Daniel and His Dreams

Daniel is such a fun book. It has the men with funny names thrown into the fiery furnace. They are saved without even the slightest burn and with angels appearing in the fire with them. It has Daniel thrown into the Lion's Den by the King in a fit of rage. Then the lion's mouth is shut. These miraculous stories are amazing. A follower of mine said, "why don't you talk about Daniel's dreams in Chapter 7?" So I will tell you about this amazing dream because it connects the two parts of Daniel: the first part with these amazing stories and the second part with all these crazy images, just like Revelation. Dreams are such a big part of the Bible. Daniel was the last book of the Old Testament written between 167 and 165 BC. That is confusing, because our Bible's put Malachi last, but they did this to link the Old Testament with the New Testament. Even though Daniel was written about things that happened 400 years before, it's story telling tells us so much about the people living just before Jesus. If you could take your Bible apart and put it back together, you should put Daniel last. I explain how this timeline is so interesting and how it helps to make this weird dream make sense.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the Real Bible Rob Teencast. And today we'll talk about one of the craziest books of the Bible, Daniel, and where it sits in the Bible. And it's so familiar probably to many of you. If you haven't read Daniel, you really ought to give it a try because it has some of the craziest, funnest stories of the Old Testament. It's a lot like Revelation, except for it has um it's a little bit easier to read, and it's not quite as crazy in the first part as it is in the second part. The second part of Revelation of Daniel, the last uh five chapters, is a lot like Revelation. It reads the same way and everything, but the first seven chapters read um like a really neat story uh about Daniel who was taken away uh with the Jewish exiles to Babylon. And we read about King Nebuchadnezzar, and we read about his uh the king that came after Nebuchadnezzar, and um, and then we read uh two stories about um uh about that you probably are familiar with, and most people are. One is about the fiery furnace, and uh Daniel, there were four uh Daniel had uh three companions, um Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and which were funny Bandel uh Babylonian names for uh these three uh uh Jewish guys, and um and and Nebuchadnezzar had a fit of rage, and he threw them, had them bound up, had the um furnace stoked up as hot as it could get, and threw these three guys into the furnace. And um, and that happens very early in the book, very early in the chapter or in the book, um, I think the third chapter, something like that. And he he throws these guys in there and then comes back and finds out that the the guys uh are they're just sitting there and dancing. There's a there's a fourth person in there who's an angel uh talking to them. And it says that when they came out of the furnace, they didn't even have a little singe, you know, a little tiny bit of a burn at all. They didn't even smell like smoke when they came out. So this is like this big miraculous story, and uh, and and it would just goes to show that you know God will protect these um these these three guys, will protect uh the people who you know are faithful and stand up for the um everything. And then a little bit later is another super famous story, and that is about Daniel. And Daniel, uh, he the um king was putting all kinds of rules about how you had to worship and all of that kind of thing. And Daniel said, No, no, I I I want to stick with what uh what the Jewish God, you know, my God, uh, wanted me to do for worship. And uh then uh he's thrown into the lion's den. And of course, the idea is then the lion would eat him, right? Well, uh again, another miracle is that the lion's mouth was shut and he wasn't going to be eaten, and he came out alive, no problem. So they figured out, oh, well, maybe these guys uh aren't so bad after all. And in fact, uh both kings decided that uh they really thought Daniel was useful because Daniel uh was really good at interpreting dreams. So uh I had a person uh in that contacted me, he's a follower uh of me online, and he said, you know, I really wish you would talk about um Daniel chapter seven. And I said, Okay, well, that's interesting. It's one of these dreams, and it's a crazy dream, kind of like uh the dreams in uh revelation, and then it's the interpretation of the dream, and uh we look at it and it's really kind of like telling the story. The idea is that it's telling the story about the future and the future of these four kingdoms and the kingdoms around them, and you know how this is another miracle and everything. Then, and the reason why um this dream sequence in chapter seven is important is that the rest of the book is basically uh all this uh more imagery about prophecy, what they call prophecy, basically telling the future or tell from their point of view. And and um, you know, it's uh about the it says in the first year of Babylon's King Belshazzar. So uh Nebuchadnezzar is already gone, and that now there's the second king, King Belshazzar. Daniel had a dream and a vision in his head as he lay on his bed and he wrote the dream down, and then here's the dream, and it's all this stuff about four giant beasts and uh and you know how the beasts eat each other, and um, and then uh and and horns and all of this stuff, right? Sounds just like Revelation, right? Um, and then um about this human figure that will come. Now, people will think that you know that's kind of like a savior figure, right? You know, kind of like Jesus is in Revelation. And then there's this interpretation, this um telling what the dream is about in the second half of the chapter, starting in verse 15. And uh, like I said, it it's fun to read and good. It's not quite as fun as the you know the other parts where you have the storytelling, but it it gives you a good idea where this kind of thinking comes from, this kind of what we call apocalyptic thinking, you know. Now, why is this so interesting and why is this so important? Well, Daniel is almost for sure the last uh book of the Old Testament. It's it's much, much newer, but it was written far later than most of the Old Testament, and you go, Well, but how can that be? You know, it's talking about things that happened about five hundred uh five hundred and fifty years before Jesus in BC before Christ. But but uh but how can it be? Because uh there are other books that were definitely written after 550 BC, but the thing is is that they can tell by um how it was written and the language, the language that Daniel is mostly written in, which is a language called Aramaic, didn't exist in 500 BC, and on and it also it talks about things that were happening in um around uh this time when it was written. So um the you know, people who uh study these things are almost certain that the book of Daniel was written between 167 and 165 BC years before Jesus, much, much closer. And um this is really important, and it's you can tell mostly by the language, because the kind of language it was written in Hebrew, uh it's Hebrew and Aramaic and Hebrew again, the even the Hebrew wasn't the kind of Hebrew that they used 500 years before. So it's kind of like if you're you and I are thinking about how language changes, the way we speak English today is way different than people spoke English, you know, in Shakespeare's time or in the King James Bible time or something like that. And you know that, you've heard that, right? Well, that's exactly the same way that the book of Daniel is, is that it's written in a kind of language, kind of like a much more modern style language, kind of and about events or things that happened 400 years before it. Just like when we uh talk about in in English today, and we're talking about things that happened in Shakespeare or in that time, and you go, wow, the language really has changed a lot. So you can tell just by looking at how things are written, you can tell what era they're from, what part, what time they're from. Well, that's the way Daniel is. So Daniel and so really Daniel is the last book. And you go, if you look at a um a Bible, you'll notice that the Old Testament stops at Malachi and not Daniel. Well, why is that? Well, if you look at a Jewish Bible before this, it's the Chronicles that are the last books, it's not even Malachi. And it's really kind of confusing. Well, what should be the last book uh of the Old Testament? The last book of the Old Testament should be Daniel, because that's the last one written. Um, but they they choose where to put the the people who made the Bible, pulled all these books together and turned them into a um one single Bible. They decided where the different books would go. So for sure, Genesis would go first, right? And for sure uh Revelation would go last. That makes no that makes perfect sense. Um, but these books in the middle, you know, had came at different times and and had different ideas. The reason why Daniel should be the last book is that it also talks about the way people were thinking at that time, about 160 years before Jesus. And it's very much like the thinking that was around when Jesus was around and when the book of Revelation was around, even though it's a couple hundred years later. So that's that's why it should be the last book of the Bible, because it tells you the way people were thinking as the New Testament starts when Jesus came. Isn't that interesting? So, um, and the the idea, and so you you can ask, well, why what were they thinking? Well, they were thinking the the Jewish people that wrote the book of Daniel were thinking about how to survive with all of these kingdoms around them that were um threatening them and um were trying to take away their um Jewish practices, the their their real the way they do religion, right? The way they pray. So if you look at Daniel, almost everything in here is about how uh to be a good, faithful, um, Jewish person with in an in a foreign land in in Babylon, and how the the the people in Babylon were trying to um change them, and and they have this strong stories about how we're not gonna change, we're gonna just stay true. And and uh that's so that's why the um Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown into the fiery furnace. That's why um Daniel was thrown into the lion's den, because at that time they were they were trying to say, you know, you've got to be um, you know, stay with your faith and do the right things. And that's what they were doing. So that's where these stories come from. And we it it we're really lucky because we get to go read back and read these fun, amazing stories, and also kind of get an idea of the way they were thinking at the time. So why this is important too for Jesus is that that this kind of what they call apocalyptic literature that means end times, you know, looking, uh thinking that the world is falling apart and we need to be faithful to God. That was very much the kind of thinking that was happening in Jesus' time. And you can even see it in some of Jesus' stories. Jesus tells these stories kind of uh about um uh about the end of the world and the end, uh, how things are gonna end. And then um Paul was right, you know, uh the decide or the apostle Paul, who was wrote most of the New Testament, was also kind of talking this way too. And of course, then when we get to Revelation and John, it was all about that. So that line of thinking, they weren't thinking that way in the earlier part of the Old Testament. There was lots of threats and all that stuff, but they weren't kind of thinking in this magical way, you know, with all of these crazy beasts and and uh um trying to predict what was going to happen at the end of time. And well, but Daniel is one of those Old Testament books that does talk this way. So that's really I think I that's just super fascinating. Whenever we read the Bible, so when you're reading these stories, and um it is you kind of go, wow, I get to look inside of the way they thought, you know, just like reading Shakespeare or reading, you know, a novel, uh or something about World War II, or uh, you know, something about uh, you know, Americ American history or something like that. You read these old, you know, historical novels, and the most valuable thing about them is that you can kind of see the way people were thinking in the time that they're talking about. And that's what we do in Daniel as well. So uh there's a couple of other things in Daniel too that you can look at. Um, I talked to uh some about the language. There was this language called Aramaic, as I mentioned, and that's the language of Jesus, that's the language of Jewish people at that time, and it's a it's qu a lot like Hebrew, it it's kind of like uh, you know, Spanish is to French, for example. You know, you if you're if you speak Spanish, you can't really understand French, or you know, French, you can't really understand Spanish. But the language, the words, the way the um, the way the language goes together really sounds a lot or is really a lot closer than than you think, right? That's the way Aramaic is to Hebrew. Hebrew uh um and Aramaic are they they use a lot of the same words, they use the same kind of language structure and stuff like that, but they're they they really couldn't understand each other. So in Daniel, they figured out, oh, well, even the Hebrew parts of Daniel, because there's both in Daniel. It's the it's it's a really crazy book, then they put it together. Even the Hebrew parts of Daniel um use this really strange Hebrew that that people kind of didn't really use at that time, because it was probably written by a person that or people that spoke Aramaic, and they and the Hebrew sounds more like Aramaic than the other uh Hebrew books uh of the Old Testament, and it's really crazy how that goes. So um I I so instead of like I'm I'm not gonna really tell you the stories because there's lots to Daniel, but if you read it, um, first of all, just have fun with it. It is a it's a fun book filled with lots of crazy stuff. Um, and the other part of it is then then also look at it in this way that you can kind of understand how the the people who were um listening to Jesus, uh how people who were writing around that time were thinking. So a lot of the people in Jesus' time, a lot of these disciples with the Roman, you know, because the Romans were super powerful, right? And they were doing terrible things, they were killing people, they were doing crucifixions, they were doing all of these things. So people were afraid, and they so they thought, oh, this is the end of the world. And that that was already happening even uh before Jesus came. And then Jesus was kind of showing, you know, this I'm gonna show you how we're going to be saved. I'm going to show you how all of these terrible things that are happening is kind of uh showing that um we're we're moving, or I am going to show you how to live a life of love and service rather than fighting back. That's really most of what Jesus was saying is that we could fight back, you know, we could uh um get out our swords and our guns and all of these things and fight back against the Romans, but no, instead we should love each other and we should live out our lives and love. So maybe that's a lesson for you and me today. Uh there are a lot of people saying a lot of crazy things, um, especially uh to young men. Uh you know, you see a lot of um if you're a if you're a boy or a young man and you kind of look and you get a lot of images of of warfare and a lot of um really threatening images. So it's really easy to think that the world is ending right now, doesn't it? It's no different than then. That's the way they thought too, and that's the way we can uh kind of identify with them as to as well. So uh again, when you when you read these books, kind of you can instead of trying to like say decipher what our future is gonna be, kind of say, oh, they think like I do, they're having the same challenges, their same worries that I have. And this is how they thought about it. And that's uh super valuable to do. So uh with that, I I really do hope that you read Daniel. I hope you read some of these books, the fun stories. There are parts of the Bible that aren't so fun to read. Nobody says that you have to read it all at once. You can read the fun stuff, and then if you get curious, you can kind of go and look at the what looks like more boring stuff. But the more boring stuff is actually where uh, you know, college professors and uh biblical scholars, the people who really study the Bible for a living, that's where they go because they get a lot of information uh about how other things about the Bible. But that doesn't mean you have to do it. Well, you you can do that when you get curious, but instead you can read the fun stuff like Daniel and kind of go, hmm. But don't, like I said, don't take too much time in Daniel thinking that, oh, well, you know, I'm gonna predict our future. And a lot of people have done that with Daniel, just like Revelation. And uh, if they if you do that too much, you're kind of missing the point. So with that, um, I'll say, you know, thanks so much for listening to me. You know, people say lots of things about the Bible that aren't really there. Uh, people say lots of things about Daniel that aren't really there. So I really want you to uh kind of look at it in a different way. Um, thanks and God bless you.