Lesson 6 - Daniel 2 Cont.

[Music] [Music] we left off in Daniel chapter 2 as babylons King Nebuchadnezzar had a series of disturbing dreams now beware that we're not gonna come close to finishing chapter 2 of this lesson because there's a lot more here than meets the eye the king called his flock of seers and enchanters and magicians and astrologers all together and told them he needed to have this persistent and troubling dream of his interpreted however before he'd listened to an interpretation first they had proved themselves by telling him the details of the dream itself but even more if they couldn't tell him the subject of his dream they'd be executed well after some back-and-forth between the king and his seers they admitted it was humanly impossible for any man to know another man's dreams what a king promptly ordered that all of his seers in the capital city of Babylon were to be killed their family home was destroyed because he lost any faith that they had legitimate gifts turned to interpret dreams or to see the future now this mass execution was to include Daniel and his three Jewish friends who the timing seems to indicate we're still in the midst of their three-year education it was part of the process of changing their identity from Hebrew to Babylonian now when Daniel is informed of this harsh decree he pleads with our yoke the chief of King Nebuchadnezzar's royal bodyguard to give him an audience with the king because he believes it with a little time he can satisfy the king's demand concerning his dreams Daniel and his three courts prayed to the Lord to reveal to them the secret of Nebuchadnezzar's dreams the Lord responds Daniel who were told in Chapter one had big spiritual gift of deciphering dreams and visions was naturally the one to whom God communicated the meaning and it happened in a waking vision at nighttime in a most appropriate response and you'll prayerfully thank the Lord for saving them for giving him the key to unlock the King's dream well let's reread a portion of Daniel chapter 2 if you have a complete Jewish Bible it is page 1099 Daniel chapter 2 we're gonna start reading at verse 19 then the secret was revealed to Daniel in a vision at night and Daniel blessed the God of heaven in these words blessed be the name of God from eternity past to eternity future for wisdom and power his alone he brings the changes of seasons and times he installs and opposes kings he gives wisdom to the wise and acknowledge and knowledge to those with the discernment he reveals deep and secret things he knows what lies in the darkness what light dwells with him I thank and I praise You God of my ancestors for giving me wisdom and power and revealing to me what we wanted from you for giving us the answer for the king so Danielle went to see REO whom the King had charged with the destroying the sages of Babel and said to him don't destroy the sages of Babel bring me before the king I'll give the king the interpretation well quickly are you brought Daniel before the king and told him I've found the one of the exiles of Judah who will reveal the interpretation to his majesty and the king said to Daniel would been renamed Belshazzar can you tell me what I dreamt and what it means and Daniel answered the king no sage or Exorcist or magician astrologer can tell his Majesty the secret he's asked about but there is a God in heaven who unlocks mysteries and he is revealed to King Nebuchadnezzar what will happen in the aqua Ameen here are your dream and the visions you had in your head when you were in bed your majesty when you were in bed you began thinking about what would take place in the future and he who reveals secrets is revealed to you what will happen yet the secret has not been revealed to me because I'm wiser than anyone living but so that the meaning can be made known to your majesty and then you can understand the thoughts of your own mind Your Majesty had a vision of a statue very large extremely bright it stood in front of you and it's appearance was terrifying the head of the statue was a fine gold its chest and arms of silver its trunk and thighs and bronze its legs of iron its feet partly of iron partly of clay and as you watch the stones separated itself without any human hand it struck the statue on its feet made of iron and clay and broke them into pieces then the iron the clay the bronze the silver and the gold were all broken into pieces which became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer the wind blew them away without leaving a trace but the stone which had struck the statue grew into a huge mountain filled the whole earth that is what you dreamt now we will give the king its interpretation your Majesty King of Kings to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom the power of the strength and the glory so that whenever people wild animals or birds in the air live he has handed them over to you he's enabled you to rule them all you are the head of gold but after you another kingdom will rise inferior to you then a third kingdom of bronze which will rule the whole world the fourth kingdom will be as strong as iron iron can break anything into pieces pulverize it crush it so just as iron can crush anything this kingdom will break the other kingdoms into pieces and crush them finally you saw the feet and toes made partly of pottery clay partly of iron this will be a divided Kingdom yet it will have some of the firmness of iron since you saw the iron mixed with the clay from the ground just as the toes of the feet were part of iron and part clay this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle you saw the iron mixed with clay that means that they will cement their alliances by intermarriages but they won't stick together any more than iron blends with clay in the days of those kings the God of heaven will establish a kingdom that will never be destroyed and that kingdom will not pass into the hands of another people it will break to pieces and consume all those kingdoms but it itself will stand forever like the stone you saw which without human hands separated itself from the mountain and broke to pieces the iron the bronze the clay the silver and the gold the great God has revealed to the king what will come about in the future the dream is true its interpretation is reliable then King kept nebuchadnezzar fell on his face and worship daniel he ordered that a grain offering and an incense be offered to him to daniel the king said your God is indeed the God of God the Lord of Kings a revealer of Secrets since you have been able to reveal the secret the king promoted Danielle to a high rank gave him many rich gifts made him governor of the entire province of Babel head of all the sages of Babel at Daniels request the King put shut Rock Meshach and Abednego in charge of the affairs of the province of Babel well Danielle remained in attendance to the king what's important for us to know about this prayer of thanksgiving is that daniel essentially acknowledges god's fundamental characteristics he is an eternal god he possesses all wisdom and power he controls time he brings on the seasons he is the ultimate ruler over all human governments anywhere every age and he permits Kings to reign and he removes them from power at his will the God of Israel whose name is Jehovah dispenses divine wisdom to the wise heavenly knowledge to those who have discernment but it's a given the true wisdom and discernment can only be bestowed upon a person by Jehovah all others counterfeit verse 22 explains that God knows what is hidden in the darkness and that light dwells with him the Aramaic word that is translated to English is shulker show which in Hebrews a word that we've discussed on numerous occasions beginning with Genesis 1 and that word is kosher and so check isn't referring the absence of visible light like nighttime rather it's a word that means spiritual darkness it has an evil tone to it and thus the English word light in this passage more correctly refers to enlightenment and so the verse is meant to connect with the previous one that speaks of knowledge and discernment God knows what's happening in the physical sphere of evil that is inherent to man's evil inclination and also in the spiritual sphere of evil that is Satan in his minions and yet whatever enlightenment exists in our universe or any other dimension emanates from the Lord in fact enlightenment is intrinsic to his makeup in his nature Daniels prayer ends by him identifying with the God of Israel who is also the god of Daniels ancestors and so once again this weighty issue of identity is just thrust front Center at this point now we're gonna detour for a few minutes another one of these famous detours into something that's anything but academic or trivial or frankly even easy to hear rather it's in our time prophetic and it's heading towards catastrophe I want to begin by stating a God principle which it would behoove all Christians and Jews to embrace we can only ascertain God's identity and the same lee daniels outlined for us by means of god's name and his inherent attributes that's how we know God and it might seem within judeo-christianity that discerning God's identity is a long settled matter and so to re-examine it has little bearing on modern Christianity or Judaism but in fact God's identity and thus especially as believers who we identify with has become muddled God's identity has become muddled and compromised even though most Christians and many Jews who occupy our synagogues and churches are unaware of it because of the resurgence of Islamic influence especially in the Western world there's this concerted effort mostly by well-meaning Christians to find a pathway to a middle ground in order to achieve peace with the Muslim world one of the new focuses of Christian missionary work is now aimed rightly so at the more than 1 billion Muslims on our planet and due to much failure to make very many converts a new approach is underway that seems to be achieving better results and that approach is to explain to Muslims that their God and the god of the Christians is the same God and further that their holy book the Quran is just as valid and just as worthy as is the Hebrew Scriptures and is the Christian Bible thus Christians ought to feel free to learn the customs and the prayers of Muslims join them in their mosques as they worship Allah all together one voice and that Muslims oughta reciprocate by joining Christians and churches and praying with believers the so called emergent church quite open to this concept even a new term called chrislam has been coined to identify this movement within Christianity now I personally encountered this phenomenon well over a decade ago as I was working in an executive capacity at a evangelical mega church the pastor dropped a booklet on my desk he asked me to review it and then tell him how many we needed to order it had been produced by the mission's Board of this well-respected evangelical denomination and because the annual missions week focus was only a few weeks off hundreds of thousands of this booklet had been printed in order to hand out to the many congregations that form this denomination and the book of the set of booklet essentially explained to the denominational membership but that for the sake of spreading the gospel of Christ we ought to accept that Allah is the same as Jehovah and the same as the God of Israel and that there's nothing wrong with the Quran as a holy book and that we ought to seek out Muslims to pray with and to pray with them in the name of Allah in fact Muslims have always been trained to Jesus they just didn't know it after I climbed down off the ceiling and I gathered myself I went into the pastor I showed him some underlying passages and he went red in the face and much to his credit he immediately put in a call to the missions board logged his protest and told them this booklet was unwelcome in his church now I have close contact with one of the largest nondenominational Christian missions group in the Middle East and many of their missionaries hold that same viewpoint about Allah and Islam that I just explained to you and even those missionaries who have some misgivings some reservations about it still adhere to it and practice because of the good results they seem to be getting and getting Muslims to accept Jesus but all is not as it seems quite recently I had dinner with to folks who are active in admissions to the Muslims one in particular who deals with it at the highest levels and both of them were very eager to explain that due to this relaxed and enlightened approach to Middle Eastern Arabs large numbers of Muslims have now become to use their term not mine Christian Muslims and I replied I didn't understand the meaning of that term how could a Christian also be a Muslim since they were separate religion said their response was that these Muslims believed in Jesus and they wanted peace with Christianity but they also retained their Muslim identities and thus the long sought after middle ground had finally been found so we all ought to rejoice and join in the effort a little later in the evening I talked separately to one of the men and asked him this question have you ever asked these Muslim converts who Jesus is at that point he leaned over to me he confessed but indeed that this issue was troubling to him because the Christian Muslims who professed belief in Jesus did not believe that he was God did not believe that he was the son of God or was he God's Messiah nonetheless he felt that while they did not accept the divinity of Yeshua that they were and that they were equally insistent on maintaining their Muslim identity that they were either Christians are well on their way to becoming Christians and he pointed out that many accepted modern-day Christian denominations essentially hold the same belief that Jesus was a good man but he was not divine and this also agrees with the beliefs of most of the modern schools of Bible scholars so for him case closed the situation may not have been ideal but it was a good thing nonetheless well Yeshua seems to have a different standard for answering the question who is jesus in matthew 16 13 through 17 it says this when you schewe came into the territory around caesarea philippi he answered he asked his talmud dmoz disciples who were people saying the son of man is and they said well some say johanna John is a John the Baptist and y'all come on the immerser others say le ow Elijah others say hear me out Jeremiah one of the prophets but you he said to them who do you say I am come on keifa Simon Peter answered you are the Messiah the son of the Living God Shimon bar Yohai 9 issue is said to him how blessed you are for no human being revealed this to you it was my father in heaven I can't begin to tell you how this new distorted idea among many believers among many Christian missionaries of how Jesus is to be presented to Islam even to the Western Gentiles and what constitutes faith in Christ troubles my heart I can't begin to tell you how catastrophic this is to our faith I certainly don't hate Muslims Muslims are certainly worthy of being told the good news of Jesus and being saved as much as anyone else I have Muslim friends and acquaintances most of them are good people but the old and New Testaments are clear that our identity and which God we identify with and how do identify that God is everything for a human being here at seed of Abraham we have spent years studying the Old Testament and it is overflowing with stories of Israelite kings and of their their subjects adopting elements of pagan worship of other gods of the cultures attached to them and then adding it to their worship with a God of Israel I even gave you the scholarly name for this phenomenon syncretism and what was God's reaction to all this unequivocal condemnation of it sometimes killing those Hebrews who practiced it sometimes various disasters be falling as people in the Holy Land as a supernatural judgment and in the end exile in fact this was the primary subject of the many prophets the Lord sent to warn and chastise his people Israel therefore I want to be clear in this matter all law is not the Arabic name of the God of Israel it is a uniquely Islamic God whose origination is with the Nabataeans moon-god system this isn't speculation it's just historic fact the Quran is a schizophrenic compilation of words that begins with respect for Christians and Jews but then quickly turns to demonizing us and demands that we convert to Islam or be subjugated the slaves are just simply outright murdered the attributes that create the identity of the God of Israel are the opposite of the attributes that create the identity of the God of Islam identity see it's all about identity and identity is established by means of name and attributes just like it is on your passports we are told by Christ we cannot identify both with God and with Mammon we cannot identify both with the world and with Yeshua we cannot identify both with Allah and Yahweh any more than the Hebrews were allowed to identify with both bail and Yehovah no matter how old they tried to rationalize it how much they insisted upon it for the sake of getting along with their neighbors see it's important to realize and this is gonna be the hard part for you today it's important to realize that merely saying you believe in Jesus that doesn't establish a saving faith in fact much of Islam might surprise you to know accepts the reality the historical reality that a Jewish man named Yeshua Jesus lived and that he was a good man and a great teacher so it's not that difficult of a step for them to go from a tacit approval of Jesus within the framework of Islam and becoming more familiar with his teachings adopting especially his admonitions regarding love and peace and this is because not all Muslims are warlike it is this peaceful aspect of Jesus that Christian Muslims are accepting but they do not accept His divine nature or his ability to say now as a caveat there indeed are Muslims who have sincerely converted they've become Christians I personally know a handful of them but the key is they've renounced their Muslim identity they have accepted the divine and saving nature of Messiah and they would refuse the label of Christian Muslim there for an hour day and era we have to be aware and be alert that there is a category a religious people who look admiring only to Jesus not come up with a name for these folks I call him Jesus ight they're distinct from Christians or Messianic Jews and they be looked at as separate and apart jesus i'ts are those who accept that a Hebrew man named Jesus Yeshua existed that he was a great teacher great philosopher who preached love and tolerance and that if the whole world adopted his attitude and teachings we'd have universal peace he was essentially the middle-eastern version of Gandhi and just as Gandhi wasn't divine neither was Jesus to the Jesus i'ts that doesn't make him any less worth following now sadly and what we could loosely call the church today we have several denominations that have let go of their Christianity or new ones have arisen and instead they become Jesus i'ts they want to retain the label of Christian but I'm determined not to let them have it Jesus ice may be good people and there are in deeds no better teacher to look to than Jesus but they're not saved they don't have a Holy Spirit in them therefore they are not Christians because these folks still desire to be called Christians it waters down the meaning and definition of the term Christian which Ottoman what it's always meant those who know Christ is God Lord and Savior and that sort of process of dilution of faith and a resultant disillusion of identity is essentially what King Nebuchadnezzar intended for Daniel for his three friends but Daniel refused to succumb to it and his prayer reestablishes that he remains faithful to the God of Israel who Daniel identifies fight knee means of his incomparable name attributes character in nature because outside of this there is no other means of identification Daniel was brought before the king when the king asked him the same question he did to his Chaldeans seers can you tell me what I dreamt then interestingly in verse 27 Daniel gives me and Ezer an answer similar to what the seers had given the king no no you and being he says can do that nobody not even those who possess the knowledge of the Chaldean black arts can tell the King the secrets of his dream however there is a God in heaven who can and so despite the fact that Danielle's nothing special he's no magician he's no sorcerer God's chosen to reveal to him what it is that the King dreamt and the meaning of it so that the king could understand what Yehovah revealed to Daniel is that the dream was all about the AHA murid Yoma yah which is Aramaic it's the same as the hebrew sarit i a mean a literal translation of those words neither language would be in the latter part of the days or more familiar to us the latter days so what does that term mean what's he referring to well first obviously this is referring to a time in the future um when the words were uttered second it's a concept that is entirely Hebrew it's used regularly and to Hebrew prophetic writings and of course Daniel was very familiar with those writings so whatever the King the Gentile King Nebuchadnezzar might have taken all that to mean weird to understand it the same way that all previous Hebrew writers and Daniel intended it it is referring to some future time in which God will be dealing with the human race and it includes the involvement of the Hebrew Messiah that's the latter day put another way the phrase greet hiya meme lift it out of context and standing a own that is only referring to some undefined future time any future right but in the Bible when you take it in context the phrase is in reference to a messianic Kingdom even if the initial manifestation of a specific latter days prophecy might not be in messianic times such as Jacob prophesying the outcome of the twelve tribes in Genesis 49 but instead a later manifestation of that prophecy will involve the Messiah as an illustration think of the coming of Yeshua around 30 ad he accomplished part of his prophesied mission but the fulfillment of the remainder of the prophecies concerning Messiah only happens after his second coming and of course that's yet future for us so here's an important but I admit a bit complicated principle concerning prophecies of the latter days for the people who were alive before Messiah came the first time these people who lived in this range the offer at high Amin was future to them that was their latter days for them Yeshua's first coming would be the latter days they were looking forward to what they didn't know then was that the latter day is manifested itself more than once and the second manifestation would be very far into the future for us today messiahs second a first coming why it's ancient history and we're up here somewhere is something we turn around to look back upon so the latter days for us means when Yeshua comes the second time thus in the Bible there is a first latter days and there's a second latter days the first latter days has come and gone the second latter days is yet to arrive both are fully valid but as of now only one of them's occurred well now that your head is properly swimming let's move on to verse 31 where Daniel begins to tell the King the dream he had dreamt the King saw an enormous statue there was me a shiny metal and for some unexplained reason the sight of that statue brought on a feeling of fear within the King so the statue was called terrible it was the image of a man the head was made of gold the chest and arms were made of silver the belly and thighs of bronze its legs were made of iron and feet and toes were made partly of iron partly of clay but then something else that was mysterious and terrifying habit a great stone struck that statue at its feet it caused the statue to break into many pieces were so small that they they blew away in the wind the same way that chaff does in the winnowing process this stone had been quarried foretold without the work of humans and tools in other words the stone appeared supernaturally but even more after smashing that statue a stone grew and it grew into a huge mountain that engulfed the entire planet now this statue in the dream was only an image it was not an idol it was not menacing it was not alive and it did not move the only moving object in the dream was that great stone that struck toppled and destroyed the statue in fact if we can take it completely literally the statue was fully formed and present in the dream before the stonee showed up it disintegrated no doubt the king was by now suitably impressed by Daniel's words and was all ears so let's briefly consider that statue itself first notice that it was one piece each successive part of portion melded right into the next it was a unity and what we can know and hindsight is that it represents the Gentile empires that will dominate the world in succession until messianic times the second thing to notice it is that the only undivided part of the statue is the head a head of gold the head in other words is a unified whole but beginning with the silver chest and the arms the statue becomes divided so to speak or perhaps better it becomes an amalgam of parts that is two separate arms are joined together by the chest the same occurs with the bronze belly that is the joining point of the hips and the thighs and then with the iron legs we have two separate parts the don't really seem to have a clear joining point and yet they work together the feet are different yet and that they are a mixture of iron and clay the some scholars have argued that what's pictured is a statue consisting of five parts and not four but as we move along and Daniel will see that the clear intent of Daniel was to describe a statue consisting of four parts and not five now something else we ought to note the hardness of the metals increase as we go from head to feet gold is the softest silver next then bronze finally iron further the specific gravity in other words the weight the mass of each metal that's used decreases in succession from head to foot Gold is heavier than silver silver is heavier than gold which is heavier than bronze which is heavier than iron even the value of the metals decreases as we move from gold to silver to bronze to iron so there's obvious symbolism here not only in the metals chosen but in what order they're stacked that we're gonna in time consider so next in verse 36 daniel says that now that he has told the king the dream he's going to interpret it for it now Daniel speech begins with a preamble that sounds as though it's just the customary flowery compliments that are usually heaped upon a potentate of Nebuchadnezzar's height position however that would be wrong if we can that essentially Daniel is only confirming that a prophecy the many years earlier had come to pass in verses 37 and 38 we hear Daniels saying that Nebuchadnezzar is the king of kings and to him has been given the kingdom the power the strength and the glory let's dispel a common misconception here Nebuchadnezzar was anything but evil in God's eyes he was not looked upon as a wanton barbarian who ruthlessly and wickedly harmed the Hebrews Jehovah had raised him up and given him great honor and awarded him with tremendous power part of the purpose of that power was to be used as God's means to appropriately punish his people for their syncretism their unfaithfulness and their idolatry God was well-pleased with the king and says this about him in Jeremiah Jeremiah 43 10 tell them this is what out and I say out the king of Israel says I will summon Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon take him set on set him on his throne these stones I have laid here he will come and spread his royal canopy over them but then Daniel 2:38 goes on to say that wherever people dwell on earth the animals and the birds have also been handed over to him God has given dominion over the Earth's creatures and Nebuchadnezzar that have a familiar ring to it what ought to Genesis 1:28 God blessed them and God said to them be fruitful multiply fill the earth and subdue it rule over the fishes in the sea the birds in the air of every living creature of the crawls on the earth see this speaks of the authority that God gave to Adam and Eve in the garden and eat Garden of Eden now in the sixth century BC the Lord was handing this authority over to the gentile king nebuchadnezzar but this ought not come as a surprise to us i'm sure it wasn't a surprise to Daniel because Jeremiah had prophesied exactly this and jeremiah 20:7 1 through 7 it says this at the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim the son of Yoshio the king of judah this word came to Jeremiah from out and I add and I says this to me make yourself a yoke of straps and crossbars and put it on your neck send similar yokes to the kings of Edom Moab and the people of a moans or and sidon bite meat by means of the invoice they send to Jerusalem and to ziqiao Zedekiah king of Judah give them this message for their masters by telling their invoice that I don't ice a boat the God of Israel says for them to tell this to their masters I made the earth humankind and the animals in the earth by my great power and my outstretched arm and I'll give it to whom it seems right to me for now I have given it over I've given all these lands to my servant Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon and that nations will serve Him and his son and his grandson until his own country gets its turn at which time many nations and great kings will make him their slack and for good measure to Jeremiah the Lord emphasizes in chapter 28 his intentions in 2814 for here is what Adonai is a boat the God of Israel says I have put a yoke of iron on the necks of all these nations so that they can serve Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon they will serve Him and I've given him the wild animals too so we can just forget any notion of Daniel just flattering King Nebuchadnezzar or of the king of Babylon as being comparable to let's say that Egypt's Pharaoh of the exodus essentially Daniel is merely acknowledging that what God said he do he did but notice in Jeremiah 27 7 that does God ordained Dominion is only to last three generations Nebuchadnezzar his son and his grandson after Nebuchadnezzar's dynasty is ended God's wrath will turn from his own people the babylon not because nebuchadnezzar and his offspring were seen by god is evil or that god had held off on his judgment but rather because with the kings that followed nebuchadnezzar and his royal descendants babylon ceased being reasonably accommodating to god's people they ceased serving god's purposes even though they didn't fully realize the fruits of their actions in physical reality physical reality did nebuchadnezzar actually have dominion over the whole planet no only over a vast area of the Middle East that was the center of early civilization but he did hold sway over the known world of people of that day yet whatever additional nations Nebuchadnezzar might have decided to conquered would indeed have become his with the Lord's blessing next time we'll carefully begin to dissect the meaning that Daniel assigns to the statue to each of its parts please rise [Music] [Music] you see [Music] yes [Music]

Channel: Torah Class

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

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Length: 46min 8sec (2768 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 03 2019