Author: Bryan Richardson

Re:Verse passage – Daniel 9:1-23 (day three)

“I, Daniel, observed in the books the number of the years which was revealed as the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet.”

Daniel: fount of wisdom to kings, interpreter of dreams, faith-filled sage, courageous advisor, trustworthy friend. That’s character. How about including this descriptor: Bible reader. Daniel’s character – his seemingly unfathomable depth of benevolent goodness and quiet confidence – grew in part from how the Bible shaped his inner life and informed the way he moved in the world. He didn’t call it “the Bible.” He called it “the word of the Lord to Jeremiah,” who was a contemporary of his. But as soon as Jeremiah spoke those prophecies, they were written down. And what we have come to know as the Bible is in fact the written-down word of God. That same word which shaped Daniel’s character will shape yours.

Re:Verse passage – Daniel 8:1-27 (day three)

“Then I, Daniel, was exhausted and sick for days.”

Human beings have been designed by God to live within a framework of a sequential progression of events we call time. We can see the present, and we have experienced what is past, so we have some familiarity with both of those parts of reality. But reality isn’t merely a collection of stimuli and responses. It’s also full of meaning. Just because something is happening now or has already happened doesn’t guarantee we know what it means. Prophecy is God’s way of leading human beings to apprehend meaning by operating briefly outside their natural habitat of time. That experience interrupts a person’s perception of the flow of time, and it is disorienting, troublesome, and frightening. Revelation of the future isn’t for the faint of heart. God’s help will keep it from overwhelming us.

Re:Verse passage – Daniel 7:1-28 (day three)

“And the books were opened.”

There’s been a witness to every injustice you’ve ever suffered. Every act that has wounded your soul has been recorded. Despite the amount of power a person amasses, impunity is ultimately out of reach. Blood cries out from the ground; deeds get weighed in the balance; secrets become rooftop news; schemes lose their cover of darkness. Whether a king lords it over a subject, or whether a person in the inner circle merely looks with smug satisfaction on someone of lower station, God knows. The way others treat you matters to God, and you are therefore responsible for the way you treat others. This will all become starkly clear on that day when the books are opened.

Re:Verse passage – Daniel 6:1-28 (day three)

“Then the king went off to his palace and spent the night fasting”

Was Darius’s way of passing the night a type of prayer that God actually heard? One could claim that Darius simply engaged in an attempt to manipulate a deity: If I do A, God will be bound to do B. But the sense of the passage does not seem to indicate a cynical attitude on the part of the king. Instead, we see in Darius a genuine concern for Daniel, a high regard of God’s character, and a recognition of God’s power. Taken together with his self-denial through the night – no food, no music – Darius seems to have placed himself in an humble posture of prayer. If this was the case, God inclined himself favorably towards Darius’s righteous behavior. When anyone seeks God earnestly, God will be found.

Re:Verse passage – Daniel 5:1-31 (day three)

“Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin”

When God sees that a person can still hear him, he’s going to speak. And he spoke to Belshazzar. Actually, he sent the king an engraved invitation to pay attention to God, something Belshazzar had decidedly not done during his reign. As Aaron pointed out in yesterday’s post, Belshazzar had been keenly aware of God’s past activity, and of the particular necessity to wield power by God’s wise counsel. But Belshazzar didn’t steward power, he drank it. The kind of sophisticated and elegant communication such as dreams by which God spoke to Nebuchadnezzar apparently didn’t give Belshazzar pause, so finally God spelled it out plainly for him: Your kingdom is now at an end. Even when the news is bad, even when one has willfully rejected God, God will pursue until the last lamp goes out.

Re:Verse passage – Daniel 4:1-37 (day three)

“The Most High is ruler over the realm of mankind, and bestows it on whomever He wishes.”

God had been at work for some time revealing reality to Nebuchadnezzar. In the course of that instruction, the king had reached a sticking point at which he did not wish to comply with reality. God then let Nebuchadnezzar know that his behavior had endangered his mental and emotional health, and suffering would result. God further told the king that this time of suffering, though, would not be in vain. God did not intend to put the king in a headlock until he cried uncle, but instead to form him into the kind of person who understands that he will endanger his life and the lives of many when he attempts to live as an authority unto himself. Reality originates with God.

Re:Verse passage – Daniel 3:1-30 (day three)

“The appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods!”

Nebuchadnezzar employed his non-Hebrew cultural perspective in an honest attempt to describe what he could not explain: “one like a son of the gods.” Was he wrong? Would you just love to tweak his language (as some translations do) so that it emerges as the much more acceptable designation “the Son of God?” Nebuchadnezzar wasn’t wrong so much as he was observant. He believed that he was seeing profound evidence of something cosmic in scope. He now wanted to know more than ever what was real, where he could stand, whom he could trust. God can work with that. When someone is becoming ever more interested in the activity of the divine, God will put up with some awkward descriptors. He’ll put up with far more than that. Will you?

Re:Verse passage – Daniel 2:31-49 (day three)

“The God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed.”

The story of revolution is the story of the founding of nations, including our own. People who rise up against established authorities do so as a result of long-held animosities against long-perpetrated injustices. What would an unshakable kingdom look like? It would be, by definition, a good kingdom – one in which human flourishing is the way of life for all people. Despots and dictators and technocrats tout the resilience of their societies, but they know – everybody knows – that revolutionaries always lie in wait. The scriptures reveal that at long last there is coming on the earth a kingdom which revolution will never threaten. How can this be? Here’s how: Human rulers hold their people down. God in his glory will lift his people up.

Re:Verse passage – Daniel 2:1-30 (day three)

“Let the king tell his servants the dream, and we will interpret it.”

The royal advisors were good at what they did. They knew how monarchs thought. They’d heard countless dreams, and they knew that these visions from the unconscious followed familiar scripts involving power, pomposity, and paranoia. The interpreters would request to hear the dream not so much to learn the narrative as to gain an opportunity to discern Nebuchadnezzar’s verbal cues and which dream elements he would emphasize. The advisors’ guild would then get to work, producing an “interpretive product” that would please him. But this time, God’s communication to the king had shaken him to the core. For the first time in his life, he sought the truth rather than an engineered answer. He learned from Daniel that God will show the truth to those who seek it.

Re:Verse passage – Daniel 1:1-21 (day three)

“Please test your servants for ten days.”

Did Daniel and his friends devise their plan in order to prove the superiority of the Lord up against the various and sundry deities of Babylon and of Israel’s fellow subjugated peoples? In actuality, Daniel was in no position to stage a showdown. As a prisoner of war, his influence amounted to as much as the geopolitical realities would have allowed, which is to say, nothing. Bible readers can look at the sweep of the story and thrill at Nebuchadnezzar’s eventual transformation to a believing – or at least “Yahweh-friendly” – monarch. But that story’s arc was far from apparent in the midst of war and forced resettlement. For now, Daniel had to find his bearings. Was God still God far away? Daniel did all he knew to do. And he discovered God’s familiar presence. Daniel was home.