PT-3 "Introduction to the Book of Daniel"

 

PT-3 INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF DANIEL

 

11/19/2023 7:55 AM

 

First of all, Daniel focuses on what true dedication to God means. You can’t help but see this in the book of Daniel. Daniel makes this tremendous commitment to God and nothing changes it. He is never a victim of his circumstances. He never bails out no matter how tough it gets. He makes a commitment and he holds to that commitment and he is living proof of how God blesses committed people. I mean, you – you can’t believe what happens to Daniel because he’s committed to God. God just pours out blessing on him. And so it’s a tremendous message of dedication to God.

Secondly, Daniel is a book about God’s care for Israel. Some people think that when Israel went into captivity, God turned His back on them. Not so. When Israel went into captivity, God made sure that they had a representative right in the middle of a Babylonian government. And He picked Daniel and Daniel was Israel’s man in the White House. Daniel was there always to defend his people because God cared even in punishment.

Jewish interest was always in the heart of God. And so even though they were captives in a foreign land, even though they lost their existence as a national entity God still loved them, cared for them. In fact, only 70 years of captivity is all God allowed and then He took them back. And even during the captivity He allowed them to live in peace and have a very special man in a very high place to care for their needs and to give them hope. And through that man, Daniel, He gave tremendous prophecies of what it was going to be like in the future for God’s people when their captivity was turned into glorious liberty.

And that leads us to the third element in the book of Daniel and that is a tremendous message of comfort for the Jews. Daniel is a book of comfort. It was terrible being punished in a pagan land. And they would easily have forgotten that God cared except that God continued to give them the message through Daniel that He cared – also through Ezekiel.

And then finally, Daniel is given to us to lay out the story of how the world is going to end. What a tremendous book. It is a book that tells us about dedication to God and how God rewards that with blessing. It is a book that tells us about the love of God for His people Israel. It is a book that tells us about the hope for the future for those who are in captivity. And it is a book that tells us how the world is going to end. Tremendous, tremendous book!

And so, as we look at it, we’re going to see the great eternal secrets of the future and yet we’re going to learn how to live life right now. And you’re going to see how marvelously blended these things are. Now let me say this. Some people believe Daniel is the most important book in the Old Testament. I know why they believe that. They believe it because it gives us these four things that I just told you.

They believe it because it lays out the panorama of human history. They believe it because it shows us what godly character is like. They believe it because it takes a crisis point in human history when there could have been a total abandoning of all that was holy and hopeful in God’s people and it turns it around to a great story of hope and confidence. And if Daniel is important – and I believe it is – whether or not it’s the most important book in the Old Testament, I wouldn’t say.

But if it is important, then you can believe one thing about it, it will be attacked by the enemy, right? Because whatever is meaningful to the heart and soul of Christianity is exactly what Satan will attack. We know today that when a cult comes along, it invariably will attack the truthfulness of the Bible and the deity of Jesus Christ because those are the cardinal things we hold to. And Satan attacks the book of Daniel because it upholds the truthfulness of the Word of God.

I want to show you what I mean. For quite a while in our society – I suppose over a century now, well over a century – the book of Daniel has been attacked. And I mean it has been attacked constantly and viciously. What is being said about Daniel is simply that Daniel is a forgery. Daniel is not true. Daniel was not written by some sixth-century Jewish prophet predicting the future; Daniel is a forgery by some Jew who lived in 165 B.C. and wanted to pawn this thing off as if it were written by Daniel.

And what the critics want to do, you see, is they want to say, “Well all of Daniel’s prophecies were fulfilled in a certain man named Antiochus. And after Antiochus had lived and fulfilled all these prophecies, then Daniel wrote them – or whoever this man is – wrote them down under the name of Daniel as if he were living in the past and predicting it. And the whole thing is a ruse, it’s a fake, it’s a fraud.”

In fact, Doctor Criswell in his commentary on Daniel says, “There is not a liberal theologian in the world, past or present, who accepts the authenticity of the book of Daniel. They all deny its integrity declaring the book to be a blatant, patent forgery. They define its contents as pure unadulterated fiction,” end quote.

I took a course in one of the colleges that I attended in the prophets of the Old Testament. The professor told us that all of this is really not what it appears to be. They never predicted the future. They all really lived after their prophecies came to pass and then wrote them down as if they were still in the future so we’d believe they could tell the future. I went through a whole semester of that blood-curdling experience, listening to that.

And you say, “Well why they do this? Why won’t they allow somebody to predict the future? Why do they get upset that the lions didn’t eat Daniel? Why do they” – and by the way, he suffered a lot more from the critics then he ever has from the lion – “Why do they say that you can’t have people in a fiery furnace that don’t get burned up? Why is it that they will not allow the miracles and the prophecies of Daniel to stand? And in order to get rid of them they say the miracles were just lies and forgeries and the prophecies were really written long after they happened. Why do they do this?”

Basically it is because of this. It is because of what is known as modern rationalism. There is at the bottom of humanistic philosophy the idea that man’s mind is ultimate, and if I can’t conceive of it and if I can’t understand it by my rational mind, then it can’t be true. And the rational mind cannot tolerate miracles because they violate reason and cannot tolerate predictions of the future because they do too. And so if the mind is ultimate and I can’t conceive of those things, then those things aren’t true because my mind is ultimate.

11/19/2023 7:54 AM