In today’s episode, we explore the rich narrative of Daniel’s encounter with King Nebuchadnezzar, diving deep into the intricate details of Babylonian culture. From the exchange of dreams to the powerful significance of names and language, discover the profound lessons on faithfulness and God’s sovereignty. Daniel’s story in Babylon offers valuable insights into standing firm in one’s beliefs amidst adversity and the power of faith to overcome the impossible.
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country and welcome to Bob and your live today. We’re going and listening to Daniel, a study on Daniel given by Bob and yard. If you want the full thing, you can find that by going to any art dot shop and signing up there for just ten dollars if you can’t afford that. Make sure to reach out to us, service at kgov.com, and we’ll see about getting that to you free of charge. Enyart.shop for the entire thing, but this is Bob Enyart’s study on the book of Daniel. You do not want to miss it. Hey, let’s jump right into the broadcast.
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Welcome to our study in Daniel. We’re now in chapter two, and if you recall from last night, We talked about the Babylonian captivity happening about 600 years before Christ. And that’s the dating you could get from Encyclopedia Britannica. And this is Nebuchadnezzar II. And so Daniel 2, verse 1. Now in the second year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams. And his spirit was so troubled that his sleep left him. Then the king gave the command to call the magicians, the astrologers, the sorcerers and the Chaldeans to tell the king his dreams. So they came and stood before the king. And these names, this is what you would expect. These are like cultists. And we’ll talk about these a little bit later in the chapter. Then the Chaldeans spoke to the king in Aramaic. And the Chaldeans, an ancient name, Babylonians, That part of the southern Mesopotamian Valley, Chaldeans and Magi or magicians came to be used interchangeably, sort of in a technical sense. Today we talk about gypsies and we think of gypsies as fortune tellers. And so it’s similar to that. Not all gypsies are fortune tellers and you get in trouble today. We’re all very sensitive and there’s probably a lot of good in that. But there’s a lot of people going overboard also. I like a good Italian joke, and I’m Italian. But you can’t say that you gyp somebody. And you can’t say that a gypsy is a fortune teller. I mean, some are. That goes with, you know, some different nationalities work in 7-Elevens and others work in dry cleaners. And so many gypsies have worked in fortune telling businesses. But that’s the idea of the Chaldeans and the Magi. So verse three, the king said to them, I have had a dream and my spirit is anxious to know the dream. Then the Chaldeans spoke to the king in Aramaic. O king, live forever. Tell your servants the dream, and we will give the interpretation. Then the king answered and said to the Chaldeans, My decision is firm. If you do not make known the dream to me and its interpretation, you shall be cut in pieces. So you think Obama’s bad, right? This king is really rough. You shall be cut in pieces and your houses shall be made an ash heap. Now a few things about this because it’s similar to other passages in the Bible, just somewhat similar. Remember the story of Pharaoh’s dreams. Oh, and Pharaoh, that whole story was very well known throughout Israel, of course, through their scriptures that they had well developed by this time. There’s some small chance that Nebuchadnezzar might have been aware of that story. But let’s remember what that was about from the book of Genesis. Remember that Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt and he was put in prison unjustly. And he was in there for years. And then Pharaoh had a dream of seven fat cows. And then seven ugly lean cows, gaunt cows, came up. They arose out of the Nile River. And they ate the fat cows. I don’t think they got fat themselves. Just skinny cows ate the fat cows. And it was disturbing. And then he had a second dream, and it was seven full heads of grain, and there were seven then skinny, gaunt heads of grain, and they devoured the full heads. So Pharaoh thought, this is weird. Now he was willing to tell his fortune tellers and all, what his magi and wise men, what the dreams were, but they couldn’t tell him the meanings. So his chief butler, this is one of those the butler did it stories, the chief butler said, oh, I remember there was a Hebrew in prison, and he told our dreams, me and the chief baker, and both dreams came true as interpretation. So Pharaoh called… Joseph to come before him. Joseph correctly interpreted the dream. Seven years of plenty and seven years of famine. And we need to prepare. And so Pharaoh made Joseph virtually king over the whole land of Egypt. So it seems pretty easy, really, for God to set up someone in a position of power because kings are as easily amused as anybody else. It’s like, whoa, that’s amazing. How’d you know that dream? And then when it comes to pass, then that’s really significant because then it’s not just a dream and an interpretation, but a fulfillment. So that’s pretty cool. Now, That was centuries before this. If we go into the future, remember Queen Esther from… that part of Jewish history, God gave to the king a sleepless night, if you remember that story, and brought to his remembrance the book of the records of the chronicles of the kings. And so the king called the servants and said, I can’t sleep. Get me our book and read to me. And so the text they opened to was of Mordecai, alerting King Ahasuerus to an assassination plot and he realized that Mordecai saved the king but he had never been thanked and so God used that to open another door for Esther so now here we are in Babylon Daniel chapter 2 with Nebuchadnezzar and he has had this dream God has given him a dream that’s really jolted him and he wants to know the meaning and so in verse 6 the king says however if you tell the dream and its interpretation you shall receive from me gifts rewards and great honor and Therefore, tell me the dream and its interpretation. And they answered again, these are the wise men. We’ll call them the wise guys. They said, let the king tell his servants the dream and we will give its interpretation. The king answered and said, I know for certain that you’re stalling. I know for certain that you would gain time because you see that my decision is firm. Now, with Pharaoh… His magi, wise men, he could tell them a dream and they’ll just make up an interpretation. Just make it up. because that’s what they do that’s what fortune tellers do and that’s even what the horoscope does or even fortune cookies there’s just enough detail to make it a little bit interesting but generally it’s vague enough so that you can’t prove the person wrong right there on the spot so it’s a con game Well, Pharaoh’s dream was so specific and he had two dreams and they both had the seven fat and the seven thin destroying the fat and the specificity of the dreams and the the duplication of it, I think it scared the wise men. They thought, we can’t even take a guess at this one. Because whatever we say, either it’s going to be so vague, the king, Pharaoh, will know it has nothing to do with his dream and will be exposed. Or if we try to make up something specific, it’s probably not going to come to pass because we’re just making it up. So they were stymied. Well, in this case… They’re horrified because they know this king, Nebuchadnezzar, will kill them. He will just kill them if they don’t tell him what his dream was, because he’ll say, you guys are supposed to be magicians, wise men, soothsayers. You could tell the future. If you could tell the future, you could tell the past. I had this dream last night. So what was it? and they were scared for their lives. So verse 9, If you do not make known the dream to me, there is only one decree for you. For you have agreed to speak lying and corrupt words before me till the time has changed. Therefore tell me the dream, and I shall know that you can give me its interpretation. The Chaldeans answered the king and said, There is not a man on earth who can tell the king’s matter. Therefore, no king, lord, or ruler has ever asked such a thing of any magician, astrologer, or Chaldean. It is a difficult thing the king requests, and there is no other who can tell it to the king except the gods whose dwelling is not with flesh. Notice the gods. They were pagans. So who are pagans? Pagans are people who don’t believe in the one true personal God. So they might worship animals, bugs, and they might worship the alphabet. as the ancient Sumerians did, because remember, God confused the languages at Babel, and so they all spoke different languages, and then they had to invent alphabets if they wanted to write anything, so they had an alphabet god. It’s sort of weird to us, but in Egypt, they had the Nile god, or the sun god, and so they would have many gods, And so we translate this with a lowercase g in our Bibles to indicate this is not God, because there is only one God in three persons, the triune God, the Trinity, but there’s only one God. So they were saying, no one can tell you this except the gods, and they don’t dwell with men. So then the king is thinking, well, then what good are you? What have I been paying you for all these years? Well, it’s his second year, but he wants the clean house. Verse 12. For this reason, the king was angry and very furious and gave the command to destroy all the wise men of Babylon. So the decree went out and they began killing the wise men and they sought Daniel and his companions to kill them. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But in reality, Daniel, because he passed his first test, he wanted to honor God in all things. Even something as relatively minor as the food that he was going to be given. And it might be in violation of what God said should be their dietary law. And he had an easy excuse. He could say, well, I’m captive and they’re feeding me. I have no choice. But he stood firm in his commitment to obey God and God blessed him for that. And so now here he is in the right place at the right time. See how quickly things can change. So they wanted to kill Daniel and his three associates. Verse 14, then with counsel and wisdom, Daniel answered Ariok, the captain of the king’s guard, who had gone out to kill the wise men of Babylon. He answered and said to Ariok, the king’s captain, why is the decree from the king so urgent? So Ariok made the decision known to Daniel. He told the story to Daniel about the dream and why the king was mad. So Daniel went in and asked the king to give him time that he might tell the king the interpretation. Then Daniel went to his house and made the decision known to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, his companions.” Now remember those guys were given pagan names, Babylonian names. I’d like to take a moment and talk about the meaning of their names and then how their names were changed. It’s an interesting part of the story. Hananiah, remember we talked about their names and their names had to do with God? And Abraham was named Abram and God was Yahweh or Jehovah. God’s name had four letters, Y-H-W-H, as we bring them from Hebrew to English. And those four letters are called the Tetragrammaton. It’s pronounced either Yahweh or Jehovah. And it’s an H sound. And Abram, he just had a name Abram. So they had a relationship with one another, and they shared their names with one another. Abram’s name… was changed to Abraham with an H in it, Abraham. And God put his name in the middle of Abraham’s name. And then God took on Abraham’s name as his own. And he ever since has been called the God of Abraham. He calls himself that. He is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And so 4,000 years later, the billions of people in the world, the largest religion in the world is Christianity. But all the people of the monotheistic religions believe that there’s one God. And if you ask them, who is he? They say he’s the God of Abraham. So that’s pretty neat. So Hananiah, his name, his Hebrew name, meant Yahweh is gracious. A beautiful name. Well, they changed it to Shadrach. It doesn’t sound quite as nice. And that means the command of the moon god. That’s what that means. And the moon god back in Babylon, they called him Aku. So Shadrach, command of the moon god. Now, there’s a tangent I’d like to take, and that’s because we hear about Allah, the Arab word for God, and it means the deity. That’s what the word means if you break it up, Allah, the deity. Well, back in 600 A.D., Arabs worshipped many gods. They were polytheistic. But each tribe had a primary god. And Muhammad’s tribe, they worshipped the moon god. And the moon god, they called him Allah. But many tribes called their gods Allah. So it’s not… technically accurate to say Allah means the moon god but Allah was the name by which Muhammad’s tribe worshipped the moon god it was a name for God that pagans used before Muhammad and he adopted that name and then associated it with monotheism although a perversion of the God of the Bible who is the plural God Elohim let us make man in our image the Trinity the deity of Jesus Christ the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit so he took this name that was used by pagans and he invented a new God a Unitarian God and he rejected that Christ is God the Son okay so that was Hananiah now Mishael like Michael Mishael means who is what God is. Who could possibly be what God is? Who is what God is? No one. This week, a pregnant mom asked me if it would be okay for her to name her son Adonai. She had never heard that name before. And she heard it and she thought it was so beautiful. And it is a beautiful name, but it means God. It means Lord. So we talked about it for a while, and we said, of course, in Mexico, Jesus is popular, and that’s Jesus. But here in America, people don’t name their child Jesus or God or Jehovah or Christ or Yahweh because it’s too awkward. It doesn’t quite sit right. It doesn’t seem right. And so Adonai, when I hear that, or if somebody said, we’re going to name our child Elohim, I would say, well, that just doesn’t seem right. And it doesn’t feel comfortable. It doesn’t seem to sit right. And so she said she appreciated that. And so she’s trying to think up other names for her son for when he’s born. And that’s great. Now, Mishael’s name was changed to Meshach. and probably because it was a Babylonian word that sounded similar to his Hebrew name, Mishael Meshach. The Babylonian word seems to mean, I have become weak. And possibly it was given to him to remind him of his subjugation, that he was in captivity. So Mishael, there’s nobody like God, to I have become weak. Oh, and I think about Shakespeare. And Shakespeare, he’s the one who said, what’s in a name? And a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And that’s true, but really there’s a lot in a name. Even in our modern age, even our names. We have, many of us have a first, middle, and last name. There’s all kinds of combinations all over the world. One of the seniors at graduation today in Golden in the foothills of the Rockies. Beautiful graduation. And how many names did that one student have? Five names. And I guarantee you those five names can tell you a lot about that person if you didn’t know anything else about them. Today, we have millions of people boarding airplanes and flying between countries around the world, and so much can be gleaned from just their names. Not always with certainty, but often with a very high degree of reliability. For example, just from someone’s name, you can often tell their gender, whether they’re male or female. You can often tell their country of origin. sometimes even their marital status, even their religion, and sometimes their approximate age. You can get that just from somebody’s name. For example, if two people were boarding a plane together and their names were Herbert and Gilda, would you think that they might be Japanese? No. Maybe Hindus? No. How about their teenage brother and sister? No? Why not? Well, they’re probably Herber and Gilda. They’re probably married. They’re probably from America or anglicized Europeans. And they’re probably in their 60s or 70s. Wouldn’t you say? And are they? Is my mother here somewhere? Are they? Yeah, they are. Aunt Gilda and Uncle Herbie. You just know so much about them from their names. So, Azariah. Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Azariah means Yahweh has helped. Yahweh has helped. And they changed it to Abednego. which was probably a wordplay. Now, these are things that happened more than 2,500 years ago, and languages changed. These are different languages. Scholars study the ancient languages of the Chaldeans, Aramaic, Hebrew, and so on. And so they try to figure out what’s going on here with this name. And it seems that Abednego is a wordplay on the Babylonian god Nabu or Nebo. And since Azariah meant God, Yahweh has helped him, they changed it to Abednego, which means he helps Nabu. So his name was God helps me, and they changed it to he helps one of our gods. the servant of the Shining One. He helps Nabu. Now Daniel, Daniel’s name is God is my judge. That’s quite a name. God is my judge. And it was changed to Belteshazzar, which means may the wife of Bel, one of their gods was named Bel, B-E-L. Don’t tell anybody that. B-E-L. Bob and you’re alive. No relationship whatsoever. May the wife of Bell protect the king. So that was the name they gave to Daniel. May the wife of Bel protect the king. So again, in verse 17, Daniel went to his house and made the decision known to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, his companions, that they might seek mercies from the God of heaven concerning this secret so that Daniel and his companions might not perish with the rest of the wise men of Babylon. So they prayed to God, Lord God, please reveal to us this dream, the secret dream that the king has had. Then the secret was revealed to Daniel in a night vision. So Daniel blessed the God of heaven. Daniel answered and said, Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, for wisdom and might are his. It’s such a beautiful prayer and a worship of God. And that’s true. The Bible says that it is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to search out the matter. And imagine all the wisdom and knowledge in God. We could never ever plumb the depths of what he knows and his brilliance. So he reveals deep and secret things. He knows what is in the darkness and light dwells with him. Therefore Daniel went to Ariok. whom the king had appointed to destroy the wise men of Babylon, he went and said thus to him, Do not destroy the wise men of Babylon. Take me before the king, and I will tell the king the interpretation. Now even that is bold. Even when you know the interpretation, it’s still bold. It’s easy to become timid in life, and there could be any number of people who would actually know the interpretation but wouldn’t say a word because they just don’t want to say anything. And so that would really have been trouble. So God entrusted this precious piece of information to Daniel, and Daniel had to not be like someone who hid it, buried it, and hid it, He needed to use it, use his talents, use what God has given him. So verse 25, then Ariok quickly brought Daniel before the king. He didn’t want to kill all these people. It’s ugly business to kill a lot of people. It’s difficult. And imagine the Germans, with help from the Poles and others, killed millions upon millions of innocent people. Imagine how difficult that was. And that’s the reason why God, I believe, judged the world with a flood. The angel of the Lord could have gone around the world and individually killed each person. But I think for God, that would be a burden that he does not want to bear. It’s difficult to kill someone. And so this guy, Ariok, he didn’t want to kill all these wise men, regardless of whether or not they were con men. So he was thrilled that Daniel said he had the interpretation. So he quickly brought Daniel before the king and said thus to him, So, The king said to Daniel, Are you able to make known to me the dream which I have seen and its interpretation? So he had the king’s ear. The king was very interested now. And Daniel had a name that he liked. So verse 27, Daniel answered in the presence of the king and said, The secret which the king has demanded…
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Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time. If you’d like to hear the rest, please go to enyart.shop and sign up for the Bob Enyart Bible Studies. It’s only $10. You get access to all of Bob Enyart’s Bible Studies, including the book of Daniel. You do not want to miss that. Make sure to check that out. Hey, may God bless you guys.
