This episode invites you to unravel the historic narrative of Babel and the fateful choices of Nebuchadnezzar. Discover how envy and pride led a mighty king to erect an idol, compelling an empire to its knees. With fascinating archaeological insights and biblical reflections, this conversation brings to life the ancient setting while affirming timeless truths. Ideal for anyone interested in theology, ancient history, and the human condition.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country, and welcome to Bob and Yart Live. Today, we’re getting into a study of the Book of Daniel done by my father and predecessor, Bob and Yart. And if you want, you do not want to miss this. If you want to get all of Bob and Yart’s Bible studies for just $10, you can get that at nyart.shop that has all of these Daniel studies. You do not want to miss those. But today, we’re getting into this study of Daniel, So exciting. Hey, if you can’t afford that $10, email us, service at kgov.com, and we will find a way to get you those Bible studies. Hey, this is Daniel, Bob Enyart’s study of Daniel. So exciting. I’ll see you on the other end.
SPEAKER 01 :
Please turn to Daniel chapter 3. If you were not familiar with human nature and the pride and sin that is common to man, you’d think that for sure chapter 3 could not have followed on chapter 2. Something must be missing. For in chapter 3, King Nebuchadnezzar builds a giant image and requires everyone to worship his image. Now, Do you remember what just happened? How chapter 2 had just ended with the king recognizing the God of Daniel as the true king and the true God? That had just happened. So let’s reread that so it’s fresh in our minds from Daniel 2. chapter 2, verse 46, Nebuchadnezzar fell on his face, prostrate before Daniel, and commanded that they should present an offering and incense to him. The king answered Daniel and said, Truly your God is the God of gods, the Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, since you could reveal this secret. So we observe that It’s awfully easy for God to pull the strings of a king as though they were puppets. He doesn’t have to control them. He doesn’t literally need to turn them into puppets or robots to get them to work into his plan. But changing their heart, that’s a different matter. Jesus said it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. So that tells us a lot about how God views the difficulty of softening a person’s heart. And so here, outwardly, Nebuchadnezzar is in awe of what Daniel’s God could do. Also, we should note that If you recall in the New Testament, John went to bow down before an angel and the angel said, hey, don’t do this. I’m a servant of God just as you are. When they bowed down before Jesus and worshipped him, he accepted that because he is God, our creator, God the Son. So Nebuchadnezzar is a pagan king. He doesn’t know right from wrong, but he knows how to be amazed, and he was amazed. So in verse 49, the end of chapter 2, Daniel petitioned the king, and he set Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego over the affairs of the province of Babylon. But Daniel sat in the gate of the king. So Daniel is a counselor to the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar II. We go right into chapter 3. Nebuchadnezzar, the king, made an image of gold whose height was 60 cubits. So what did we miss? How does Nebuchadnezzar go from Daniel’s God is the God of gods to himself constructing an idol of gold? That’s quite a change. How does that happen? Well, sadly, it’s easy. It’s not a non sequitur. It does follow because the heart is exceedingly wicked. In Daniel’s interpretation of the king’s dream, he said that the great image that the king dreamed of was a head of gold and chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet partly of iron and partly of clay. And that the true God gave the dream to the king and revealed its interpretation to Daniel in that the king was the head of gold. And the rest of the image represented other kingdoms that would come after him. Well, he was initially impressed. I didn’t even tell anybody what my dream was. I told all the wise men and the magi, if you don’t tell me what the dream is, all you Chaldeans, I’m going to kill you because I think you’re liars. So I’m not going to tell you the dream. You tell me the dream and the interpretation. And God did this, and Nebuchadnezzar was amazed. Wow. The… Head of gold represented him. So what he decided to do, after being initially impressed, he thought better of himself, and he decided that he would show God who’s really in charge. And so he built the image from his dream. He built it. And instead of making only the head of gold and the other parts of the body the way God gave him the dream, he made the whole thing an enormous statue of gold. Now, undoubtedly, the ancient architects did what modern builders do, and they built a framework of wood and stone, and they put an exterior finish of gold, but he showed that it was all gold. Because it’d be all me. It’s all me, Nebuchadnezzar. No king and no God is going to come after me and take away what I built by my own hands. That’s his pride. Like Lucifer, his downfall would be his pride. In a contest against God, he was utterly inadequate. How could he fight against the living God? And he definitely wouldn’t have liked how the dream ended. Remember the end of his dream that Daniel told him, the dream and the interpretation? A stone struck the image, and the stone became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. And then when Daniel is interpreting this, he said that the God of heaven will set up a kingdom and this will be unlike Nebuchadnezzar’s. His kingdom shall never be destroyed and king, the dream is certain and the interpretation is sure. Well, not if this king had anything to do with it. That was his thought. That is after his initial amazement wore off. So, We see also in that story that if the dream and the interpretation are seen as a miracle, this is yet another example in Scripture where miracles foster unbelief. They tend to produce rebellion against God, not humility in faith. That is shown time and time again throughout the Bible. And here it is again with Nebuchadnezzar. So verse 1 again, chapter 3, verse 1. Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold whose height was 60 cubits and its width 6 cubits. He set it up in the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon. So how long is a cubit? Where’s Dura and what’s the province of Babylon? Well, Babylon and the city of Babel That empire called their city Bab-Ili. Bab-Ili. Well, you know how the whole world calls the kings of Egypt Pharaoh? We call them Pharaoh. The whole world does. Well, the Egyptians, they don’t have a term Pharaoh. That’s not their term for the king of Egypt. That’s the Hebrew term from the Bible. And those skeptics who say the Bible is just an insignificant book from one tribe in ancient history, well, the whole culture and history of the world revolves around the story of the Bible. So the whole world refers to the kings of Egypt as Pharaoh, and the world calls that ancient city Babel because that’s the Hebrew pronunciation of the city, Babel. Babylon, so there’s a city Babel, and it’s in a kingdom of Babylon, and that is in southern Iraq. If you look today, well, the same as back then, the Persian Gulf in the Middle East, and sitting just on the top end, the north end of the Persian Gulf, is the southern end of Iraq. And Iraq has the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in it. And civilization began after Noah’s ark. When they departed from the ark, the descendants of Noah and his sons followed the path south between the rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, and they settled in that part of the world in what today is southern Iraq. If you go to Iraq today, you could go to the province of Babel today. And we hear about the Fertile Crescent after the global flood. You could imagine how drainage would bring, in some places in the world, tremendous fertile soil. And that was true in the land between the rivers. between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and that’s what Mesopotamia means. Meso, medzo, in the middle, and Potomac, like a Potomac River, is river. So the Mesopotamian Valley is the land between the rivers, and that’s where Babylon was. Archaeologists dispute many things. But it seems that Dura was not far in southeast of Babel, near a small river and mounds bearing the name of Duair, or Duair, D-U-A-I-R, when archaeologists and historians have explored and excavated just in the last century. So there is a thought that we know where this was. In fact… there are archaeologists who say, and I haven’t seen that this site has been properly excavated, but it is reported that there seems to be the base of a giant statue there at due air, and hopefully we’ll get more information on that possibility. Now the cubit, how long is a cubit? The cubit is the oldest measurement of length known to mankind. The cubit. Remember that God told Noah to build the ark 300 cubits in length? Well, men varied the length of the cubit over time, and there was a royal cubit, And there was a short and long Hebrew cubit. And the short Hebrew cubit was, in modern terms, about 17 inches. And the long Hebrew cubit was 20 inches. And the Egyptians, they built with the royal cubit, which was like the long Hebrew cubit of 20 inches, or that’s about a foot and eight inches, of course. And the Babylonians also used the 20-inch cubit. Some of this is known, well, in many ways, but also because of the ancient descriptions of temples that could be measured today. So if a temple base is reported in antiquity as so many cubits long and the base still exists, as many do, then they measure it and they determine how long a cubit was. Now we have a dear friend, Dr. Don Patton, And if you missed our two interviews with him this spring, you might want to go back and hear them. He is an extraordinary scientist, archaeologist. He is an associate of the chief archaeologist for the government of Turkey. And he has gone many times to Ararat. And next month, in July, he’s headed back there with a team of scientists and engineers, archaeologists, and a labor team of 20 Kurds. And they’re going to hike up to Mount Ararat. and dig down, this is their goal, to dig down 20 feet through the ice to get to their target that they’ve identified with ice penetrating satellite imaging. And in their last excavation last year, they took the world’s latest and best ground-penetrating radar with one of the world’s leading experts on the use of that. And they went up there and they used that and they used satellite imaging. And so they’re excited. Of course, it’s a… wild in a long shot but they’re excited that they’re thinking if noah’s ark if there are remains of it we think we might know where it is and it’s fun to think that if they’re right we might know in august exactly how long a cube it was that noah used that’d be fun Well, Nebuchadnezzar would have used a Babylonian cubit of 20 inches, and so his image would have been an astounding 100 feet tall. Now, telephone poles are what, around 30 feet or so? That would have been just a little bit shorter than the Statue of Liberty. If you measure her from her heel to the top of her head, she’s 111 feet tall. So imagine this early, 2,500 years ago, you have a kingdom where they can build a statue that is 100 feet tall. And if you notice the width, let’s see the verse, Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold whose height was 60 cubits and its width 6 cubits. So that would be 10 feet wide and 100 feet tall. Verse 2, And King Nebuchadnezzar sent word to gather together the satraps, And then all these other traps. The sad traps, that is a technical name from history for the title of the governors of the provinces of the kingdoms of the Medes and the Persians. And so Babylonian governors, that’s a technical term of art for them. So Nebuchadnezzar sent word to gather together the satraps, the administrators, the governors, the counselors, the treasurers, the judges, the magistrates, and all the officials of the provinces to come to the dedication of the image which King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. Sounds just like something Barack Obama would do. Bring everybody in to see how great I am. Verse 3, So the satraps, the administrators, the governors, in case you missed how important of an event this is, the counselors, the treasurers, the judges, the magistrates, and all the officials of the provinces gathered together for the dedication of the image that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. So there’s real fanfare here. And they stood before the image that Nebuchadnezzar had set up. For all the to-do that Nebuchadnezzar made out of his dream, remember he said, I want all the magi to come and tell me my dream and tell me the interpretation. And if you can’t tell me my dream, I’m not telling you, I’m going to kill you. And so throughout the land, the Chaldeans, the wise men, they were all scared to death. And they started to pull him, come on, let’s go, we’re going to kill you. And then Daniel comes forward and says, I can tell the king the dream and the interpretation by the God of Abraham. And so that was quite a news story back then. That would have been a big event. And once Daniel told the dream, everyone in the empire would have known the dream, everybody. It just would spread like wildfire. And the interpretation what gall of a young Hebrew man to tell the king of Babylon that you are going to be replaced by another kingdom. And even that kingdom will be replaced by another and by another, but then ultimately the true God will set up a kingdom that will last forever. Well, at the moment, Nebuchadnezzar was amazed. But once it set in what Daniel had actually said to him, he was offended. So he thought he’s going to put an end to this once for all. Or so he thought. So verse 4, Imagine being there on the plain of Dura in Babylon, aside a tributary of the Tigris. Then a herald cried aloud, To you it is commanded, O peoples, nations, and languages, that at the time you hear the sound of the horn, flute, harp, liar and psaltery in symphony with all kinds of music you shall fall down you shall worship the gold image that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up And whoever does not fall down in worship, freedom of worship is very important to us and to all men and to God. God wants there to be freedom of worship because you cannot force a woman to love a man. You can’t force Adam and Eve to love God. So you certainly cannot force anyone to consent mentally, intellectually, emotionally to anything. But King Nebuchadnezzar didn’t have that kind of maturity or wisdom. So he thought he could force worship of his image. Whoever does not fall down and worship shall be cast immediately into the midst of a burning, fiery furnace. So it’s quite a motivator, of course, for those who don’t fear the true God. Verse 7, so at that time when all the people heard the sound of the horn, flute, harp, and lyre, its symphony with all kinds of music, all the people, nations, and languages, and that doesn’t mean there were entire nations there on the plain, but the representatives of all these peoples of his empire. All the people, nations, and languages, all those who spoke different languages, fell down and worshipped the gold image which King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. God had cursed them at Babel and confused the languages. Today, those who study language… are dumbfounded by their inability to study and find the original evolution of language. They simply cannot find it. When they trace back, languages evolve, they change. And when they trace them back far enough in human history, they get back to approximately 100 different languages. original languages, and they cannot trace them back any further. And those languages are very sophisticated. And I’m not saying this is the result of Christian scholarship. This comes from secular scholars like Noam Chomsky and MIT’s Edward Sapir. And they have utterly refuted the claims of Charles Darwin that human language evolved from the grunts of animals. And they have demonstrated that language is very different than animal sounds. You have an animal that grows up on an island after a shipwreck, and the animal makes all the sounds that animals make. But a child who grows up without hearing language will not know a language. He will have to be taught a language from the beginning. Human language is a different kind of thing than animal sounds. Darwin thought that there were many primitive languages still on earth, and linguists have proved that no matter where they go to any language, Aboriginal tribe, Pygmies, any native peoples, their languages are very sophisticated. There is no such thing as a primitive human language. So God is the one who gave us all the different languages at Babel. That’s why the ancient Sumerians invented a god. You know how they invent… endless gods one of their gods was the alphabet God of all things because they had to start to write down these weird languages they were speaking so they had a look to a guy to help them come up with alphabets and Nebuchadnezzar polls everyone together all those who speak all these different languages so that in unison they fall down in worship his image And in his eyes they were really worshiping him, for he was the God-maker, which meant he was God in his own eyes. Verse 8, Therefore at that time certain Chaldeans, and that’s a Greek name for part of Babylon, Chaldea, certain Chaldeans came forward and accused the Jews. Now, the Jews that are accused here, these are really good guys. These are the men who had the courage to say, we will only worship the living God. We’re not going to worship your idol. It doesn’t matter how you threaten us. Now, I’ll just mention in passing, tragically, there is racism. within christianity that has been here for centuries and it’s a hatred of the jews and one of their arguments is that well the term israelite refers to the good ones and the term jew refers to the bad ones now that’s just racist that’s just evil and it’s not true It’s not even incidentally true or coincidentally true. This is an example where the Jews who were accused were the really, really, really good guys. And in the New Testament, Jesus said salvation is of the Jews. So it’s simply racism that drives people to that false claim. So these Chaldeans accused the Jews… And they spoke and said to King Nebuchadnezzar, O king, live forever. Live forever, right? You, O king, have made a decree that everyone who hears the sound of the horn, flute, harp, lyre, and psaltery in symphony with all kinds of music shall fall down and worship the gold image. And whoever does not fall down and worship shall be cast into the midst of a burning, fiery furnace. There are certain Jews whom you have set over the affairs of the province of Babylon, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. These men, O king, have not paid due regard to you. They do not serve your gods or worship the gold image which you have set up. Now, as we continue in the story, you’ll notice that Daniel doesn’t appear in this account, and the book of Daniel doesn’t tell us where he is during this time. It is highly unlikely that he was there at Dura. Because if he were there and being such a high official, having the ear of the king, he very likely would have inserted himself in the situation, not hiding, so that his friends would be killed and he would be safe. That’s just not the kind of man Daniel was. We saw right off the bat from Daniel 1. And later in the book, Daniel doesn’t care if they’re going to kill him or not. He’s going to be true to God. So most likely, Daniel was an emissary for the king on a mission or he was somewhere else. He was not here. Verse 13, then Nebuchadnezzar in rage and fury gave the command to bring Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. So they brought these men before the king. He was probably a brat growing up. You know when you’re growing up and you don’t like the way things are and you get angry and you have a hard time controlling yourself? Well, if you don’t get a handle on that, when you get older, pretty soon your rage really produces tremendous evil. So it is so important for us to ask God to help us to have self-control. So… The king of Babylon calls these three Jewish men before him, and it’s so wonderful to realize that the great miracles of the Bible are not done in secret. The televangelist goes over to Thailand, and he raises somebody from the dead that nobody ever heard of. And when he’s talking to people in Thailand, he tells them that people in Oklahoma get raised from the dead. When he’s in Oklahoma, he says people in Thailand get raised from the dead. So today, the miracles are done in secret, but not so in the Bible. They are done before the kingdoms of the world, the emperors, the pharaohs, Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and the entire nation of Israel, and here in Babylon, and also with God’s judgment of the flood, literally over the whole world. And so today, nearly 5,000 years later, archaeologists and anthropologists have documented flood stories across the globe in so many…
SPEAKER 02 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time here on KLTT Radio. If you want the entire thing, you can find it in two different ways. One, you can go to kgov.com, click on the store, and purchase the Daniel Bible Study, which is a little bit expensive. I’ll be honest. It’s a little bit expensive. Or for way cheaper, you can go to enyart.shop and get all of Bob Enyart’s Bible Studies for just $10. You do not want to miss that. $10. What a steal. If that’s too expensive for you, reach out service at kgov.com and we will find a way to get that to you. No charge. We want to be a blessing to you. Again, nyart.shop. That’s E-N-Y-A-R-T dot S-H-O-P. Hey, may God bless you guys.
