SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 11/26/2023 7:39 AM
PT-10 Intro to Daniel
We continue to look at John MacArthur’s second sermon on
his introduction to the book of Daniel.
“Now, notice in verse 1 that there
are two places mentioned as we saw last time. There’s the king of Judah and the
king of Babylon. Judah and Babylon really provide the scenario as we begin the
book of Daniel. We discussed each. Judah was God’s place and Babylon was the
devil’s place. We would think they had very little in common. Judah was the
place where Jerusalem was, the city of God. Babylon was the place of the city
of Babylon, the Tower of Babel where all false religion really began. And so
you have true religion pitted against false religion, God against Satan. What
do these two things have in common? Well God raises up Babylon to be the
chastening agency for His people in Israel.
“We saw also the period last time.
Look at verse 1, “In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim.” And we
discussed that in some great detail so we won’t go into that again. “In the
third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah.” Now, this particular year
was the year 605, the first group of people from Judah were taken to captivity
in Babylon. And among that first group was a man named Daniel. So it was in
this very year, the third year of Jehoiakim. He had one year called the
accession year in Babylonian terms, and three years. He’d actually been on the
throne for four years. And at 605 he takes the first group of captives from
Judah to Babylon.
“Now we mentioned that Jehoiakim was
an evil king. Jehoiakim led Israel down a path of disaster. During his reign
then, the first group were taken captive and the punishment of Judah really
began. Now you remember this, in backing up. Once, the kingdom was united under
Saul, under David, and under Solomon. But Solomon lost control of everything at
the end of his life and as a result, after Solomon, the kingdom split. Ten
tribes went to the north and two to the south. And you had the Northern Kingdom
known as Israel with its capital city of Samaria and you had the Southern
Kingdom known as Judah with its capital city Jerusalem. And they were not only
split, they were warlike toward each other.
“Israel seemed to decay faster. In
fact, in all the history of the Northern Kingdom there was never so much as one
good king, so their slide was fast. And by the year 722, Samaria was crushed by
the Assyrians and the Northern Kingdom was swept into captivity and the
Southern Kingdom alone remained. And the first blow came in 605 and the second
blow came in 597, and by 586 B.C. the third and final crushing blow described
in 2 Kings 25 took place. Jerusalem was destroyed. Tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of Jews were swept away into captivity and the country
was turned into a province of Babylonia.
“Now, before the final fall in 586,
nineteen years before in 605 Daniel was taken captive. And in that first
captivity in the reign of Jehoiakim, apparently the Babylonians wanted to pick
the cream of the crop, some young men that they could use in their government
training program. They wanted to pick the very best men to develop them, to
train them for usefulness in their country. And so by the time the majority of
people arrive in the captivity of 586, Daniel’s already been there nineteen
years.
“He’s already been well trained and
he’s already risen to a place of prominence among the Babylonians so the Jews
have their man in the palace and he becomes a key man in what God wants to do
with Israel, the people of Judah, in their captivity and in the future. And so,
last time we covered that, the places and the period and that was just a review.
“Let’s look thirdly at the
punishment, the punishment. The captivity, of course, is a punishment. God is a
God of great grace, but ultimately, His grace runs its course and when men take
a very firm stand in their – in their position against God, He acts in judgment
and chastening and punishment. And so that’s what we see here. Judah had
forsaken God’s law. In fact, it had gone so far that God realized there
wouldn’t be any turning back. They were resolutely determined to disobey God.
They turned their back on God.
“And so Isaiah 24:1 says,
“Behold, the Lord makes the earth empty and makes it waste and turns it upside
down and scatters abroad the inhabitants thereof and it shall be as with the
people so with the priests; as with the servants so with his master; as with
the maid so with her mistress; as with the buyer so with the seller; as with
the lender so with the borrower; as with the taker of interest so with the
giver of interest to him.” In other words, God’s going to come in judgment and
nobody’s social strata is going to be able to affect that. In other words,
nobody is going to escape.
““The land shall be utterly emptied,
and utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath spoken this word. The earth mourns and
fades away, the world languishes and fades away, the haughty people of the
earth do languish. The earth is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because
they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting
covenant. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell
therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and
few men left.”
“What you have there is a
mini-apocalypse. You have a taste of the tribulation in the Babylonian
captivity. And God says to the prophet Isaiah that He’s going to come and He’s
going to make that place an empty place, a languishing place because they have
disobeyed God’s law, they have broken the covenant and the commandments. They
had, of course, ignored the Sabbath. They ignored the Sabbath day and they
ignored the Sabbath year. And it always interests me that the Babylonian
captivity was seventy-years long. And one of the reasons I believe it was a
seventy was because that’s the number of the Sabbath and I think God was in
judgment recovering the Sabbaths that they never gave Him.
“They had engaged in gross idolatry.
Even though they had been repeatedly warned of its consequences, they had
turned their backs on God and they worshiped idols. It says in Jeremiah 7:24,
“They hearkened not, nor inclined their ear, but walked in the counsels and the
imagination of their evil heart. They went backward and not forward.” They
retreated to idolatry. “They hearkened not unto Me, nor inclined their ear, but
hardened their neck and did worse than their fathers.”
“And what would be the result? “At
the same time, saith the Lord,” – in Jeremiah 8 – “they shall bring out
the bones of the kings of Judah, and the bones of his princes, and the bones of
the priests, and the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the inhabitants of
Jerusalem, out of their graves and shall spread them before the sun, and the
moon, and the host of heaven, whom they have loved, whom they have served, and
after whom they have walked, and whom they have sought, and whom they have
worshipped: but shall not be gathered, nor be buried; they shall be for refuse
upon the face of the earth. And death shall be chosen rather than life by all
the residue of them that remain of this evil family, who remain in all the
places to which I have driven them, saith the Lord of hosts.”
“They have gone into all kinds of
pagan idolatry and God says I’m going to put them away in a severe judgment.
Now listen. God says there’s going to be judgment on Judah. He waited over a
hundred years after He judged Israel in the north. But Judah had progressed a
little more slowly in the cycle of terminal decadence. But they were there by
586 and that was the end. But may I hasten to add this, less you misunderstand
God and His nature. Before judgment ever falls God always warns. God always
warns. That’s always the way it is. There will never be – mark this – there
will never be in this world a divine judgment that is unexpected or
unannounced. God always warns.
“In the book of Jonah, chapter 3 in
verse 5, “So the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on
sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them. For word came unto
the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from
him, and covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he caused it to
be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his
nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let
them not feed, nor drink water: but let man and beast be covered with
sackcloth, and cry – cloth. And cry mightily to God: yea, let them turn
everyone from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands.
11/26/2023 7:40 AM
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