Daniel 4
Joyful Humbling
(Daniel 4)
Jason Procopio
There’s a fun narrative trick that’s used in cinema, in which the first scene of the movie actually shows you something from later in the movie—usually close to the end. You have no idea what’s going on, the characters are talking about things you don’t understand, but it’s always clear that the stakes are very high. Then the scene ends—usually on some kind of surprise or cliffhanger—and we’re taken back to the beginning of the story.
The first time I remember consciously noticing this trick was when I was in high school, when J.J. Abrams used it in the pilot episode of the TV show Alias, and it’s been horribly overused ever since—for good reason. This beginning in the middle, then going back to the beginning—when done well— lets you see how high the stakes are; it lets you know you’re going somewhere unexpected and thrilling; it gets you hooked before the story even really begins.
Now, here’s why I mention all this: J.J. Abrams did not invent this trick. In fact, cinema didn’t even invent this trick.
The prophet Daniel used this trick at the beginning of chapter 4.
Chapter 4 opens with the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, writing an open letter to everyone in his kingdom. We’ve been following the king for several weeks now, so the first words of his letter to his people come as a bit of a shock. He says (Daniel 4.1-3 in the ESV—or 3.31, in some translations):
1 King Nebuchadnezzar to all peoples, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth: Peace be multiplied to you! 2 It has seemed good to me to show the signs and wonders that the Most High God has done for me.
3 How great are his signs,
how mighty his wonders!
His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,
and his dominion endures from generation to generation.
That does not sound like the guy we’ve been seeing up to now. We’ve seen a narcissistic, power-hungry child. He defeats Jerusalem, brings a bunch of exiles back to Babylon, and has only the best-looking and most intelligent of the exiles trained to serve him in his palace. He has a dream he doesn’t understand, threatens to kill his wise men if they can’t tell him not only what his dream meant, but what he dreamed. And then when he gets the interpretation of his dream from God (who tells him his kingdom will be replaced by several kingdoms coming after him), he rebels against it by erecting a giant statue as a way of symbolizing the permanence of his kingdom, and threatens to throw anyone who doesn’t bow to worship his statue in a fiery furnace.
And each time, God has showed up. He gave Daniel the ability to know and interpret the king’s crazy dream in chapter 2. He protected Daniel’s friends when they were thrown into the fiery furnace for refusing to bow down to the king’s idol. Both times, the king acknowledged that there was something to this God of the Hebrews, but he never got so far as to actually proclaim any kind of faith or trust in this God.
But now, all of a sudden, it seems as if things have turned around. Now he’s talking about the signs and wonders that the Most High God has done for me. He’s talking about the fact that God’s kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, how his dominion endures from generation to generation.
Why the sudden reversal? Why is he all of a sudden attributing to God the things he has always wanted for himself?
That’s what chapter 4 is about. After establishing the surprising end to his narrative, Daniel—through Nebuchadnezzar’s letter—takes us back to what started it all.
This is one of my favorite stories in all the Bible. It’s long—which in itself isn’t a problem, but there’s a lot of repetition: a large part of this story is repeated nearly verbatim by Daniel in the story itself. So we’re not going to read this entire text together this morning (though if you were in your community groups this week, you’ve already read it together)—but for time we’re going to skip over some of that repetition.
Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream (v. 1-27)
The first thing that happens in the story is something that’s already happened once before in this book, in chapter 2.
Let’s read starting at v. 4:
4 I, Nebuchadnezzar, was at ease in my house and prospering in my palace. 5 I saw a dream that made me afraid. As I lay in bed the fancies and the visions of my head alarmed me. 6 So I made a decree that all the wise men of Babylon should be brought before me, that they might make known to me the interpretation of the dream. 7 Then the magicians, the enchanters, the Chaldeans, and the astrologers came in, and I told them the dream, but they could not make known to me its interpretation.
Now if I were one of these magicians, one of these wise men, I’d be quaking in my boots at that point, because the last time this happened, in chapter 2, the king ordered all of them to be killed because they couldn’t tell him his dream. This time he goes easier on them—he tells them his dream—but they still can’t interpret the dream for him. So they must have been terrified.
But the king remembers what happened at his last disturbing dream: Daniel came to the rescue and was able to tell him everything he wanted to know. Because of this, the king had made Daniel the chief of all of his magicians. (I often wonder how that actually worked, because Daniel wasn’t a magician at all—he was a prophet of God. It’s not as if he could teach someone else how to do what he was doing.)
Anyway, you can almost hear the relief in the king’s voice when he says (v. 8-16):
8 At last Daniel came in before me—he who was named Belteshazzar after the name of my god, and in whom is the spirit of the holy gods—and I told him the dream, saying, 9 “O Belteshazzar, chief of the magicians, because I know that the spirit of the holy gods is in you and that no mystery is too difficult for you, tell me the visions of my dream that I saw and their interpretation.
10 The visions of my head as I lay in bed were these: I saw, and behold, a tree in the midst of the earth, and its height was great. 11 The tree grew and became strong, and its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth. 12 Its leaves were beautiful and its fruit abundant, and in it was food for all. The beasts of the field found shade under it, and the birds of the heavens lived in its branches, and all flesh was fed from it.
13 I saw in the visions of my head as I lay in bed, and behold, a watcher, a holy one, came down from heaven. 14 He proclaimed aloud and said thus: ‘Chop down the tree and lop off its branches, strip off its leaves and scatter its fruit. Let the beasts flee from under it and the birds from its branches. 15 But leave the stump of its roots in the earth, bound with a band of iron and bronze, amid the tender grass of the field. Let him be wet with the dew of heaven. Let his portion be with the beasts in the grass of the earth. 16 Let his mind be changed from a man’s, and let a beast’s mind be given to him; and let seven periods of time pass over him.
Now let’s stop here for a moment. As far as we know, trees don’t have minds; so at this point we understand that the “tree” he’s describing is actually a man, who will basically lose his mind and become like a beast. The watcher—probably an angel—commands that this man remain in this beast-like state, for “seven periods of time.” (The text never explains just how long this is—most scholars guess it’s seven years—but the number seven signifies completion. In other words, “let him stay in that state for the right amount of time.”)
Now the real question is, why will all this happen? V. 17:
17 The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, the decision by the word of the holy ones, to the end that the living may know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will and sets over it the lowliest of men.’
(Keep an eye on that phrase—it’s going to come back.)
So the king concludes recounting his dream, and turns to Daniel for the interpretation.
Daniel’s Interpretation (v. 19-27)
As soon as the King stops speaking, it’s clear that Daniel knows exactly what the dream means, because he’s afraid to speak. V. 19:
19 Then Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, was dismayed for a while, and his thoughts alarmed him. The king answered and said, “Belteshazzar, let not the dream or the interpretation alarm you.” Belteshazzar answered and said, “My lord, may the dream be for those who hate you and its interpretation for your enemies!
In other words, this dream is bad news…and I think it’s bad news for you.
Remember, Nebuchadnezzar is not known for his stability. He’s the guy who threw three men in an oven because they wouldn’t bow to a golden statue he’d built. So Daniel is dismayed, he says, but he is courageous; Daniel uses tact, but he tells the truth. Daniel repeats the dream, describing the tree Nebuchadnezzar saw in his dream, and he says that this tree (v. 22):
22 ...it is you, O king, who have grown and become strong. Your greatness has grown and reaches to heaven, and your dominion to the ends of the earth.
Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom was incredibly powerful—the city of Babylon was the largest city in the world at the time. His power, and the dream image attached to it, is evocative of the Tower of Babel. In their hubris men had desired to build a tower whose top reached to heaven, a testament to their own might. The Babylonian empire was no different: the King praised himself for his own might and power.
So Daniel repeats the next part of the dream, describing the the angel ordering to chop down the tree, and what will happen to it afterwards. Then he says what it means (v. 24):
24 this is the interpretation, O king: It is a decree of the Most High, which has come upon my lord the king, 25 that you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. You shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and you shall be wet with the dew of heaven, and seven periods of time shall pass over you, till you know [once again, we see the same thing repeated here] that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.
In other words: King Nebuchadnezzar, God’s going to make you lose your mind, until you recognize who he is, and who you are.
You’re going to be driven into the fields and you’re going to live outside, and sleep outside, and eat outside—like an animal—for seven periods of time—until you understand that your kingdom, your power, did not come from you, did not come from your might, from God. Daniel had told him this before, in chapter 2, and the king clearly hadn’t gotten the message. And the whole point of this dream is that he had to get the message.
And Daniel ends with a plea to the King to repent of his sins, so that what he saw in the dream wouldn’t happen to him. V. 27:
27 Therefore, O king, let my counsel be acceptable to you: break off your sins by practicing righteousness, and your iniquities by showing mercy to the oppressed, that there may perhaps be a lengthening of your prosperity.”
Nebuchadnezzar’s Downfall (v. 28-33)
But, of course, the King doesn’t do that.
At this point, the story makes a leap forward: twelve months pass. We don’t know what happened during this time, but we see that the pride in the King’s heart has not disappeared.
V. 28:
28 All this came upon King Nebuchadnezzar. 29 At the end of twelve months he was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, 30 and the king answered and said, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” 31 While the words were still in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, “O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: The kingdom has departed from you, 32 andyou shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. And you shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and seven periods of time shall pass over you, until [and at this point the repetition is too obvious to miss] you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.”
And it happens. V. 33:
33 Immediately the word was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers, and his nails were like birds’ claws.
Nebuchadnezzar Restored (v. 34-37)
Now we don’t know exactly how long he was like this, but that it was the full period of judgment allotted to him. The King lifts his eyes to heaven, and BOOM—his mind returns.
V. 34:
34 At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me...
So we have those two images, like bookends: the King is on the roof of his palace, looking down on the people—and he becomes like a beast. Then on the ground, in the position of a beast, he looks up to God, and is restored.
And for perhaps the first time in this whole book, the King speaks about God in exactly the right way. He was reasoning like a beast even before his madness, attributing his power to himself; now, for the first time, he is reasoning like a man created in the image of God.
He proclaims, with perfect clarity and truth, the sovereign greatness of God, making this wonderful declaration in v. 34-35 (starting from the second half of v. 34):
…and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever,
for HIS dominion is an everlasting dominion,
and HIS kingdom endures from generation to generation;
35 all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing,
and he does according to his will among the host of heaven
and among the inhabitants of the earth;
and none can stay his hand
or say to him, “What have you done?”
The king is reestablished in his kingdom, and he says that still more greatness was added to me. (Note it well: he doesn’t say “I gained even more greatness,” but rather “greatness was added to me.”
And he concludes his story by saying (v. 37):
37 Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, for all his works are right and his ways are just; and those who walk in pride he is able to humble.
Joyful Humbling
There is a lot going on in this story.
The whole book of Daniel is about God’s sovereign rule over human history and human empires. He sets up kings and he removes kings as he sees fit. And in the story of King Nebuchadnezzar, what we see is basically a human being’s experience of realizing that fact. But because Nebuchadnezzar is a human being, he learns just like we do: slowly, and painfully.
If we live in this world, it’s quite probable that we will have similar experiences.
Here’s just a small example: my experience of this confinement has been strange, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I’m typically someone who’s naturally down on myself; I like myself just fine, but there aren’t a lot of things I feel like I do really well. I’m naturally going to identify areas of my life in which I’m not as good as I wished I was. I often feel like I’m not a great husband, not a great father, not a great neighbor.
The one area of my life in which I feel confident in my abilities is my job. I don’t do a lot of things well, but I’ve thought that ministry, being a pastor, is something I’m good at.
But in confinement, I feel like I can’t even do that well. Even something as simple as preaching—I can’t tell you how weird it is to be sitting here, in a bedroom, looking at a camera, trying to not make too much noise because there are other people in the house and I like to yell…and trying to preach. And the same holds true the rest of the week too—my time, and Loanne’s time, has been drastically reduced (since we always have the kids with us now), so I’m scrambling just to get the sermon prepared every week with the time I have. And because I don’t have time for much else, there are a lot of things about my job that I just can’t do anymore; or can’t do well. I can’t take care of you guys the way I should.
I had a night a couple weeks ago when I was just so discouraged—not just about my situation, but about myself. I was kind of venting to Loanne that not only did I feel like I was failing as a husband and a dad (because I was so scattered), now I was failing as a pastor too: the one thing in my life I’m actually good at.
And it just so happened that on this day, earlier that morning, I had read this text so I could get it in my head to start preparing for this sermon. And as I’m saying all this to Loanne, the words came out of my mouth and I just stopped. Because I remembered Nebuchadnezzar.
I think God let me have this experience to remind me that I’m not the one who teaches you; God teaches you through his Word. I’m not the one who takes care of you; God takes care of you, through his Word and through the church. For a time, he might do some of that through me, but he’ll keep on doing it perfectly well once I’m gone.
Now that may sound like bad news to some of us, but we have to remember that when we talk about pride, that coin always has another side. On the one side of pride you have arrogance; on the other side, you have self-condemnation. In both cases, it’s always about me: either I’m great, or I’m a failure. But in both cases I’m the center.
And with these two distinct attitudes come two distinct postures of the heart. With arrogance comes a posture of heart which says, like Nebuchadnezzar, Look at how great I am. With self-condemnation comes a posture of heart which says, Please don’t look at me.
But what do we see after God restores the king? We see neither arrogance nor self-condemnation; we don’t see him say, Look at me, and we don’t see him say, Look away.
Rather, he says, Look at God.
I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever,
for his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
and his kingdom endures from generation to generation…
That’s the goal.
Because God loves us, sometimes he brings us low, to remind us that those things we have, that we take for granted, didn’t come from us, and could never add anything to our worth in him; and to remind us that those things we’ve lost were never really ours in the first place, and could never subtract from our worth in him. Because he loves us, he brings us low, so that every other reference and support might be stripped away, and we can finally see him: the only reference and support we truly need.
God brings Nebuchadnezzar low, to show him that for all of his seeming might, he is a weak king, and his kingdom is a weak kingdom. For all the might of Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom, it cannot be the kingdom it needs to be. It is not the kingdom he had dreamed about in chapter 2: that kingdom which would stand forever.
For all of Nebuchadnezzar’s power and might, he cannot resist the simplest act of sovereignty God can throw at him—taking his mind and making it turn against him. He cannot preserve his own sanity, much less a kingdom.
God brought the king low, to that he might see nothing else but God himself, and know that it is the Most High, not Nebuchadnezzar, who rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.
And now, because of his painful ordeal, Nebuchadnezzar finally understands. He tells this story to his entire kingdom, telling them that as powerful as he may be, he is not the King of kings.
That there’s a better King than he.
He says (v. 34 again):
34 At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever,
for his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
and his kingdom endures from generation to generation…
The image from the king’s dream—the giant tree, giving shade and fruit for all—would later be taken up again by Jesus, to speak of the kingdom of God. Mark 4.30-32:
30 And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? 31 It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, 32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”
The kingdom of God, he says, is a kingdom which will fill the whole earth. And this kingdom would not be established through military might or power, but through the humility and service of a different kind of king.
The kingdom of Babylon was powerful, and capable of doing great good—but ultimately it was doomed to fail, because all it could do was fight the symptoms. Nebuchadnezzar could feed the hungry (as his dream suggests in v. 12), but he couldn’t reverse the sin that makes our bodies hunger. He could keep a relative amount of peace, but he couldn’t reverse the sin that makes people violent.
All human kingdoms are doomed to fail, because for all their power, they can’t solve the real problem—the problem behind all other problems.
Only God himself—the Son, Jesus Christ—could do that, because only he could be what we needed: God, taking on human flesh, being born in the likeness of men, taking our sin upon himself, and putting that sin to death, through his death for us.
The Son identified with humanity so completely that his death to sin became our death to sin. He identified with humanity so completely that his resurrection was the beginning of the reversal of all that was wrong with that humanity.
Jesus Christ is the King we needed, and he came. In his death, life and resurrection, he didn’t just treat the symptoms, but the cancer. He killed our sin, and at his resurrection, he began the process of recreating humanity in his image.
Only the kingdom Jesus came to establish could have both the power and the goodness to give shade and nourishment to the whole earth.
And now, through his humiliation and his restoration, Nebuchadnezzar knew that. He of course didn’t know the details; he didn’t know who Christ was, or exactly how God’s kingdom would be established.
But he had no longer any doubt that Babylon was not the great kingdom in which he prided himself. It was a great kingdom, sure, but not the great kingdom.
That kingdom is God’s alone, for (as he said in v. 34) his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation.
So if you find yourself in a situation like this one—on a smaller scale, of course—and you have the impression that God is bringing you low, that he is taking away those external and internal supports, those things which give you confidence in yourself, don’t run away from that experience. Don’t be discouraged; don’t give up. Because if you know that God is at work in those moments, if you allow him to bring you low, then you won’t look at your successes any longer, or your failures—you won’t look at yourselves at all. The only thing remaining before your eyes will be God alone, who gives success, and who redeems failure, for his glory. And because he created you precisely for that reason, you will rejoice like Nebuchadnezzar. You will say with him (v. 37),
Now I…praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, for all his works are right and his ways are just; and those who walk in pride he is able to humble.
