I'm going to blog my way through Daniel for the next couple of weeks or so with pauses on weekends to meditate on the passage we'll be looking at from Acts at Grace Church on the Sunday.
As the book of Daniel opens from the world's perspective Israel, and therefore Yahweh, is defeated. They have been utterly crushed by the Babylonians, their people carried off, the brightest and best cherry picked for Babylonian re-education and service, and even the articles from the temple looted, loaded up and taken to idol temples. The situation looks bleak.
But this opening chapter of Daniel shows us a different perspective, it peels back the veneer of the physical world and shows us the reality beyond our reality. It is there in the little turns of phrase that are deliberate but which we can easily miss: "And Yahweh gave..." (verse 2) as it speaks about Jehoaikim's defeat by Nebuchadnezzar, "God had caused" as it describes Daniel's favoured status with the official, and at the end of the chapter "Daniel remained there until the first year of King Cyrus", God is still sovereign as kingdoms rise and fall, and kings come and go, but Daniel remains because he is God's man in God's place. The writer records history as Yahweh foretold in Isaiah 39v5-7:
5 Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, ‘Hear the word of the Lord Almighty: 6 the time will surely come when everything in your palace, and all that your predecessors have stored up until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord. 7 And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.’
God is faithful to his word, he is keeping his covenant even as he sends Israel into exile (see Deuteronomy 28v47, 49, 52, 58).
This raises the question; how do I view history? Do I just settle for the physical, for what I can see? Or do I evaluate what I can see in light of the reality the Bible reveals to me? God rules, he is sovereign, world events do not take him by surprise. We need to learn to view the world around us with this dual perspective. As we do it will save us from utterly despairing because we know no matter how bad things seem God is still on the throne, he is still ruling and reigning, his kingdom will come. It will also drive us to prayer. One of the features of the book of Daniel is prayer, how often he and his friends pray or ask for prayer, how prayer is as much a part of their natural daily rhythm as eating and sleeping. That is not a coincidence, their belief in the sovereignty of our God over all things, even in a foreign land, even over world superpowers, fuels their prayer life and their active costly risk taking stand and service. They know that the LORD is king, we need know no less today.
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