Lesson 16 - Daniel 6

[Music] Daniel chapter 6 continues that part of the book that was written in Aramaic so we find that the focus is on the Gentile captors of Juna and those captors have now transitioned from the Babylonians to the media version coalition in other words it's transitions from the head and old to the chest and arms of silver as predicted by Nebuchadnezzar's dream statue made of four different metals now the first meeting of Persian King was Darius Dario Besh and as we discovered last week it appears that he was appointed into his position by as a king by someone who had higher authority in all paths point to that person is Cyrus the second although also known as Cyrus the Great now there's a couple of important points to understand first is that the needs and the Persians had for some years become more of a talents they were separate kingdoms but they cooperated closely together in their imperial aspirations in fact we find that the last few generations of the line of median Kings which was Darius's Grail line share the common patriarch with the last few generations of the line of Persian kings Cyrus's brought a line and that pantry art was a fellow named Cistus this ancestral tie is no doubt the basis for this unusually tight relationship between the Medes and the Persians and second is that every record discovered whether it's Babylonian the persian median Greek chronicles the the fall of Babylon into the hands of the Medes and Persians was led by Cyrus he's given credit for the for the Congress so it seems clear that for whatever his political purpose sylars appointed a member of the median Braille family to be the king over the former Babylonian Empire it's also important to understand that when Cyrus conquered Babylon it essentially joined together the former Babylonian Empire with the kingdom of media and the kingdom of Persia and that might wound up forming and even more expansive Empire however there is no indication that Darius was came over this gigantic new combined Empire rather it seems that he was king only over the portion that used to be the Babylonian Empire the kingdoms of media and Persia apparently were not included under his rule rather it seems that Cyrus controlled those two kingdoms personally as well as the newly formed Empire in its totality so even though Darius was given the title of King he functioned a lot like Joseph did when he was the Vizier of Egypt under Pharaoh thus while Darius had a great deal of autonomy in the end he was still under and beholden to Cyrus and diary - Darius began his career of King as began his career as a king he decided to set up the government of his portion of the Empire might divide it up into 120 districts each of them controlled by an administrator administrator than our Bible complete Jewish Bible is called a Viceroy and these 120 administrator were divided into three rows and each of these groups reported to one of the three Chiefs who then reported to Daris Daniel the GU who the pointed is one of those three Chiefs are Daniel was so skilled at his job and his reputation was so impeccable that Darius let it be known that he was considering taking Daniel the chief of Chiefs essentially making him second-in-command to King Darius this didn't settle well with the other two chiefs and so a member of some number of their royal a loyal love I suppose so they decided that they had to discredit Daniel however since Daniel was the epitome of administrative and moral perfection he couldn't find the slightest cause to bring complaint against it so they did something clever they convinced the King to sign into law an empire-wide decree that Daniel couldn't possibly abandon me so let's would be reading a portion of Daniel 6 and get a complete Jewish Bible that's on page 11 HOSA 1107 we're going to start reading daniel 6 at verse 6 to the end then these men said we're not gonna find any cause for complaint into this danielle unless we can find something against in regard to the law of his God so these Chiefs advice waited to send it on the king and said become king during a veg live forever all the kings all the cheese of the King come along with the prefect slice Tori's advisors and governors have met we've agreed that the king should issue a decree would he enforce the following law whoever makes a request of any God or man during the next 30 days some of you Your Majesty is to be thrown into the Lions pit now your majesty issued this to create over your signature so that it cannot be revoked as required by the law means incursions which is itself irrevocable so king Daria - signed the document and the degree became law on learning that the document had been signed Daniel at home the windows it was upstairs who were opened in the direction of your Roush Lane and there he kneeled down and three times that they prayed giving thanks before is God just as he'd been doing before then these men descended object found him making requests and pleading before his God so they went in to remind the king of his royal decree didn't you sign a law prohibiting anyone from making requests of any God or man within 30 days except yourself your majesty on pain of being under the lion pit the King answered yes that is true as required by the law of the Medes and Persians which is itself irrevocable they replied to the king that Daniel one of the exiles from Judah respects neither you your majesty north a decree whose science tension continues praying three times a day when the King heard this report is very upset he determined to save Daniel he worked until sunset to find a way to rescue her but these men descended on the king and said didn't remember your majesty that it is a law and he didn't purchase the note de creer even once issued by the king can be revolved so the king gave the word and they brought Daniel and threw him into the lion pit the king said today your God whom you're always serving will save you a stone was brought to them to block the opening of the pit and the king sealed his own sing that and with the signet of his Lords so that nothing concerning Daniel can be changed then the King returned to his palace he spent the night fasting refusing to be entertained the sweep through him early in the morning King got up hurry to the light pit on approaching the pit where Daniel was the King cried in a pain points to Daniel Daniel servant of the Living God as your God whom you're all sir we've been able to save you from the Lions Daniel answered the King may the king live forever my God sent his angel to shut the Lions mouths so they haven't heard me this is because before him I was found innocent and also I've done no hurt to you your majesty the king was overjoyed he ordered Daniel taken up in the pit so Daniel was taken up from the pit he was found to be completely unharmed because even trusted in his God then the King given word they brought those men who'd accused annual they threw them into the lion pit them their children their wives before they even reached the bottom of the pit the Lions had them in their control and report all of their bones to pieces King died in vision with all the people nations languages living anywhere on earth Shalom Roth abundant peace i herewith issue and decree that everywhere in my kingdom people are to tremble be in awe of God Danielle for he is the Living God he endures forever his kingdom will never be destroyed his rulership will last till the end he saves rescues does signs and wonders both in heaven and on earth he delivered Daniel from the power of the Lions so this Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius also during the reign of korish Silas the Persian verse 6 says that the means is deposing Daniel will be to force them to do something the conflicts become law they what the king decide because of them also conflict with the law of Daniels God and when he does when he know what they know he's gonna do which is to obey the law of his God with law king they'll happen they'll finally have that cause to get rid of him what law of Daniels God are they talking about it's obvious the law of Moses the Torah law now we shouldn't think that these cheese do much of anything about the law of Moses rather this is meant in the sense that all God's systems have their own unique set of laws and they were well aware that perhaps the most unique the most visible law among the Jews was that they had only one God to worship and that God didn't allow the worship of any other gods this reality was especially highlighted in Nebuchadnezzar's era when the Shadrach Meshach and Abednego refused to bow down to that golden statue and they wound up in the fiery furnace because of it but the point I want to make for the moment is that in the Bible when the term the law is applied to the Hebrew people or in the Hebrew context it's only ever speaking about one thing the law of Moses the Torah and the law that they want to be applied throughout the former Babylonian Empire is that no one is to make the request of any God or man for a full lunar cycle thirty days one month what this is referring to is prayer no one was to bring their prayer directly to their gods or through any holy man who represented their gods why the king went along with this was difficult to say what could possibly have been a legitimate purpose for this new temporary law after all while his Chiefs did it to try and give it a Daniel the story confirms the King Darius had much affection and respect for Daniel and knew that he was loyal so there must have been some logical pretext for their requests that he found reasonable nuns recorded for us on the other hand from a cultural standpoint there indeed was logic to what these conspirators suggested in the ancient Middle East a king was seen as the earthly representative if not the actual combate meant that nation's gods so the idea is that for 30 days Darius will be the sole earthly representative of the gods who can be approached by anyone in the Empire for any reason perhaps the idea was to mimic what Nebuchadnezzar did when he ordered that everyone on the Empire was to bow down to that golden statue or risk being thrown into the furnace that edict was meant as a means for all of his subjects all of Nebuchadnezzar subjects to declare allegiance to the Babylonian Empire while making it clear the despite many kingdoms and many nations that formed his Empire having their own unique set of gods Nebuchadnezzar overload them all thus it was not that anyone's gods were to be renounced they weren't even to be disrespected and this was not a law strictly pointed at the Jews everybody was to follow it but it did affect the Jews the most because the Torah law didn't permit their worshipping or accepting any other God than you Hovick even though in practice we know they did so rate early the Gentile people of that era they didn't have any product accepting everyone else's gods right along with her own but one of the subtleties of this passage is in verse 9 when these Chiefs one became to sign his name to the decree and this is because according to the median Persian law when the king signing a decree as opposed to merely orally declaring it the law became irrevocable written in stone we find this same you Asian regarding the Jewess Esther as she was still residing in Persia listen to Esther 1 1 1 19 if it pleases the King leper royal order to go out from him and let it be written among the laws of the immersion of persons in the Medes so that it can't be altered that Vashti is to never again come before King I swears and let the King give her a royal petition a position to another who's better than she verse 11 says that Daniel further the law he went home he promptly ignored it he did what he normally did he prayed to the God of Israel three times per day era window that faced Jerusalem no not to take from this Daniel tried to be a spectacle of himself or trying to draw attention he wasn't trying to make the plain he sure wasn't trying to become a martyr he was inside of his own home doing his usual ritual in the same manner in same place and of course he could be seen from the outside and these conspiring Chiefs knew this windows were but openings and stone walls of buildings and by the way it's from this passage that the Hebrew tradition was formed that wherever possible synagogues around the world are to be constructed so that they face Jerusalem this is yet another proof in itself that the Book of Daniel is not only valid and truthful because the Jews have memorialized Daniel praying towards Jerusalem in their religious thought and in their architecture and this tradition was established before issue is day only a century or so after the liberal Bible critics claim that this fictitious book was written when thinges bush people do that if they well knew or even suspected the day was a fraud the Jewish people themselves would obviously have known whether this was a new book or an older book and of course they would have known if it referred to Antiochus Epiphanes that's what liberal Bible critic says does or to the Jews time and Babylon as the book itself purports so the idea that this was a late writing from the era of the Maccabees about 165 BC becomes further exposed as the dishonest product of the secular humanist enlightenment agenda as we carefully examine each point well verse 12 tells us that of course the co-conspirators hung around outside Daniel's window and they finally spotted him praying and they immediately ran off to the King reminding him that he had signed an irrevocable law that prohibited such a thing as praying for 30 days Darius confirmed that the law could be rescinded couldn't be changed and he was downhearted to learn that the violator they brought to him was none other than Daniel now let's pause to consider an aspect of the story that shouldn't go unnoticed there's little other way to look at what Daniel did but as rebellious even though a highest act of civil disobedience he knew the degree he had a clear choice obey God's law or obey the government law doing both at the same time is impossible here we encounter a conundrum that the rabbi's and sages have always wrestled with and the New Testament products how various Jewish factions dealt with trying to square God's law with Roman law so I think the best way to put Daniels response to the Kings edict into perspective is to acquaint it with modern day application the church has had an equally hard time with the matter of civil obedience and civil disobedience of believers especially since we here in the book of Romans an unmistakable call to obey our human government in Romans 13 1 through 7 we hear this everyone is to obey the governing authorities for there is no authority that's not from God and the existing authorities have been placed where they are by God therefore for whoever resists the authorities is resisting what God is instituted those who resist will bring judgment on themselves for rulers are no terror to good conduct but too bad would you like to be unafraid of the person an authority and simply do what's good you will witness a premium for he is God's servant he's there for your benefit but if what you do is wrong be afraid because he's not it's not for nothing but he holds the power of the sword for he is God's servant there is an Avenger to punish wrongdoers another reason to obey the science fear of punishment is for the snake of conscience this is why he paid taxes where the authorities are God's public officials constantly attending to these duties pay everyone when he's old if you know the tax collector pay your taxes in with a revenue collector pay your revenue he will someone respect and respect if you know someone honor came honor then there's this from Christ in the book of mark mark 12 12 through 17 they said about to arrest him for they recognized that he had told the parable with reference to themselves but they were afraid of the crowds they left a little way next they sent some portions and Pharisees and some member of Aaron's party to have in order to trap him with it Sheila and came and said to him rabbi we know that since you tell the truths and you're not concerned about what people think about you since you paid no attention to a person's status to really teach what God's Way his does the Torah say then taxes aren't to be paid to the Roman Emperor or not but he knowing their hypocrisy said why are you trying to trap me bring a Denarius so that I can look at it they brought one and he asked him whose name and picture of these be confers they replied if she was in and give to be him Erlik belongs to the Emperor and give to God what belongs to God and he remains to do so what are believers to do when our government makes a law the directly contradicts God's law some denominations don't have too much of a problem with that since they claim that the New Testament says that under every circumstance is weird to follow our civil or local civil law and God's law takes a backseat to a do that reasoning was used in Nazi Germany his spores of thousands of Jews and Heidi were turned in by Christians for a vengeful extermination so that these leaders could be obedient to what they saw as a biblical directive to obey the law of the land no matter how unreasonable it might be therefore especially is applies to these last few years if the law of the land is for gay people to be married the church should embrace that law and perform ceremony if the law of the land is abortion on demand in the church and respected counsel against different question is morality if the law of the land there can be no employment discrimination towards homosexuals or transgender people then the church is equally obligated as secular employees to hire and include those folks at every level of ministry Canada has taken in so far as to make it illegal for pastors even inside the closed doors of their churches to teach their congregations that God is against immoral sex to speak about homosexuality to speak against it it's called heat in fact when I was in Canada a couple of years ago there was a notorious case against a pastor for doing just that he had preached a sermon against homosexuality calling it perverse in God's eyes it was reported to the police and he was arrested as a criminal you know after almost 90 days of incarceration he was finally released by agreeing never to do it again attending the tolerance school now most any believer in America over about 50 years old looks around today feels that his getting harder and harder to recognize our nation without getting into detail we have ever escalating attacks against the sovereignty of the church and against the traditional family and a government that seeks to take whatever God calls evil and make it good and whatever call God calls good and make an evil how I mean to respond do we respond at all should it only be in private prayer did Christ and Paul intended for us to meekly submit to government laws that are at times explicitly in opposition to God into his laws well that's the case then Daniel was being legalistic and he was self-righteously wrong in his actions should he have simply stopped praying the yellow pay for that month and a medians to king darius or has the way believers are to respond today to such a challenge fundamentally change it's different now since the advent of yeshua there for daniel what he did has no relevance to us times are tough questions but i believe the issue has been being overly complex and confused not because the answer is unclear but because when they're Jewish a Christian art religious doctrines and traditions have muddied the water the Old and New Testaments essentially direct us to divide away the moral issues of divinely defined right and wrong from financial and fairness issues that are all about like and dislike put it another way there is a clear dividing line between moral choice and personal preference however because much of the institutional churches claim wrongly that God's Torah laws the carefully defined sin and morality are dead and gone for Christians trying to apply God's morality and our time has become a matter of opinion and it's all about chains of pray in fact some liberal church doctor essentially sees it that each and every believer is a separate container of the Holy Spirit so then right and wrong good and evil sin and obedience even what a scripture passage means is divinely customized it's individualized it's not unique for each and every Christian and if whatever cultural definition of love is invoked in every case if that situations brought up everything's about love law all bets are off however setting that rather dubious and convoluted argument aside for the moment if we believers can just once again accept the entire biblical truths taken from this holy mint itself along with the ongoing relevance of authority of God's laws and commandments for our modern lives not only having in a ready and crystal clear definition of what morality is and what it is not in God's eyes the remaining issues concerning the matter of obedience to our government then amounts to some combination of personal preferences personal views of fairness and how much of our money in time we agreed is teeth to our government let's take that one step further in America I think the hot debates in 2013 and the manners of immigration policy in health care from a biblical perspective those two matters fall under preferences fairness and finance and despite our enormous philosophical and political differences on these issues sin evil and long doing from the divine perspective aren't at the core of those choices and options taxation is front and center for the citizens I think of every nation likely it always will be but despite all of the emotion involved this is mostly preference fairness and finance and not morality I'm confident that both the Old Testament and New Testament Testament make it clear that it is the non moral issues that are being contemplated when it comes to believers obey our human governments the non moral issues there are four heart demands a huge portion of our income as taxes God would have us pay it no matter how painful if our government enacted a law to allow non-citizens to vote for non-citizens is to have three public education free health care etc then we ought to evade no matter how unfair we might find such a thing at least in America we have an opportunity to elect people to change the most laws but until that happens we obey those laws but what about the world issues on the sexuality marriage dole tree abortion what about contraception for our daughters given without parental permission in our public schools what about the so-called morning-after pill is now available to any each girl without a prescription and the seller being legally bound to keep the transaction secret from that girl's parents sex education forced upon our elementary students that gives a secular humanist viewpoint only which inevitably leads to promiscuity and normalizes some types of sexual immorality well Christians like to say WWJD or when Jesus do that on our study of daniel east had also asked WWD what would daniel i think the answer is obvious Daniel and I also have no doubt you she would would disobey the law of land if what was deemed with what was demanded was in war and it was a direct trespass against the Lord and then accept the other having consequences could need be and that is exactly exactly what Daniel did when he continued to pray to the Lord knowing that a gruesome death was I'm doing that it is what Shadrach Meshach and Abednego did when they refused to declare allegiance to the one-world government and to its gods and by the way this is going to be expected of believers especially when the Antichrist reveals himself he blasphemes and declares himself to be God and he orders everything man a immoral an unclean thing to be followed and obeyed is that what you're going to do Revelation tells us there will be millions of believing martyrs who commit civil disobedience against this one world government and they accept the deadly consequences brothers and sisters the reality is that our lot as believers the price we pay to be saved is to obey God and let the chips fall where they may that is what taking up the cross and following Christ means the cross is not a pleasant or a lovely thing it's an execution of state the cross is not a front-row seat to a life of comfort and ease and fitting in so we should not expect an easy life as a result of our trust in Yeshua now to me go looking for trouble for martyrdom of course not we should all seek peaceful lives just to live harmoniously with our neighbors and communities wherever possible but when a government decides as Germany did recently that circumcision for instance is now Dean mutilation so it's illegal in all of its forms such a thing cannot be allowed to stand nor can it be obeyed because its intent is obvious nor will be at seed of Abraham ministries ever stop preaching and teaching God's Word concerning all forms of immoral sex abortion the sacred rights and duties of families to make moral decisions concerning our minor children and that we will never allow our judeo-christian faith to be intruded upon and suffer dilution by paying in Muslim women or any other faith system because in our government size is needed for tolerance to say whatever happens does a result of that position happens and I hope that is an attitude that will permeate the thoughts and the lives of all who are listening to this message because day by day the government intrusion into our faith becomes deeper and wider and Biblical prophecy says it's going to get worse as we get nearer to the return of our King and Messiah we have choices to make just as daniel did in verse 17 shows that the political pressure of Hong King Darius was more than he can stand up against so convinced that Daniel had indeed violated this law he reluctantly ordered that Daniel suffer sought the consequences and the law demanded death by being torn to peace peace is by lines now we get few details about how the sentence was carried out other than the Daniel's tone of clients death and then the exit was sealed up with a boulder and the Kings seal and that his Chiefs was put upon the boulder so that no one would dare try to rescue it now there's been much scholarly criticism doubt speculation about this whole lion's den incident some claimed there were no such things as lion stands constructed for such a purpose in that but sitting the site such claims the truth is we have no good idea of what this liens did look like my near Batcave how about a subterranean cavern media and gain t waters sister he stood up but the idea is that there was some inescapable place where liens were kept for the sole purpose of painful execution of the condemned now verse 19 explains that Darius was most of sentence he couldn't sleep all night he couldn't eat thus in the morning he hurried to the lion's den and slim hope that somehow daniel has survived his voice was full of anxiety when he calls for Daniel to reply if you can wondering if Daniels God had been able to deliver you from certain death Daniel hollers in response to the game Oh King live forever that he was alive is one thing but to show such respect to the king and this circumstance was another and Daniel tells the King that indeed your whole day just sent an angel the angel shut up Elias mouths and he is thus unharmed further he is innocent in God's eyes so should be innocent in the Kings I see how can Daniel claim innocence to the King when he knowingly broke his government's law under his seizure in his hole right back to our discussion of civil disobedience not to unjust laws but rather to get more laws and immoral law is not a legitimate law at all as far as a worshipper of God is concerned I can come to no other conclusion that in God's eyes his believers are innocent when we refuse for the reach of reason of righteousness to obey a law of human government that amounts to an obvious and serious trespass against God's moral laws now the king thrilled and he still has his best counselor available to him as Daniel free from the lion's den the final words of verse 24 sum up the entire point for the Lord even allowing this matter this matter to go so far for he Daniel and trusted in his God the Lord uses his potentially deadly situation to his own glory that's not the first upon chiefly because when we encounter our own life-threatening situations in our journey but we're also another slide right by the miraculous nature by which is transpired it was a supernatural act of your whole thing accomplished through the power of a heavenly angel if the Lions didn't harm Daniel the Lions weren't killed they simply didn't contaminate Daniel which certainly would have been their natural instincts this of course is another reason that the Bible critical school sites as this story being alleged admit because for them there are no such things as divine miracles but now the just execution of the co-conspirators against Daniel was brought about those who insisted on the law those who brought Daniel before the key for sentence are thrown into the Lions pit they these same lines that passively sat and lay down while Daniel was in the pit attack these people and began tearing them apart before they ever even reach the law the whole assignments yet from a divine perspective the actual accuser suffered a fate that was just in God's eyes for it is God's law that those who bear false witness and a capital case are themselves guilty of murder for which the punishment is death but what about the innocent women and children the family members were killed that's not God's justice but it is rather standard oriental justice the idea is not that these family members had committed any crime rather it is that by the entire family being destroyed the criminals bloodlines are brought to an end his name will now be forgotten and thus his eternal essence that was thought to live on after death in his descendants would be terminated this was the worst possible outcome for any human being we're gonna finish up chapter 6 get will into chapter 7 next time please rise [Music] you see [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Torah Class

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Keywords: Daniel, Old Testament, Seed of Abraham, Torah Class, End Time Prophecy, Tom Bradford, Bible Study

Id: Rj1PcUil4PU

Length: 44min 34sec (2674 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 03 2019