Copyright © 2006 by The Voice of Prophecy

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Disaster on the Outskirts of Baghdad

It’s great to be back with you again today in our first week of a new, month-long series exploring the chapters of the book of Daniel. Today we open chapter 2. As Connie just mentioned, it’s about a dream, and God gave this dream to King Nebuchadnezzar to wake him up (in more ways than one!) and to let him know what the future held from his reign on through all the great empires of history that would rise and fall one after the other, until the climax of history when Jesus returns. No dream could hold more vital information about the world and its history than this one. So if you have your Bible close to you, open it to Daniel 2 will you? And this is how I imagine it might have happened.

One night, the king who had learned so much while wide awake, discovered he could learn even more sound asleep. God gave him a dream. You probably know that part of the story well. He saw a giant sculpture of various metals of diminishing value, from a gold head to iron legs. And the feet of the statue were an oddball mix of iron and clay, something that would never hold together. The first metal must have been of great interest to the king because he lived in a palace laden with gold. And the last element, clay. must also have been of interest to him, for he lived in a city built of clay bricks; all their houses and the city’s protective walls were made from sun-dried clay bricks. These people perfected the art of clay-brick manufacture, and oven-fired, beautiful, colorful clay tiles for decoration. So this dream riveted the king’s attention. And at the climax, this highly polished statue, shimmering in the brilliant rays of the middle-east sun was shattered by a massive bolder cut from a distant mountain.

The king must have had some gnawing intuition of the meaning of the symbols, but he hardly dared to believe his thoughts were true. He called his advisors, the people that had been so clever and helpful to his father.

Now it’s at this point in the narrative that the book switches from the sacred Hebrew language, the language of God’s people in the Old Testament which they used to record sacred history, and it changes to Aramaic the secular Babylonian language. Daniel made the change because the dream he was about to reveal described a succession of secular empires that covered many secular centuries. So Daniel chose to give the explanation in a secular language. Only when we get to chapter 8 of his book does he revert to Hebrew, because there he unveils the story of the Messiah.

But back to the royal bedroom.

The king couldn’t afford to be confused at this moment. He had to know the truth, not some hocus pocus of which he knew these men were capable. Daniel wrote here in verse 5:

The king . . . said to the Chaldeans, The thing is gone from me: if ye will not make known unto me the dream, with the interpretation . . . ye will be cut in pieces.

Well, folks, that’s just the way kings were in those days. If you got a C- on your performance review, they didn’t threaten to fire you, they threw you IN the fire! A worse score didn’t get you reported to the head of your department, it got you de-headed. So, when the king wanted to know his dream, he called his wise men and gave them one option, not “My way or the highway,” but “My way or the executioner’s way!”

Suddenly everyone was wide awake! Because attached to the king’s demand came a double-barreled warning. “Succeed, and you’ll have unparalleled promotion. Fail, and you’ll be marched to the bow and arrow firing squad.” It took only seconds for the President of the council to regain his composure. He delicately suggested that the king’s request might be unreasonable. I read in Daniel 2: 10, 11:

The astrologers answered the king, "There is not a man on earth who can do what the king asks! No king, however great and mighty, has ever asked such a thing of any magician or enchanter or astrologer. What the king asks is too difficult. No one can reveal it to the king except the gods, and they do not live among men."

And with this statement, these advisors unwittingly set themselves up for the most profound self condemnation, and an admission of the supremacy of Daniel’s God beyond any of their gods.

When the king kept insisting, they produced a second ploy: they begged for time. The astrologers in the group believed that the positions of the planets made some days more auspicious for certain tasks.

That reply outraged the king and he ordered the whole bunch executed. At that moment, Arioch, the “public executioner,” responded to the king’s urgent call wondering who could possibly be in such dire trouble. He rehearsed in his mind the procedures for hustling someone out to the execution site at this unseemly hour. But when he arrived at the court and saw the pale faces of the entire council, the implications staggered him. Hearing the king’s command brought him back to the present, and he lost no time in tying up the gaggle of wise men and set off to get the stragglers in other places in the palace.

Now here’s an amazing reality. After what happened in chapter 1, the Jewish lads had become part of the court, numbered with the royal advisers. But apparently they were not yet such an intimate part and were not included in every summons of the king. So when Arioch got to Daniel’s bedroom and hustled him to his feet and out the door, Daniel, wide-eyed, wanted to know what was going on.

Striding down a hallway magnificently decorated with colorful fired tiles depicting the military victories of the king, he finally got the short version of the problem. He heard that the royal counselors had been called, they failed to satisfy the king, so they were all to die. “Hey, just a minute,” I hear Daniel calling out, “There’s a solution to this problem. We don’t all have to die. I can help the king. I can tell him what he wants to know!”

It’s a tribute to the esteem in which some members of the royal household already held Daniel, (and that included the chief executioner) that Arioch believed he should take Daniel seriously. When they arrived, I can hear him asking the king in a whisper, “Do you really want to wipe out the entire college of advisors in one early-morning blood bath? I’ve got a solution.” And I imagine he claimed full credit for saving the day. When Daniel stood before the king he simply asked for time to so he could correctly interpret the dream. The same request had been summarily denied the court counselors, but the king granted it to youthful teenager Daniel!

A confrontation was about to take place the likes of which had not been seen since Moses stood before Pharaoh and his wise men, and brought ten disastrous plagues crashing down on Egyptian society.

Daniel ran back to his companions, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and they had a serious prayer service. Not too many prayer meetings are such life-or-death occasions as this one. But these young men believed God answers pray, and they had no hesitation about putting Him to the test. And in a direct answer to their prayers, God showed Daniel the same the dream he had given the king. Friend, that’s how anxious God is to listen to us and to respond to us.

After a time of praise and thanksgiving, Daniel returned to the royal chamber while his three friends continued in prayer.

When Daniel arrived, he acted with great humility. He demonstrated that he wasn’t there to make a good impression for himself, he was there as God’s ambassador, and he gave all the credit to God for what was about to be shared.

Daniel recounted in narrative form the contents of the dream, without missing a detail of the grand panorama—a giant statue made of the metals gold, silver, brass, and iron, and the feet a mixture of iron and clay. Then at the climax of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, he saw a giant bolder miraculous carved from some distant mountain hurtled to the statue, crashed into its feet, scattering the pieces to the four winds. Then the stone grew and grew until it encompassed the entire globe.

“That’s it,” I hear Nebuchadnezzar exclaim with a broad smile (hearing the dream described must have recalled it to his mind). “You’ve got it right in every detail. Now what does it mean?”

You know, God always meets us at our point of need. This self-centered tyrant wanted to know about himself, where he fit in the grand scale of world affairs. So God honored that need. Then God shifted the king’s gaze from earthly things to heavenly realities.

And that brings us to the kings’ second question. Daniel, what does this dream mean? And to that question we might ask a deeply personal question: What does the dream mean to you and to me? The answer is about our ultimate security, yours and mine. Don’t miss the Thursday edition of The Voice of Prophecy and I’ll share Daniel’s explanation of Nebuchadnezzar’s remarkable dream.