In this enlightening episode, join Bob as he delves into the captivating first chapter of the Book of Daniel. Discover the historical context of Daniel’s story, exploring the disastrous Babylonian captivity and its profound impacts. Through engaging storytelling, we connect the trajectories of fallen kingdoms and the enduring faith of God’s people. Gain insights into the cultural shifts and adaptations experienced by the Israelites in Babylon and learn how Daniel’s steadfast faith stood against temporal challenges.
00:00:00 Introduction to Bob’s Bible Study on Daniel
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Bob and Yart Live. Today we’re going back and airing Bob’s first study on the book of Daniel. Daniel is such an exciting study. I’ve just been going through it in my own life and it’s been a huge blessing to me. And so I thought I could share that blessing with you. So with that said, this is Daniel chapter one, a Bob and Yart Bible study. If you want the entire thing, you can get that by going to kgov.com and clicking on the store online. or for much cheaper, you can sign up for a subscription at nyart.shop to get access to all of Bob and Yart’s Bible studies. You do not want to miss that. That’s a huge blessing for so many people. If you can’t afford that, $10 a month, make sure to get in touch with us. You can email us service at kgov.com, and we’ll see about getting that to you for free. But $10 a month for all of Bob and Yart’s Bible studies. With that said, here’s
SPEAKER 02 :
Daniel chapter 1 let’s jump right into it tonight we are going to meet Daniel and also briefly his associates Hananiah Mishael and Azariah we have heard of the Babylonian captivity at least we’ve heard of that if we study the Bible a little bit The Babylonian captivity, well, Daniel chapter 1 tells us of the beginning of that captivity that these men were among the thousands of Jews carried away from southern Israel to Babylon, the land of Nebuchadnezzar. We call them Jews, by the way. They were Israelites who lived in the southern part of the nation, and that part of the nation was called Judah. The nation had split in what could be described as a civil war after the time of Solomon because of his wickedness and sinfulness and the sinfulness of his father David. Their rebellion, their personal rebellion, had consequences for the nation, which happens in human history. When the leaders disobey God, the people suffer. And so the kingdom split into the northern ten tribes, which was called Israel. And the southern kingdom was also Israel, but it was called Judah, named after their most prosperous tribe. And of course, the tribe of King David. David came from the tribe of Judah, and of David’s descendants, they were of Judah. So the Jews were carried away from southern Israel to Babylonia, the land of Shinar. About 150 years before this, The northern kingdom was devastated. They were not exiled to Babylon. They were exiled to Assyria, which also was north of Babylon. So the northern kingdom, the ten tribes as they’re called, were exiled to Assyria and they never returned. basically the southern tribes in judah were carried away because of their sin they became weak god turned his back on them and they were carried away by nebuchadnezzar to babylonia but that was a punishment that lasted for 70 years and then they were able to return to rebuild the wall in the time of Nehemiah and to rebuild the temple and this was largely thanks to courageous individuals like Nehemiah and like Esther who had saved the Jews now we will see that Daniel’s associates were given different names, pagan Babylonian names. And one purpose of God’s people is to put his name on everyone so that many can know the joy of becoming his children so that they will be called by his name. Now, pagans, naturally, in rebellion against God, they put the name of their gods on everyone and everything. in an attempt to obliterate Israel’s God, Elohim, also known by Elah, or El as in Israel and Ezekiel. So please turn to Daniel chapter 1. Daniel chapter 1, in the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it. So you have two kings of two empires, although Israel’s empire was reasonably decimated by the loss of the northern kingdom. And they had all kinds of difficulty with their neighbors because they became weak. I think it’s tragic when Christian leaders in America will see an attack on our nation and they’ll say that’s God’s punishment, that God did it. Or in Europe… that the Germans in World War II, they were doing God’s bidding. I think that’s tragic. But there’s another side, another aspect to that that does have validity, and that is when a nation turns against God, they become foolish. They lack wisdom. They become selfish and filled with worldly lusts, and that makes them vulnerable. They lose the blessing of God. And so that happened to Israel, but also in this time in history, God was more involved in a supernatural way. And so we’ll see God doing the most extraordinary things through Daniel in this book. Notice that Daniel, the Hebrew prophet, opens up his book by dating the time of this terrible captivity, not based upon the reign of this pagan king, Nebuchadnezzar, but based upon the chronology of the kings of Israel and Judah. So he could have said in such and such a year of Nebuchadnezzar. Now this Nebuchadnezzar, if you go to look him up in a history book outside of the Bible… they’ll call him Nebuchadnezzar II. He was the second Nebuchadnezzar to rule. Nebuchadnezzar I, at the time he was only called Nebuchadnezzar, he reigned 500 years earlier. He’s considered the most powerful king in his dynasty. And he was honored because he kicked out others who began to overrun their land. And so he restored Babylonia to their control. original inhabitants, so to speak. And so 500 years later, here is a new king. This is the more popular king because he figures in the story of Israel. And when Israel is involved in international affairs, then the world remembers what happened, even though we’re now 2,600 years after this first verse of Daniel. That happened 2,600 years ago, and the world remembers this Nebuchadnezzar, but not really the first Nebuchadnezzar. Because history is his story, God’s story unfolding among men, how God interacts with us. So everything is judged on whether it’s in obedience to God and honoring him or in disobedience. And that’s where events in history get their significance from. Now, when did this happen? I just said it was about 2,600 years ago. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, I remember when the Internet first became popular and you could go to Britannica.com. And so one of the first things I did was look up the Babylonian captivity. And they listed in a Britannica article that this happened… almost exactly 600 years before Christ’s birth, this happened in the year 597 B.C. 597 B.C. And the Babylonian captivity then lasted for 70 years. It went on until the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylon and gave the Jews permission to begin rebuilding in Jerusalem. Now, There were a number of tragic things that came out of this captivity in Babylon. For one, many Jews, it appears that by far most Jews, remained in Babylon. So even after they were allowed to return, they did not. The world, it’s a small world, and the history of our world is very brief. And so today you may have heard of people talking about the Babylonian Talmud. And that is a body of writings, a corpus of rabbinical writings about the Torah and all things Jewish that was put together, that arose during the time of the Jews in Babylon. So today, halfway around the world, 2,000 years later, if you study the Bible much and Judaism and Christianity and how teachings relate, where they came from, You learn about the Babylonian Talmud. Well, I’d like to quote a couple other passages before we continue in Daniel. And the first comes from Psalm, and I’ll just read this. You don’t need to turn around. In fact, in a moment, we’ll go to Jeremiah chapter 25. And I think it would be good to turn there to get ready for that. We’ll look at a handful of verses there. But I’m going to turn to Psalm 137. And just look at the beginning of this psalm. And this should give you a sense for what it was like to be a Jew… who loved God, the God of Abraham, and longed for a return to the land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants. Psalm 137 says, When we remembered Zion. We hung our harps under the willows in the midst of it, for there those who carried us away captive asked us a song. And those who plundered us requested mirth, saying, Sing us one of those songs of Zion. And of course, Jerusalem is not only the capital of Israel, but it’s also a figure, a symbol of God’s city and God’s kingdom. So it’s easy to take the symbols and the rituals and the customs that God gave to us in Scripture. It’s real easy to take those and to begin to worship them as an end in and of itself. It’s easy to worship the land of Israel as Muslims might virtually worship Mecca and Iraq and Mecca. It’s tragic to do those things, but that’s done. People could worship Jerusalem where it is the God of Jerusalem that the scriptures are pointing us to. So now, if you’ve turned to Jeremiah chapter 25, when the Jews were in Babylon for 70 years and then they began to return, at first in very small numbers, those who remained they already had 70 years of beginning to absorb the culture and customs of this pagan kingdom and in fact eventually not only do we have the Babylonian Talmud that’s not teachings from the Sumerians or the Babylonians those are Jewish teachings and that are based to some extent, some significantly, some not so, on the Torah and the Jewish scriptures up to that point. But they were influenced the way we Christians are influenced in our society today. There’s immorality everywhere and it seems to seep into our minds. the Jews changed their calendar, for example, to the Babylonian calendar. Even though God said that the beginning of the year is in the spring, in the month of Abib, when you have the Passover, the Babylonians had the beginning of the year in the fall, in their month of Nisan. And so the Jews celebrate Rosh Hashanah to this day, in the fall, in a month that has not the biblical or Hebrew name, but the Babylonian name. And so they discount what God says explicitly in the Bible. And these things, the names of months, even the beginnings of years, you know, is it in January like the Romans do? The Romans started the daily clock at midnight, where it was basically 12 o’clock, and then you have 12 hours, 1, 2, 3, 4, and then 12 hours again. So the Romans started the new day at midnight. That’s not when God started it. God started the new day at sunset. And so the Babylonians started the new year in the fall. The Romans started the new year in the dead of winter. But God said, let the start of your new day as of the Passover, let the month of the Passover be the beginning of the new year in the spring. And so… That’s not a moral issue like do not murder, do not steal, do not commit adultery. But it is an opportunity to show that you honor God and you will obey him. Even if you disobey God on something that’s symbolic, you’re still disobeying God. and that is a grave thing to do with terrible consequences. And so today, you’re in Israel, the first day of the year according to the biblical calendar, first day of the decade, first day of the century, the whole nation should be celebrating, and they don’t even recognize it. You talk to Jews, we were there. On the first day of the new century, the new millennium, on the biblical first day of the year, in the month of Abib, the first, and nobody even knew it was the new year. But then that fall, after the Babylonian calendar, then they all celebrated the new year. So we’re in Jeremiah 25 to see the Bible’s own explanation of why this captivity is occurring. And so let’s read the first dozen verses or so. The word that came to Jeremiah of Judah in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah. Now Josiah was one of their most righteous kings. Well, this is in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, which was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. Now, when we are trying to figure out what year some event happened in the Bible, there are many Christians who think that we could track everything almost to the day, the month, and the year. And I don’t believe that at all. I’ve tried to do this over a period of years. I have quite a spreadsheet in Excel, and it has many, many Bible passages that have to do with chronology listed. And it’s a hobby, and it’s something I’m sure I’ll do over the coming years, Lord willing. But there are simply not enough markers in the text for us to know exactly when things occurred from the Bible alone. For example, if we’re told that Adam lived a hundred and some years and then he had his son and then his son lived a hundred and some years and he had a son and that goes on for a series of generations. Even then, we don’t believe that they had their sons on their birthday and They didn’t have their son on their birthday. So even in that genealogy, there’s no effort to give us an exact chronology, but we can’t be off by thousands of years or millions of years because we have many indications in the text. For example, the great-great-grandson of one guy is alive during the time of another guy. And so we know there were not hundreds of generations between these men. That’s an example of how we know the… creation of the world based on the Bible was about 6,000 years ago but I say about and I don’t go with Bishop Usher when he says the world was created in the fall which could be but in the fall of the year 4004 BC I don’t go with that because I have seen that you cannot date things to the day month and year and You just can’t from the scriptures. People who say you can, I think, have not tried it. They haven’t tried it. The Bible gives us virtually an exact chronology when you consider years up until the time of Abraham, which brings us into what you might call modern human history. ancient history, the ancients from Adam to the flood and the first generations after the flood, that is given in the Bible explicitly. Then we come down to the modern period, and we should be able to understand just from the world we live in, in history and archaeology and the Bible, that this all happened in a short period of time. The world is not millions of years old, but certainly less than 10,000 years old, about 6,000 years old. So when we’re trying to figure out when things happen in the Bible, there’s one issue, for example, that the months have different names, if it’s the Hebrew names or the Babylonian names. There’s also the ways that people count. Some people count a part of a year. If something happens at the end of the year, then they count that as a full year. Other people don’t. So they will count and they’ll get a different count. When Jesus was buried in the tomb, if he’s buried as the sun is about to set, do you count that day or do you not? And so people could reasonably do it either way, but then they’ll say, look, there’s an error in the text. And it’s not an error in the text. It’s just the humility and a recognition that people count differently. And that’s fine. That’s not wrong or immoral. So, The word that came to Jeremiah, Jeremiah 25, concerning all the people of Judah in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, which was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, which Jeremiah the prophet spoke to all the people of Judah. and to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, notice he’s not speaking to the northern tribes in Israel, because this is a southern thing now, because the northern kingdom was decimated almost 150, 140 years earlier. Verse three, from the 13th year of Josiah, the son of Ammon, king of Judah, even to this day, this is the 23rd year in which the word of the Lord has come to me. And I have spoken to you. That is Jeremiah speaking, rising early and speaking. But you have not listened. And the Lord has sent to you all his servants, the prophets, rising early and sending them. But you have not listened nor inclined your ear to hear. They said, repent now every one of his evil way and his evil doings and dwell in the land that the Lord has given to you and your fathers forever and ever. So for decades, God was saying through Jeremiah, repent, believe in God so you could remain in the land. He’s begging them to do this. Do not go after other gods to serve them and worship them. And do not provoke me, God, to anger with the works of your hands, and I will not harm you. Yet you have not listened to me, says the Lord, that you might provoke me to anger with the works of your hands to your own hurt. So when we read the stories in the Bible, the accounts that are so numerous throughout the Holy Scriptures and we think about theology and all the Christians who are taught that everything that happens was micromanaged by the will of God. And we see God pleading with people, don’t disobey me. Please don’t. And why do you rile up my anger? I’m crushed when you turn against me. I’m grieved when you sin. And so all of that, Calvinists would say, well, that doesn’t mean that. And it’s an interesting saying that Calvinists are experts in what the Bible does not mean. And we say, well, then what does it mean when it says God is grieved? What does it mean when it says God repents? If it’s a figure of speech, it must mean something. And it turns out, if Calvinism is true, almost the whole story of the Bible is a figure of speech. And I’ve had that in a debate on open theism with Dr. Samuel Lamerson, who worked for D. James Kennedy when Kennedy was alive. And I put a list of about 25 things the Bible says about God. And he actually said, Dr. Lamerson, who’s a Christian, he said virtually everything the Bible says about God is a figure of speech. It’s not literal. It’s symbolic. It’s a metaphor. So I listed that God is good, God is holy, God is living, God is powerful, God is righteous, and went on for about 25 items. And he maintained that it’s pretty much all a figure of speech. So that’s a great tragedy. This is not a figure of speech, this story, with God lamenting their disobedience. Verse seven, let me read it again. Yet you have not listened to me, says the Lord, that you might provoke me to anger with the works of your hands to your own hurt. Therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts, because you have not heard my words, behold, I will send and take all the families of the north, says the Lord, and Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, my servant, and will bring them against this land. against its inhabitants, and against these nations all around, and will utterly destroy them and make them an astonishment, a hissing, and perpetual desolations. Moreover, I will take from them the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness. So I just read in Psalm 137 that the Babylonians said, Sing us a song. Sing us your songs of Zion. We want to hear some mirth. And the Jews who were carried away because of their nation’s rebellion against God said, how could we sing? How could we be joyful when we are here weeping by the waters of Babylon? So God says, I will take away their mirth and their gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones and the light of the lamp. The millstone, of course, processing the grain from the harvest so they can bake bread and have goods. And this whole land shall be a desolation and an astonishment. And these nations shall serve the king of Babylon 70 years. Then it will come to pass, when 70 years are completed, that I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their iniquity, says the Lord, and I will make it a perpetual desolation. So I will bring on that land all my words which I have pronounced against it, all that is written in this book which Jeremiah has prophesied concerning all the nations.” So now let’s return to Daniel. Daniel. This morning at Denver Bible Church, the sermon was on Israel the bride. And we went through the Old Testament, an overview, and saw God’s betrothal to Israel. He romanced her. Moses officiated in the marriage when God and Israel stood face to face on Mount Sinai. Then they had a rocky honeymoon, you could say, in the wilderness. Then God carried Israel, carried her across the threshold into their new homes over the Jordan River. But Israel is unfaithful for centuries so that in the time of Jeremiah, God actually gives them a certificate of divorce, as we saw. So now in Daniel, to continue, Daniel 1, verse 2 says, And the Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand, into the hand of King Nebuchadnezzar. With some of the articles of the house of God. which he carried into the land of Shinar to the house of his God. And he brought the articles into the treasure house of his God. So the pagans, they worship their own gods. Tragically, they rejected the true God, the God of Abraham, the creator.
SPEAKER 01 :
and when we read that nebuchadnezzar stop the tape stop the tape hey we are out of time here on kltt radio if you want the rest of this bible study on daniel chapter one daniel is such a fun book you can find that by going to kgov.com and clicking on the store, or if you would rather, you can get access to all of Bob and Yart’s Bible studies by going to nyart.shop. You can get access to all of them for just $10. If that’s too much to you, reach out to us. You can find us at service at kgov.com, and we concede about getting that to you for no charge if you can’t afford the $10 charge. Hey, may God bless you guys. I will see you tomorrow.
