Sermon Tone Analysis

Daniel: On the Way to the Future

Author: Ray C. Stedman

Almost everyone looks at the book of Daniel with a sense of wonder and anticipation, because this is usually regarded as a prophetic book foretelling the future.

This is true.

The book of Daniel, together with the book of Revelation, marvelously unfolds future events as God has ordained them in the program of history.

By no means has this book yet been fulfilled, neither has the book of Revelation.

These two books, one from the Old and one from the New Testament, remarkably complement each other in their symmetry and harmony.

The book of Revelation explains the book of Daniel.

The book of Daniel lays the basis for the book of Revelation.

If you would like to know God's program for the future, it is essential that you understand this book of Daniel.

But knowledge of the future can be a very dangerous thing.

Imagine what would happen if any or all of us possessed the ability to know what is going to happen in the days ahead.

Think what an advantage that would give us in the stock market, in the buying of insurance, and in other practical matters of life.

By and large, God does not unfold the future to us -- certainly not in detail and certainly not any individual's future.

But what he does show us in the prophetic scriptures is the general trend of events and where it will all end.

Anyone who investigates this area thoughtfully, carefully, and scripturally will discover significant and helpful things about what is happening in our world today.

Everything that is happening is working out God's purposes on earth.

These will all end exactly as God has foretold.

We can understand what is happening today if we know what the prophetic program is.

God has taken two precautions in this matter of unveiling the future.

First, he has clothed these prophetic passages in symbolic language.

He has given them to us in figurative form.

That is why in these prophetic books unusual things appear, strange beasts with many different heads and horns sticking out here and there, and images of all kinds, and other indescribable visions.

You have the some thing in the Book of Revelation -- bizarre beasts with strange combinations of characteristics.

These have always puzzled people.

You can't just sit down with the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation and read them through and understand them as you would a novel.

You have to study them, taking the whole of the Bible to interpret the symbols in the books of Daniel and Revelation.

This is one of the locks that God has provided to keep curious minds from getting into these books without an adequate background in scripture.

You cannot understand what is going on in them without first knowing a great deal of the rest of the Bible.

These symbolic things are signs erected by God, and signs are given to us so that we may understand facts that are otherwise hidden.

God's program for the future is hidden from us until we spend time understanding the signs, and these books are full of signs.

A second precaution God has taken in Daniel, and even more especially in the book of Revelation, is that he doesn't introduce the prophetic section first, but brings us through six chapters into an understanding of the moral character he requires of the reader before the prophetic program can begin to make sense.

In other words, you can't understand the last section of Daniel unless you have lived through and understood what is involved in the first six chapters.

There is no way to understand what the prophetic program means unless you first grasp the moral lessons of the first part of the book.

There is no way to cheat on this.

You can't just read it through, and then turn to the prophetic program and hope to understand.

You will find that you get nothing out of it.

You really have to carefully analyze these initial chapters, think them through, begin to walk accordingly, and experience them, before the prophetic program comes to life.

That is the glory of God's book.

You can't understand it with just the intellect.

You can sit down with the prophetic outlines of Daniel and of Revelation, draw charts, spend your time explaining to people what all these things mean and how God's program is going to work out, and analyze it down to a gnat's eyebrow -- but unless you have incorporated these lessons of the first part of the book into your own life, you will discover nothing there to enrich your life.

The Lord Jesus himself points this out during the Olivet Discourse when his disciples asked him to name the sign of his coming and what the symbol of his return to earth would be.

Jesus said, "So when you see the desolating sacrilege spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place then...let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains..." (, ) "Get out of the city of Jerusalem, because things will happen there that will tremendously affect the people living in that area.

Then is the time to flee the city, for the great tribulation will be upon you."

When he said, "When you see the desolating sacrilege standing in the holy place," he added in parentheses these words, "let the reader understand."

That is, don't read through Daniel superficially.

Think it through.

Give yourself to thought on this.

You have to understand what he is talking about before you will be able to recognize the desolating sacrilege, or abomination of desolation, when it comes.

This is why the Lord went on to say that the world in its superficial approach to truth will not understand when it cries, "Peace, peace, peace," for there will be no peace; sudden destruction will come upon them and they will be swept away just as the people of Noah's day were swept away when the flood came.

Now all of this is a warning to take the book of Daniel seriously and to endeavor to understand the structure of this book as we delve into it.

This book divides very simply into two sections, as I have already suggested.

The first six chapters are a history of the prophet Daniel himself and his friends in the land of Babylon -- men of faith in a hostile world.

Let me tell you that there is no section of scripture more helpful to someone who is trying to live as a Christian in difficult surroundings, than these first six chapters of Daniel.

If you are working in a company surrounded by a godless crowd who are taking the name of God in vain every moment, who agree with the ideas and attitudes of the world and its ways, and who make fun of the things of God, showing little interest in what God says to mankind, then I suggest that you read carefully the book of Daniel.

The first six chapters are for you if you are a teenager going to school where you are surrounded constantly by those who seem to have no interest in what God is like, or in the things of God.

Daniel and his friends were themselves teenagers when they were first taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar and carried off to the land of Babylon.

As they began their career of faith, they did so with a total lack of understanding of life and with all the insecurity of a teenager in a hostile environment.

The book records in these first six chapters the pressure they underwent as they stood for their faith in the midst of these difficult surroundings.

In chapter 1 the young men are confronted with the necessity of changing their diet.

Ordinarily, there would be nothing particularly significant in that.

Many of us could stand that, perhaps frequently.

But these young men already have been told by God what they are not to eat, and the very things that they were told not to eat are the things that are required eating for them as prisoners in the palace of the king of Babylon.

What are they to do?

This king is the most powerful tyrant who shall ever have lived on earth.

The Bible itself records that there was no king that had ever lived before Nebuchadnezzar or would ever live after him who was equal to him in authority.

There were no restraints whatsoever upon what he desired to do.

His word was absolute law.

He could take any man's life at any time.

Later on in his reign, he took the lives of the sons of the king of Judah as their father watched and then had the father's eyes put out.

Another man was burned to death over a slow fire.

This king was an expert in torture.

So these young teenagers facing this test know that they have to either comply with the king's demands or forfeit their lives.

What can they do?

They feel all the pressure and they hear all the familiar arguments that any person hears today to try to get them to give up acting on the basis of faith.

They surely hear the argument, in whatever form it took in those days, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."

"Everybody else is doing this; what difference does it make what you eat?

So what if you have a ham sandwich with these Babylonians?

What's the difference?"

After all, they are prisoners in a country far away from home.

Their own country has been laid waste.

Who will know, or care, what they do?

They feel that pressure.

But these young men stand fast and God honors them.

God gives them the grace to stand despite that pressure, and as a result they are exalted and given positions of authority and responsibility in that kingdom.

This story of repeated pressure goes right on through this book.

In chapter 2 you see part of the reason for this kind of testing for these particular young men.

It comes out more clearly here, in the story of the great dream vision of King Nebuchadnezzar.

He dreams one night of a great image of a man with a strange body.

He had a head of gold, shoulders of silver, mid-section of brass, legs of iron, and feet of a clay and iron mixture.

But he forgets his dream.

He calls in the wise men and asks them to tell him not only the interpretation, but the dream as well.

(I've often wondered if this wasn't the beginning of that popular song, "You tell me your dream and I'll tell you mine.")

The astrologers and the soothsayers and the sorcerers of Babylon are totally unable to come up with anything.

Obviously, if the king can't tell them the dream, then they can't dream up an interpretation.

Thus their lives are forfeit.

Daniel is placed in the middle of this situation.

Again God's man is pressured and threatened with death if he does not conform.

Again God's man comes through, as he always does when he is willing to stand and obey God despite the pressures.

God overrules in the affairs of men.