Intro to Daniel | Daniel 1:1-2

Good morning church! Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a great holiday and is ready for all that 2025 has in store. It was good last week for us to be with my in-laws and enjoy some time away. We’ve greatly enjoyed this break and to be honest, I’m a little sad to see school starting back up and life resuming back to normal, so kids, I feel you this week. But, there’s a lot of good things to be had in front of us, and one of those things is the book of Daniel.

If you have your bible’s go ahead and open them to the book of Daniel. We are kicking off a series today on what is possibly the most famous book of the Old Testament, and just to be honest with you because it’s so famous I have as much excitement as I do fear and trepidation about this study. How many people in here have done at least one sermon series or bible study on the book of Daniel before? 2? 3? Yeah this book is extremely well known and well studied for great reasons, and I promise that I won’t be able to turn over every leaf and work through every application of this text. There’s been a lot of incredible work done and I’m thankful for it, so as we study this I want to encourage those of you who have studied this to revisit your notes and to share with me and one another previous things you’ve learned. But if you’ve studied it before then you know that it’s not necessarily the easiest book to study. It has a lot of difficult things in it.

Now kids, I’ve got a question for you: when you think of Daniel what do you think of? Daniel and the lion’s den? One of the most popular stories in the Judeo-Christian world. Some of you may think of Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, or more popularly known as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and them being thrown in the fiery furnace. Or you might think of the mysterious handwriting on the wall. The book of Daniel has some incredible stories in it! The first 6 chapters are typically viewed as narrative. We’re going to read and study each of these stories over the next 6 weeks. But then we find the more difficult things. When we get to the second half of this book, chapters 7-12, we fall into these strange visions that Daniel has.

Now we can be tempted when we encounter these stories to take the ethical lessons from them & seek to apply them to ourselves. In other words, we can be tempted to say live like Daniel! Or we can study these visions & get caught up in the details of them, and then begin to look at our times and what’s going on around us and see if it’s a fulfillment of these visions, but in doing both of those things we can miss the whole message of the book. You see while there is a significant shift in the second half of this book from the first half there’s one major theme that ties the whole book together. There’s one thing that is going to come up week after week as we look through this book and that’s the sovereignty of God. Yes, while there are stories about Daniel and his three friends and Daniel does have these visions he writes about, the main purpose of the entire book of Daniel is the same thing as the purpose of the Bible: to reveal that there is a sovereign God who desires to live in relationship with His creation. Sure, there’s several other themes that run through the book, like the Kingdom of God, pride & rebellion, but the dominating theme and the main purpose of this book is to reveal a God who is sovereignly in control of kings & kingdoms, and that he will not stand for pride & rebellion. In the midst of a world where evil seems to reign, where sin and sorrow and suffering seem to be the plight of God’s people, the book of Daniel shows us that God is sovereignly in control and in the process of redeeming His people.

With that little bit of background information here’s what I want to do this morning. We’re going to take the next little bit and study the first two verses of chapter 1 and use that as a diving board into the book. I’m not going to give you a chapter by chapter overview or even a book outline, but I do want to give you some important historical background information that is essential for us to know as we move forward. But don’t worry, this isn’t going to just be a history lesson. One of the questions I want to seek to answer today is how is this book relevant to our lives right now? I think these first two verses will help set us up for where we go from here and answer that question. So let’s read Daniel 1:1-2 and then ask the same God who worked in Daniel’s life to work in our lives as we study this, ok? Let’s read.

Daniel 1:1–2 ESV

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god.

This is the Word of the Lord. Let’s pray.

One of the things I want to do when I preach is to help you know how God’s Word applies to your life, and we’ll get there shortly, but the other thing I want to do is to teach you how to faithfully read the Scriptures on your own. This is why we spend time every series on talking about the original audience of the text or the original setting. These books were written by specific people, in a specific time & culture, for a specific purpose. We want to seek to understand the author’s original intent of the text and then take those principles and apply them to our own lives. So what then is the original author, audience, purpose and culture in which this book is written? Well that’s what the first two verses reveal to us, but they reveal to us more than that. They reveal to us that:

God is sovereignly at work

In order to understand Daniel we’ve got to rewind all the way back to Genesis. Remember that God called Abraham to be a great nation that blesses all other nations. God fulfills that promise by giving him a son Isaac who then had Jacob & Esau. Jacob then became Israel and he had 12 sons that would make up the 12 tribes of Israel. Those 12 tribes eventually wind their way to Egypt where for 400 years they not only survive but thrive and grow to be a huge nation within the nation of Egypt. Then through the Exodus God delivers Israel to Mt. Sinai in which we gives them the 10 commandments or 10 words or 10 instructions on how God’s people are to live in the land he is going to deliver them to. If they’ll do that, then they will continue to be blessed and be a blessing to others, but if they don’t, then they will suffer the punishment for their sins—which is their rejection of God’s Word and ways.

So how does Israel do at keeping God’s word & ways? They fail miserably. Like they were successful at keeping their New Land’s resolutions for all of 2 weeks…maybe it was a little longer than that, but the point is they didn’t do well. However, the same God who delivered them and revealed himself to them didn’t punish them right away. He was slow to anger and abounding and steadfast love and dealt patiently with His chosen people. However, nearly a thousand years after Israel first crossed over into the Promised Land after the Exodus God allows Israel to be conquered and Jerusalem destroyed by another nation. That’s where we find ourselves in Daniel.

If we were to look back to 2 Kings 24 we’d find the story of King Jehoiakim. He was put in place as a vassal king of Israel by the Pharaoh Neco. He taxed the Israelites and sent the money to Pharaoh to protect his place and power. He also, like his father before him, worshipped they pagan gods of the Egyptians. He did not love the Lord or keep his commandments. However, a few years into Jehoiakim’s reign a new superpower in the region rose up and defeated the Egyptians and then turned their eyes toward Jerusalem. Nubchadnezzar the king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. There wasn’t much of a battle and the Babylonians were victorious. Now, there’s your history lesson, you’re all caught up. Why does this matter?

Because if you step into this story with just that information, then the capture and overthrow of God’s people seems to be the work of a political superpower, but what are the first four words of Dan. 1:2? “And the Lord gave.” Did Nebuchadnezzar really conquer Jerusalem? Yes, but the only reason he did so was because the Lord gave. On the ground level it didn’t look or feel like it, but from a 50k foot view we know who was really in charge.

Do you see the hope that this provides for us? Do you see the hope this would’ve provided for the original reader of this book? Although it may seem like the evil king won, the only reason he won was because the Lord allowed him to. And that’s another thing worth noting here…Daniel doesn’t refer to him as YHWH. He refers to him as adonai. Adonai means the one who is in control. Daniel was deliberate in his use of God’s name and he was deliberate in his retelling of history. Even in the midst of what seemed like a really dark situation, God’s people could be reassured that God was in control. On both a personal and political level God was at work.

When we look across the globe and see wars, when we hear of governmental coups and of gangs controlling countries and even back here as we approach the inauguration of another president we can be reminded that God is sovereignly in control. Even when things seem dark and like evil is winning, as Joni Eareckson Tada said, “God permits the things he hates to accomplish what he loves.”

But it’s not just the macro level that God works on, he also works on the micro level. What we’re going to start to look at next week are the main characters of this book. The way God reveals himself and his actions throughout this book is in relationship to his people. God was at work in the life of Daniel and his 3 friends. He was at work for them and through them. For the people of Israel and for them individually God placed Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah into the positions they were in to accomplish his purpose.

So there’s two points of application that we can take from that. 1) where has God placed you to accomplish His purpose? 2) The position your in, no matter how dark, God is sovereignly in control and at work. He wants to work in you and through you for His glory and your good.

But here’s the question: what was he at work doing? If Joni Eareckson Tada is right that God permits the things he hates to accomplish what he loves, what is the thing God loves that He’s seeking to accomplish in this book? That leads us to our second observation:

God is sovereignly redeeming His people.

Now before we can ask how is God sovereignly redeeming His people I want to go ahead and spell out for you why God was having to sovereignly redeem his people. I’m sure it doesn’t seem like being overthrown, pillaged, and enslaved to a pagan king doesn’t look like redemption. But what brought Israel to this point? Why were they having to go through this dark of a period in their history, and how in the world does suffering enslavement result in redemption? Let’s take those one at a time.

What brought Israel to this point? God was redeeming Israel because they had been enslaved to sin. Their enslavement to a pagan king was just a reflection of their spiritual state of enslavement to sin. Since God is a just, promise keeping God he couldn’t let the sins of Israel go unpunished. And this wasn’t the first instance of their captivity or having to serve under other kings. But what God was doing here in Daniel was for a a greater purpose in redemptive history. God was even sovereign in his timing of redemption, but we’ll get to that more as we study this book.

What God was doing specifically here was he was keeping his promise of punishing Israel for their sins and the sins of their fathers and father’s fathers. Daniel shows us this in his prayer in Daniel 9:4-5

Daniel 9:4–5 ESV

I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession, saying, “O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, we have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules.

Daniel recognized that the reason for their captivity was their rebellion against God. So God in judgment of Israel allowed Nebuchadnezzar to besiege Jerusalem. But notice that he didn’t just conquer Jerusalem. Daniel 1:2

Daniel 1:2 ESV

And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god.

There’s a lot going on here that we need to unpack. First, what Daniel is doing is he’s showing us what is going to be a major theme that runs through both the stories of chapters 1-6 and the visions of 7-12. As Goldinjay says, “This is going to be “a book about the conflict between true worship of the true God, represented by the Temple vessels, and false worship of a false god, represented by Nebuchadnezzar’s temple and god.”

Second, historically what we need to know is that whenever kings would overthrow other nations one of the things they would do is take the gods of the conquered nation and throw them into the treasury of the god they served. This was to show that the conquering nations god was the true and sovereign god. The god of the losing nation was insufficient. He couldn’t save or protect his people.

But it wasn’t just to the treasury of any god that these articles were hauled off to; it was to the land of Shinar. What do we know about Shinar? Back in Gen. 11 Shinar was the location where the Tower of Babel was being built. Shinar then was synonymous with opposition to God; it was the place where wickedness was at home and uprightness could expect opposition.

So do you see what’s happening here? God—Adonai, the one who is sovereignly in control—is allowing the desecration or the defiling of the temple vessels used to worship him. He is willing to allow it to seem as if he’s losing to the rest of the world. As one commentary said, “God shows here that he is a God who wills to suffer shame if it might awaken his people to their danger.” And isn’t that what the exile did? It helped God’s people see that the result of their sin led to their destruction, but when they repented of their sin God would deliver them. That’s what Daniel’s prayer was about in Dan. 9. He was repenting of his and the people’s sin. The seeming conquering of Adonai, the defiling of him, led to the people’s repentance and faith in Him to save them.

Now I want to make a quick little side note and chase a rabbit; so bear with me. One of the interesting things about the book of Daniel is the genre of literature that it is. I agree with some scholars that it is prophetic apocalyptic—even the narrative portions of this. What we’re looking at in the first 6 chapters are stories—narrative. The last 6 chapters are these visions that are both prophetic (about the future) and about the end of time—apocalyptic.

Anytime you read the Scriptures it’s important to make a note of the genre of literature that it is. You don’t read and interpret a poem the same way you do an owners manual. Same thing with biblical literature. So the question then is how do we read and interpret prophetic apocalyptic literature? Is it an owners manual to be interpreted literally or is it a poem that uses symbols and images to make a point? And now you’ve found one of the challenges of interpreting Daniel. The answer is really, yes. It can be both literal and symbolic. For the most part though, it’s obvious as to which parts are literal and which parts symbolic. Now I tell you all of this now because it’ll really have a bearing on what we look at over the coming weeks, but for today the question is what does that have to do with verses 1-2?

You see what we’ve just looked at points us forward. The Israelites sin led to the desecration, or if we were to use the language of verse 8, the defiling, of their God and resulted in their captivity. But that isn’t just historical narrative it’s prophetic. We see in the story of Israel the story of all humanity but more importantly of redemption.

The problem that has existed for all people of all time is that they have rebelled against God. All of the darkness that exists in our lives is the result of our sin personally or just sin generally. Broken marriages, addiction, abuse, hurt, failing governments, sickness, cancer, and death are all a result of sin. And what’s at the heart of sin? Is it pride & rebellion like we see of King Nebuchadnezzar in chapter 3 and of his son King Belshazzar in chapter 5? Yes, but more than that. What’s at the heart of pride & rebellion? It’s faith. It’s belief that God is God and not Marduk—the Babylonian god. This is what King Nebuchadnezzar confesses after Daniel interprets his dream Dan. 2:47

Daniel 2:47 ESV

The king answered and said to Daniel, “Truly, your God is God of gods and Lord of kings, and a revealer of mysteries, for you have been able to reveal this mystery.”

So then what is at the heart of our sin? It’s a lack of faith. It’s a lack of believing that confession right there to be true. Church, what has struck me from this study and what concerns me is that there are a lot of people who will say that, God is God of gods and Lord of Kings, but they don’t really believe it. In fact, every time we sin what we’re functionally saying is that we don’t believe that to be true.

I was looking for graphics to go along with this series so I just googled Daniel sermon series to see what other churches had done. Most of them had a lion on there and this one was honestly a family favorite, but there was a church that I think was in Oklahoma that had a sub-header for their series. Their subheading for the series was “Conviction in a Culture of Compromise.” IF I was going to have a subheading for this series we’d steal that one because it’s not just true of the world Daniel and his 3 friends lived in it’s true of ours as well. What is a conviction? It’s a firmly held belief—i.e. faith—that results in a stance or an action.

I saw a post this week quoting Thom Rainer who runs a ministry to help serve churches. He does a lot of studying on church sociology. Anyways, he said that the average American church member attends worship once a moth. Meanwhile, the average American watches 20 hours of TV every week. According to google, the average American spends 2 hours a day on social media. So if we average 20 hours on TV and 14 hours on social media that’s 34 hours of our week being entirely and completely influence by screens. Now the point here isn’t that screens are bad, what goes in a man isn’t what defiles him, it’s what comes out of a man that defiles him. But what goes in a man is what shapes him.

Our friend, Will Standridge comments on this to say, “Is it any wonder so many Christians feel cold, dry, and distant in their faith? It’s not because God is absent—-it’s because we’ve neglected the time necessary to be formed by HIm. Instead of being shaped by the Word of God, we’re being conformed by the world and its gods.

[Our] calendars don’t just shape us—it teaches our kids, our family, and everyone in our orbit what we truly value. Our calendars disciple us—and they tell on us.” So when you and I look back at our calendars and how we’ve spent our time, what does it declare about our convictions? What does it say about what we believe?

But conviction goes beyond time, doesn’t it? Time is a good indicator of our convictions, but it doesn’t completely paint the picture. Our convictions aren’t just shaped by or revealed by our time, our convictions are really lived out in every moment of every day of our life. The way we talk, the way we parent our children, the way we work, the way we save our money or give generously, or the things we fear, or the things we enjoy, the things that bring us comfort or control or approval—all of that is what really displays our beliefs. Every facet of our life is influenced by our core convictions whether we articulate it that way or not. The primary point isn’t to get you in church more than once a month.

God’s goal in the captivity of Israel wasn’t so that they’d bring him more sacrifices. Hosea, a prophet that came about 100 years before Daniel told them this: Hosea 6:6

Hosea 6:6 ESV

For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

His willingness to suffer shame wasn’t so that temple attendance would be boosted. No, the purpose of the book of Daniel is to show that God is sovereign and to call his people to live out that conviction in every facet of life.

So I go back to the question that I asked just a second ago…what does your life say about your convictions? Because if we truly believe that God is sovereignly at work and sovereignly redeeming His people then our life will display that. Our countenance, our joy, our words, our actions, our hope will all be driven by that conviction. Do you truly believe that God is sovereign, or is that just lip service so that you appear to be a good, moral person to those around you?

If you can say yes to that, then praise God! But if there’s areas in your life where you aren’t living out that conviction—and I would contend that that describes everyone of us in some for or fashion then I have some really good news for you…there’s two things.

First, just like God gave up the temple vessels to be desecrated in Daniel, he gave up his own son to be desecrated for us. Isn’t that what Jesus did? Didn’t he suffer shame so that he might awaken a people for himself? So that he might call them out of darkness of worshipping false gods into marvelous light of his glorious grace? As we’ve just walked through in the month of December the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God took on our flesh in the person of Jesus. He lived a perfectly righteous life and then was humiliated on our behalf. He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace.

You see the justice of God called for Israel to suffer the wrath of God for their sins. The same is true for us, but on the cross Jesus bore the wrath of God so that we didn’t have to.

On the cross it first appeared that the Kingdom of God had been overthrown and the ultimate vessel desecrated, but three days later he rose again to show that even death itself could not defeat him. Now through the repentance of our sin and placing of our faith in Jesus we can not only be saved from the evil power that rules this earth, but we can be restored to a relationship with Adonai—with the Sovereign God who has worked to redeem. This is the gospel. It is the first good news to us, that God sent his son to redeem us from our failure to live out of our conviction.

But here’s the second good news, He also gave us Daniel to show us how to live out our convictions. So if you’re in this room going, I’m not really sure what it means or what it actually looks like for me to actually live out what I believe. What does living with the conviction that God is Sovereign in a culture of compromise look like? That’s why we’re studying this book now. So that we might become a people who first, truly believe in the Sovereign God, and second, who live that faith out.

You see the call of Daniel is to Trust God and live out your faith. That’s the main point of all of this this morning. There’s two question then that come from this. Do you truly trust God? Do you believe him to be sovereign? Do you believe he has sovereignly worked to redeem you through the cross of Christ? If not, then the call for you today is to place your faith in him. It’s to trust him to save you from the darkness of sin and into marvelous light.

If you do trust Him, then the call for you is to live out your faith. The call for us is to be a people who live out the conviction that God is sovereignly working. One of the ways you can display that conviction is to commit. It’s to commit to being here and studying this book with us. It’s grow in your understanding of our God and to see and know him, and then to trust that as you do so he will make it clear for you what all that entails. Will you commit to that?