Daniel 4:19-37

Nebuchadnezzar's Testimony

Dan 4:19-37

"Then Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, was astonied for one hour, and his thoughts troubled him." There are moments of astonishment in all true ministries. The word "hour" should be replaced by the word "moment": Then Daniel was astonished for one moment. But into one moment how many hours may be condensed! Into one feeling a whole lifetime, with manifold and tragical experience, may enter. We have nothing to do with mere time in calculating spiritual impression, spiritual service, spiritual enjoyment. Daniel was not a man to be easily affrighted; the astonishment which befell him was moral, imaginative, not in the sense of fancying things that did not exist, but in the sense of giving realities their largest scope and meaning. He was astonished that such a fate was awaiting King Nebuchadnezzar. It was like a blow struck upon the very centre of his forehead; when he saw what was going to befall the king he was struck, as it were, with a spear of lightning, his voice altered, as did the fashion of his countenance. He had a message to deliver, and yet he delivered it with tears that were hidden in the tone of his voice. He was not flippant; he was solemn with an ineffable solemnity. Never was he in such a position before. Only the Divine Spirit could make him equal to the responsibilities of that critical hour. Many words we can utter easily, but to pronounce doom upon a life, any life, old man's or little child's, is a task which drives our words back again down the throat. We cannot utter them, yet we must do so; we wait in the hope that some relief will come, but relief does not come from this burden-bearing in the sanctuary of life. The preacher is often as much astonished as the hearer, and as much terrified. In proportion as the preacher is faithful to the book which he has to read, expound, and enforce, will he sometimes come to passages that he would rather not read. It would be delightful if we could expel the idea of penalty from our human intercommunion. Men have tried to fill up the pit of hell with flowers, and all the flowers have been consumed. It would be delightful to hide by concealment of any kind the horrors that await the wicked man, but to hide those horrors is to aggravate them. It can be no joy to any man to go forth and say, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." No man could utter such words but in obedience to the election and ordination of God. It is easy, if we consult our own flesh and sense and taste alone, to hide the Cross of agony and shame; but he who hides the Cross hides the salvation which it symbolises, and without which it is impossible. It is not easy for any man, Jonah or Daniel, Hosea or Joel, to say unto the wicked, It shall be ill with thee. We would rather live upon the other side of the hill, where the sun smiles all day, where the flowers grow as if they would never cease to unfold some new secret of colour and beauty, and where the birds trill a song from hour to hour, as if growing in capacity as they multiply in service. But the hill of the Lord is many-sided; we should be unfaithful and unjust if we did not recognise its multifold aspects, and show them to those who have come to see the reality and the mystery of the divine kingdom amongst men. Daniel looks wondrously well in the moment of his astonishment. The man's best self is now in his face. How quiet he is, and what singular tenderness plays around the sternness which befits the message that he is about to deliver! What a mixture of emotion, what an interplay of colour, what an agony of sensation! yet Daniel is a true man, and he will speak the true word, come of it what may, so far as he himself is concerned; furnace of fire or den of lions, he must speak the word which the Lord has given to him. Why do we not follow his example? Why do we try to take out of the divine word all things offensive? It would be easy to pander to human taste, and to flatter human vanity, and to assure the half-damned man that the process cannot be completed, but that after all he will be taken to heaven and made a seraph of. Who can tell lies so thick, so black? Let him eschew the altar and the Cross.

Daniel repeats the dream to the king and says

"My lord, the dream be to them that hate thee, and the interpretation thereof to thine enemies. The tree that thou sawest, which grew, and was strong, whose height reached unto the heaven, and the sight thereof to all the earth; whose leaves were fair, and the fruit thereof much, and in it was meat for all; under which the beasts of the field dwelt, and upon whose branches the fowls of the heaven had their habitation: it is thou, O king" ( Dan 4:19-22 ).

This is the personal application of truth. What is an interpretation if it be not followed by an application? What is a sermon if it end not in a tremendous appeal? The great fathers of the pulpit were mighty in exhortation. They wrestled with their hearers. We have retained the exposition and the criticism, and the eloquence to some extent, but the application we have cut off, because we dare not offend the tastes of people who are going down to hell on the swift steed of self-flattery. Say what figure in history is grander, as representing the idea of ministry, than that of Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar, a prisoner before a king, a captive in the house of a man who could crush him with a word or destroy him with a frown? Yet this Daniel, captive, exile, tells the king that the whole dream belongs to himself, and that mighty though he be, yet it is written in heaven that Nebuchadnezzar shall keep company with the beasts of the field; the man's heart shall be taken out of him, and a beast's heart put in its place. It was not a pleasant message. What delight hath the Lord in "pleasant" sermons delivered to sinners? The sermon should be true, whether it be pleasant or unpleasant; and no man faithful to the divine word can make himself pleasant to all people. What skill there was in the manner of delivering the message! It was better that it should be done all at once. There are some things we must speak abruptly, or we never shall speak them at all; they must, so to say, be forced out of us: the word must come like the shot of a musket: "It is thou, O king," a short sharp stroke. Who would vacillate when he knew he was going to deliver sentence of death, worse than death, all deaths in one agonising humiliation? Better it should be after the pattern of Daniel, clear, simple, prompt, resonant, put in the very smallest words, words that a child could understand and repeat, monosyllables that made the heavens black with unimaginable terror: "It is thou, O king."

Nor did the message end there. That is the message that must be delivered every time men meet for religious counsel, and every time the wicked man appears in the house of God. Nor is the message, in all its best applications, to be limited to mere wickedness. There are applications of this passage which fit themselves in all the necessities and varieties of human experience and relationship. Sometimes the physician has to say to a man whose constitution is of iron, whose sinews are brass, It is thou, O strong man; the sentence of dissolution has gone out concerning thee: the frame is great, strong, noble in appearance, and apparently invincible; but there is at work within thee an influence that will kill the soldier and kill the hero and kill the king. That is not a pleasant speech to make to any man. Yet, knowing the truth and keeping it back, what is he less than a murderer who does not reveal it, and give the sufferer an opportunity to set his house in order? Sometimes the preacher has to say even to a millionaire, It is thou, O rich man: it is with infinite difficulty thou canst get near Christ: how hardly shall they that have riches enter the kingdom of heaven! thou hast wine, and beast's flesh, and fowls of the air, and bread in plentifulness; but thou shalt sleep with strange bedfellows, yea with poverty and affliction and loathsomeness: set thine house in order: riches take unto themselves wings, and flee away; he who yesterday gave orders on the Exchange, tomorrow will beg a piece of bread to break his fast. Sometimes the teacher has to address himself to the boastful man, and say, It is thou, O boastful man: thou didst suppose thyself to be in possession of everything; to be lord and king and mighty man and counsellor and lawgiver; the word shall die on thy blackening lips, and thou who didst serve in the house of vanity shall be a bondman in the house of disappointment. This was personal preaching, the kind of preaching that is resented. We are willing that any man shall be preached to except ourselves. The minister who succumbs to that dire temptation was ordained by men, but the ordaining hand of Christ was never laid upon his faithless head.

What was the fate that befell the king?

"They shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, and they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and they shall wet thee with the dew of heaven, and seven times shall pass over thee" ( Dan 4:25 ).

Some men require violent teaching. We will not obey God's love: when he whispers to us we do not hear him; unless he take up the trumpet of his thunder, we pay no attention to the voice of Heaven. Pleasant angels have come to seek us and bring us home, but we have declined their evangel and their gospel and their company; summer has come, with spring on one side and autumn on the other, all beautiful and rich, abounding in all things lovely and useful; and they have said they have come to bring us back to heaven, and we have defied the whole of them. Not until God takes up the rod of his lightning do we begin to be religious. A plague would fill the church; an epidemic would make a prayer-meeting at five o'clock in the morning seasonable: we are cowards! Yet, blessed be God, he does not withhold violence if it will do us good. If we will not have the company of angels we shall be thrust into the society of beasts, and in that humiliation we may be willing to listen to terms and proposals that otherwise would have fallen upon deaf ears; and there in the open field, with only beasts to talk to, we may begin to pray.

What was the end of this exile? Daniel explains the purpose of the providence:

"Till thou know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will" ( Dan 4:25 ).

Yet there was something left in all this:

"And whereas they commanded to leave the stump of the tree roots, thy kingdom shall be sure unto thee after that thou shalt have known that the heavens do rule" ( Dan 4:26 ).

God does not make an utter end of us; he leaves a root, a stump, something that may yield a scion, something that may come to branch and leaf and fair flower or rich fruit What have we left? Reason, power of thinking, reflection, memory, power of forecast; we have our mother tongue left us, and we could put all its words into prayer; we could build our mother's words into a cathedral of praise. It is not quite night yet; the darkness is not yet outer darkness; there is time to get home before the night settles in black and endless dominion upon the earth: hasten to be wise; make the sunset hour a time of return; sanctify the evening by the sacrifice of obedience: in thy Father's house there is bread enough and to spare.

The providence was not lost upon Nebuchadnezzar. He bethought himself; he was brought back to the habitations of men, and when he saw the purpose of God and accepted it he uttered his testimony: he was not ashamed to declare what wonders had been wrought:

"At the same time my reason returned unto me; and for the glory of my kingdom, mine honour and brightness returned unto me; and my counsellors and my lords sought unto me; and I was established in my kingdom, and excellent majesty was added unto me. Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol and honour the King of heaven, all whose works are truth, and his ways judgment; and those that walk in pride he is able to abase" ( Dan 4:36-37 ).

That is the testimony of history on both sides. Have we no testimony to bear? Is there no word we can speak on behalf of divine providence? If we are not theologians we can still observe the ways of God amongst men. We are not called upon to talk theology, but we are called upon to talk gratitude. Thankfulness is decency, and if we have received mercies of the Lord and never mentioned them, we are ungrateful, and we deserve no repetition of divine favours, and our deserts would lead to an abandonment of our life by the sunny and instructive providence of God. The testimony is always acceptable. Testimony may be argument. When a man cannot put into logical form his ideas of God he can still himself stand up and say, "Once I was blind; now I see." How were thine eyes opened? Hear the answer: "A man that is called Jesus opened mine eyes." That is due to the Saviour of the world; if we said less we should surely be thankless, and unjust, and unworthy altogether. If the Church would be faithful in the deliverance of a simple, personal, definite testimony, who can say that the world would not be won to Christ? If on every hand unbelievers heard the testimony of belief, who knows but that a miracle would be wrought along the whole line of their thinking? But if unbelief is continually seeing in the Church doubt, denial, suspicion, suggestion of possible error or failure, what if unbelief should say, "Better be certain in unbelief, than uncertain and hesitant in so-called faith; thorough, sound, emphatic denial has advantages which are not possessed by a hesitant religion, by a continually self-readjusting and self-excusing theology"? We may not be strong in metaphysics, but we can be strong in personal experience. You were once amongst the beasts of the field; where are you now? Stand up and praise the Lord, saying you have returned unto the habitations of men. Once you had no hope, and now you have a light that the wind cannot blow out: who kindled that flame? speak out the name; have no fear: it will do you good in body, soul, and spirit to be fearless in your testimony. Say simply, frankly, This is the miracle of Christ.

Note

"It must be observed that, in accordance with the principle enunciated by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 14:15 , dreams, in which the understanding is asleep, are recognised indeed as a method of divine revelation, but placed below the visions of prophecy, in which the understanding plays its part.... In exact accordance with this principle are the actual records of the dreams sent by God. The greater number of such dreams were granted, for prediction or for warning, to those who were aliens to the Jewish covenant. Thus we have the record of the dreams of Abimelech ( Gen 20:3-7 ), Laban ( Gen 31:24 ), of the chief butler and baker ( Gen 40:5 ), of Pharaoh ( Gen 41:1-8 ), of the Midianite ( Jdg 7:13 ), of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 2:1 , etc.; Dan 4:10-18 ), of the Magi ( Mat 2:12 ), and of Pilate's wife ( Mat 27:19 ). Many of these dreams, moreover, were symbolical and obscure, so as to require an interpreter. And where dreams are recorded as means of God's revelation to his chosen servants, they are almost always referred to the periods of their earliest and most imperfect knowledge of him. So it is in the case of Abraham (Genesis 15:12 , and perhaps Gen 15:1-9 ), of Jacob ( Gen 28:12-15 ), of Joseph ( Gen 37:5-10 ), of Solomon ( 1Ki 3:5 ), and, in the New Testament, of Joseph (Matthew 1:20 ; Matthew 2:13 , Matthew 2:19 , Mat 2:22 ). It is to be observed, moreover, that they belong especially to the earliest age, and become less frequent as the revelations of prophecy increase. The only exception to this is found in the dreams and 'visions of the night' given to Daniel (Daniel 2:19 ; Dan 7:1 ), apparently in order to put to shame the falsehoods of the Chaldaean belief in prophetic dreams and in the power of interpretation, and yet to bring out the truth latent therein (comp. St. Paul's miracles at Ephesus, Acts 19:11-12 , and their effect, Act 19:18-20 )." Smith's Dictionary of the Bible.

Prayer

Almighty God, we have come out of the winter to praise thee for the spring; we have come from the wilderness into the garden of God; we have come from the field of battle to the home of peace. The world is one great fight all the week long; some win, some lose: but through all the action there is a tone of misery. The world is full of wailing; there is no happiness unmixed. We have left the plough in the furrow that we may come for a while to pray; we shall go back to the plough the stronger if thou wilt answer our heart's desire. All the work is standing still whilst we worship; blessed be thy name, we can say to our toil, Stand here while we go and worship yonder. We mean to take on the yoke again, and to resume all the fight, and to endure all the misery; but we can do all this better if we see God as it were face to face through Jesus Christ his Son. We want to pray, our hearts are full of desire, but in our mouth there are no words fit to tell all our pain and all our want; hear thou what little we can say, and answer it in the boundlessness of thy Fatherly love. We want to say how glad we are that we have not been forsaken; even in the night we have had stars to keep us company: it has not been all darkness; sometimes we thought we saw the dawn soon after midnight. Thou hast kept us, fed us, led us, and we are now in this green garden, this paradise of God, waiting to give thee praise and to see thy light. We want to tell thee how sad our heart is that we have done wrong; but wrong we are always doing: we are accustomed to do evil; we do it with the one hand as skilfully as with the other; we are practised in things forbidden. God be merciful unto us sinners, because our faces are hidden at the foot of the Cross. We look up for a moment to see the Sufferer; he is our Priest; he is doing our work; he will save us every one; our hope is in the dying, rising Christ. We come to him with fulness of love and fulness of trust, and if we know aught of distrust it is not in God, but in ourselves. Humble us, that we may be raised up, tread us deeply in the dust, that at last we may stand up before God elevated and sanctified by his grace. We want to give ourselves more perfectly to thee; to this end give us health, full, radiant, bounding health; may the blood run well, may the brain be strong, may every nerve respond to the fingers of the sun: and thus in great health of body may we entertain a healthy, loving soul; may the mind be a mind of health, loving the fresh air of God, and seeking only to nest itself in the very light of heaven. Take away from us all disease, all infirmity and imperfectness, every sign and token of death; may we trample grim old death in the dust to which he belongs. Thus do thou hear our cry. Thou knowest our meaning, though we cannot utter our words aright; thou dost not look at our words, but at our thought, the thing we would be at, the great desire, the master impulse. We give one another to thee in a great act of dedication; we would be born in God's house and wedded at God's altar, and we would live under God's roof: yea, we would dwell in the house of the Lord for ever, crying out our little miseries there, and there singing our little songs of joy, and there plighting and trothing one another in holy trust and generous hospitality. Help the bad man to overthrow the devil: turn aside the counsel of the mean of soul, so that their seed may never come to fruition; when they go out to seek the harvest may they cut down sheaves of darkness. Help the good man to be better; give him more light, more confidence: so often is goodness associated with timidity that thy people strike feebly when they might strike with a battering-ram. Help those who have to carry great burdens; say to them that at the most it is only for a handful of days, that there may be one or two moments of agony, but they are like the gates that fall back upon heaven. The Lord be in our sick-chamber and make it the brightest room in the house; the Lord be in the nursery and take care specially of the weakest child, and specially of him whose forecast in this world is very dark because he is lame, deformed, blind, incomplete, poor. The Lord be everywhere like the living air, a great ventilation, a great hope, a great impulse, a great inspiration. Lord, the little earth, so little, is still thine, though it is stained through and through with sin. Hear thou in heaven thy dwelling-place, and when thou hearest, Lord, forgive! Amen.