowing:

The actions of the dreamer within the dream

The objects and figures in the dream

The interactions between the dreamer and the characters in the dream

The dream's setting, transitions, and outcome

The ultimate goal of this dream interpretation is not to understand the dream, however, but to understand the dreamer. 

• Record your dreams. ...
• Identify how you were feeling in the dream. ...
• Identify recurring thoughts in your dreams and daily life. ...
• Consider all the elements of a dream. ...
• Put down the dream dictionaries. ...
• Remember you're the expert. ...
• You can learn a lot from even the most mundane dreams.

The self-organization theory of dreaming offers a framework distinct from psychoanalytic theories to explain how dreams are generated and operate. This theory proposes that dreams are a byproduct of the dreamer's physical and mental state during sleep, distinguishes between manifest and latent dream, and points out that the dream-work proposed by Freud is actually a result of information processing and self-organization in the sleeping brain.

 

Daniel now takes us back to the second year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, so we know the time frame falls between April 603 and March 602 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar is hardly the first national leader to receive revelation from God through a dream or vision (Pharaoh in Gen. 41; Abimelech in Gen. 20; Pharaoh-Necho in 2 Chr. 35 and 2 Kgs. 23).

1 In the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams; his spirit was troubled, and his sleep left him. 2 Then the king commanded that the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans be summoned to tell the king his dreams. So they came in and stood before the king. 3 And the king said to them, "I had a dream, and my spirit is troubled to know the dream."

Nebuchadnezzar had dreams! God gave him the dreams. The dream probably occurred during Daniel's three years of training, final exams!

The King is Disturbed by his dreams.. it appears that the dream was repeated throughout the night.

It was probably one of those repetitive dreams that seem to be repeated throughout the night. It troubled him. He kept going back to the dream. Maybe he had gone to bed anxious about his large empire and how he was going to keep himself in it.

We also learn that the king was troubled and he could not sleep. Insomnia is hardly an unknown annoyance for people with great responsibilities, but we soon learn in this chapter that stress was not the issue, rather this was a God-induced problem.

And so he consulted the academia of his wise men!

Being troubled by this dream the king calls together all of his wise men. Here was a convocation that was a new age who's who. They all came and stood before the king. He gathered together the magicians and astrologers and sorcerers and reminded them that they got paid for being wise and instructed them to tell him what he dreamed and what it meant.

The magicians take their name from a Hebrew word related to a pen or writing instrument which hints at scholarship in some written mode. We're quite familiar with the term scribes in the Bible, people who work with books, perhaps religious literature, which at that time would have been in the Sumerian language unknown to ordinary citizens of Babylon.

The enchanters (ashapim) bring the hint of spiritism connected with the history of this word. They came from their post in the wizardry department, most likely interrupted from important research related to foretelling the future by analyzing the stars. They probably dealt with matters of death and perhaps communication with the dead, clearly the experts in pathological curriculum.

The name sorcerers comes from a word used for the act of cutting, suggesting that they may have worked with pharmaceutical ingredients. This is bolstered by the use of the word pharikoi in the Septuagint, the foundation word for our term pharmacist.

The NIV translators chose astrologers as the fourth category, but these are the kasdim we have already met in chapter 1. Again it is important to distinguish between these Chaldeans and the use of that term to designate an entire race of people who lived in southern Babylonia. They become the spokespeople in verse 4, and we surely can assign them the prominent role among this interesting faculty. Here they assemble, ready to put their collective brilliance at the disposal of their king.

And the king insisted they tell him what he had dreamed and what it means.

2:4. Here we see our first language switch, from Hebrew to Aramaic, the most well-known and convenient language. All the written text of Daniel from this point to the end of chapter 7 appears in Aramaic for reasons we have already discussed (although the Chaldeans likely addressed the king in Akkadian).

Wiersbe asks "Here we are confronted with a question that sincere Bible students don't answer the same way: Did King Nebuchadnezzar forget his dream, or was he using this approach to test his counselors to see if they were authentic?"

The KJV and the Amplified Bible translate verses 5 and 8 "the thing is gone from me," which can be interpreted "the dream has left me." NASB translates that same phrase "the command from me is firm," and the NIV translates it "this is what I have firmly decided."

I have an answer: I don't know. I do know I forget dreams that I have. I wake up in the morning to tell Lorelle, I had a really interesting dream. But by the time I have said that, I've forgotten what the dream was about!

Why couldn't he remember the dream? Or why did he test these guys? It was part of God's plan to elevate Daniel and the three other young men! It was probably the thing that brought attention in chapter 1 to these three men.

The magicians and the all the wise men could not discover the dream.

It reminds me of a young doctor who starting out had a very awkward patient. He checked everything in his books. He even googled the patient's symptoms.  And he still had no answers. Finally he looked over at the patient and asked "Have you ever had this before?"  The patient answered "Yes". "Well you've got it again!"

WWW "By issuing this impossible challenge, the king was unconsciously following the plan of God and opening the way for Daniel to do what the counselors could not do."

Jerome says, "If they should be unable to tell the king what he in his mental confusion could not recall, they would also lose claim to trustworthiness in the interpretation they might give" (Jerome, 25).

So Nebuchadnezzar orders the whole lot of them to be put to death. Incidentally, Daniel and his three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, weren't present but were going to be killed too.

 

12 Because of this the king was angry and very furious, and commanded that all the wise men of Babylon be destroyed. 13 So the decree went out, and the wise men were about to be killed; and they sought Daniel and his companions, to kill them. 14 Then Daniel replied with prudence and discretion to Arioch, the captain of the king's guard, who had gone out to kill the wise men of Babylon.

 

Daniel's Prudence   He Proceeds With Care

Daniel keeps his head even though everyone else is losing theirs!

WWW "As new "graduates" among the royal counselors, they hadn't been invited to the special session about the dream. Daniel spoke to Arioch "with wisdom and tact" (NIV), just as he had spoken to Ashpenaz and Melzar (1:9–14; see Col. 4:5–6), and the chief executioner explained how serious the matter was. By doing this and delaying his obedience, Arioch was risking his own life, but the officers in the palace had learned that the four Jewish men were trustworthy. Their gracious actions and words during their three years of training were now helping to save their lives.

Arioch allowed Daniel time to speak to Nebuchadnezzar, and the king must have been surprised to see him. Apparently his rage had subsided and he was willing to make some concessions. After all, Daniel hadn't been at the original meeting, so he deserved an opportunity to obey the king's orders. No doubt Nebuchadnezzar recalled that the four Hebrews had been exceptional students and were superior to the men whose lives were now in danger. Why kill your four best counselors just because of the incompetence of the others?"

 

The key to understanding this chapter of Scripture is found in a few key phrases in Daniel 2:28-29, 45. He begins by informing us that there is a God in heaven who reveals secrets. He goes on to say that this God has made known what will be in latter days…what will come to pass after this…what will be in the future.

Daniel proceeds carefully. There is no panic here!  He isn't going to respond to the pressures!

He isn't going to run and hide and die! His future is in God's hands now matter how long or short that may be!

Daniel Prays

And Daniel hears about the king's decree he gets his friends together not to plot but to pray.

He gets them in a prayer meeting and the result was that the secret was revealed to Daniel in a night vision. (Dan. 2:19)

"The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much" (James 5:16 nkjv).

I have been reading through 2 Chronicles this week.  I have been challenged by several aspects of the history of the Jews prior to the exile to Babylon. Quite often they were faced with a crisis. Someone was coming to get them. They had a choice. Should they get help from the neighbouring Kings? Anytime they did, they got themselves under God's hand of punishment. When they trusted God against unwinnable odds, God gave them a great deliverance. When they put their trust in how they could organize things, God left them to discover how little they could actually do. When we trust God, He opens doors!

Daniel Praises.

Before Daniel goes and sorts it out with Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel Praises.

Then Daniel blessed the God of heaven. 20 Daniel answered and said: "Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might.   21  He changes times and seasons;  he removes kings and sets up kings;  he gives wisdom to the wise  and knowledge to those who have understanding;   22  he reveals deep and hidden things;  he knows what is in the darkness,  and the light dwells with him.   23 To you, O God of my fathers,  I give thanks and praise, for you have given me wisdom and might, and have now made known to me what we asked of you, for you have made known to us the king's matter."

When God's people today face a crisis, we need to follow the example of Daniel and his friends and take the matter to the Lord in prayer. Faith is living without scheming, and faith brings glory to God. Daniel and his friends couldn't take credit for what happened because it came from the hand of God. "Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me" (Ps. 50:15 nkjv).

Daniel Proclaims

After Daniel prays and praises God, then  Daniel goes before Nebuchadnezzar and lays it all out before him. He stands before the king and says, There's a God in heaven who reveals secrets and He has made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days. (Dan. 2:28)

That is the key sentence in this chapter. There is a God in Heaven!

We live in a culture that is increasingly hostile to what we believe and hold dear to our own hearts. But there is a God in heaven!

I don't understand Christians who reject Vaccines.  They want to riot in town?!?!

Do they think they can achieve something other than the culture calling them nuts?

Sometimes the powerlessness of our crises makes us feel desperate.

We may be powerless. But there is a God in heaven!

There is a God in heaven! This was an unusual designation of God that was used often after the Exile into Babylonian captivity.  God was on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, but in Ezekiel we have the vision of God leaving the holy place in the temple, leaving the temple, leaving mount Zion, leaving Jerusalem, leaving Judah into Heaven. God in heaven occurs 9 times in Daniel, 6 times in Ezra, 4 times in Nehemiah. Daniel is recognising that God had brought them to Babylon because of Judah's sin!

 

Yes, our children have pressures and temptations most of us knew nothing about in our own adolescence. But there is a God in heaven!  Yes, we are indeed confronted in the workplace daily by those who have far different moral values than do we. But, there is a God in heaven! Yes atheists attack us unfairly, But there is a God in heaven!

The rest of the second chapter of Daniel deals with the interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. We discover that the God in heaven is the God of all history. Anywhere.  Everywhere! Here! Now! Including over the crisis of Corona virus.  Including over the stupidity of humanity.

Daniel is teaching us how to live in the midst of and how to engage a pagan culture around us. In the first chapter he has shown us the importance of not giving in nor giving up nor giving out. Now, in Chapter 2, he provides us with a panorama of world history to assure us that we're on the winning side even in days when victory seems somewhat remote.

 

The Lord Of Heaven is the Lord of History.

The Lord of History is the Lord of Here and Now!

 

What are we to take from the passage?

1. When you face a crisis, don't forget there is a God in Heaven.

Therefore pray about the crisis.

2. When you face a crisis, remember God is the Lord of History.

Therefore don't be surprised of God allows you to do something responsible for His glory in the crisis.

3. When you face a crisis remember God is the Lord of Here and Now.  Ask Him to change people's hearts and lives.
4. When you face a crisis, begin where God begins, with who He is not with where you are.
5. When you face a crisis, keep your head even though everyone else is losing theirs!