Immanuel Sermon Audio
Daniel (27:66)
All right, Book of Daniel. Take your Bible out, find Daniel. If you did not get an outline, there's some in the back, there should be, there's some in the front, I can see those. So grab an outline if you want an outline. Book of Daniel, fifth book, last book in a section of books called The Major Prophets. And so, there's your major prophets. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, which is written by Jeremiah, almost like Jeremiah, Part B or an addition to Jeremiah, then Ezekiel and Daniel. A little bit funny that we put Daniel in a section of books, in this English breakdown of the Hebrew Scriptures, we put Daniel in a section of books called Prophets, because technically, if you look at Daniel in his life in his ministry, he really was not a prophet. So you don't need to just be in total angst over this, but just to be clear, he wasn't a prophet. The job of the prophet in the Old Testament, think about this, think about men like Moses, think about people like Samuel, who was also a judge, but a prophet, think about Elijah. Their job was to get a message from God and then to deliver that message to usually people in Israel. Maybe it's the people of Judah, maybe it's the people of Israel, maybe it's a king of Judah or a king of Israel, but typically that's what the prophet did. They got a message from God, and then they took that message specifically to somebody within the kingdom. Usually they did that, a lot of times they did that in the form of a sermon. Daniel doesn't have any sermons. Daniel had some things to say to people, but usually it was interpreting dreams and thinking about things going on in visions, not necessarily a direct word from God that he's speaking to the people. And the people in Daniel's day recognized that he was not a prophet. They recognized he was an important guy, but nobody thought he was a prophet. And when the Jews put together their scriptures, we call it the Old Testament, they just call it the scriptures. They did not include Daniel in the prophets. And so here is the breakdown of the Hebrew Old Testament. Let's put that slide up. Hebrew scriptures divided into three sections, the book of Moses, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, that's just like ours, first five books. Then the Jews say we have prophets. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and then they have a book called the 12th. That is what we call the minor prophets. We split them up into 12 books. Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Hagia, Zechariah, Malachi. Took Old Testament in high school and we had to learn those and he would call out a book as a quiz and you had to write, he'd give you about two seconds to do this. He would say, Hosea and you had to write the book before Hosea and the book after Hosea. And then he'd wait about five seconds and he'd say, Zechariah and you'd have to write the one before and then after. I'm rusty but I could do it at one point in time. So that's the 12th. The prophets. Then Hebrew scriptures, this is Hebrew breakdown of their scriptures. They call it the writings, Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles. It's all the same material. It's just rearranged in a different order and you understand there's nothing really magical about the order. Men put that into place and the Jews just did it a little bit differently just so you know how we do it. I color coded it for you and I think I got it right. Red, we call in the English division of the Old Testament, we call those books the law. Just the same is in the Hebrews. Then we have a group of books in blue called history books, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, First and Second Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. In the Jewish scriptures, there's only one Samuel, it's just combined. Only one kings, it's combined, only one chronicles, it's combined and Ezra and Nehemiah are combined. So same material. Then we have poetry books, Psalms, Proverbs or Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon. Then we have major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, and then we have the Twelve, the same except we split them up. So you learn something tonight I hope. Exact same stuff just arranged differently. My point in that is that Daniel by Jewish people is not recognized technically as a prophet. And I think there's a better parallel in the Bible when you're trying to pigeonhole Daniel and what he's like. So I just want you to clear your mind and think about this. Think about who I'm talking about here. A young Jewish man gets taken from his home in the Promised Land and he is taken captive and he is taken to a foreign superpower. And that man experiences remarkable tests of his faith and his obedience and eventually he is imprisoned because he's obedient. And eventually this man is given abilities to interpret dreams and because he can interpret these dreams he's being promoted to senior responsibilities even up to being second in all this pagan kingdom. Who am I talking about, Joseph or Daniel, the exact same story. Both get hauled away from Israel, both get taken captive to a foreign superpower, Joseph to Egypt, Daniel to Babylon, both of them given the ability to interpret dreams, interpreting those dreams gets them promoted to where they're high officials and important in the kingdom. So if you want to think about Daniel and sort of the role he plays it's a lot more similar to Joseph in the Old Testament. What about history of the Old Testament? This is where Daniel fits in. We talk about this almost every week. He fits into the exile when the people get taken out of the land into exile in Babylon. So he lived in Judah, Babylon came and conquered Judah. If you want a ballpark date most Bible scholars say Daniel got taken into exile, Daniel. About the exile itself, but Daniel got taken into exile about 605 B.C. And about ten years later Ezekiel got taken, we talked about Ezekiel last week, and then about ten years after that the temple got destroyed and the city was completely flat. By the time you get to the end of Daniel, chapter nine, which is where we'll end up, about 70 years have passed from the beginning of the book, about 70 years. So Daniel, we don't know exactly how old he was when he got taken. Probably between 12 and 18-ish, more than likely, add 70 years on to that. He's in his mid-80s to early-90s. He is an old guy in the exile is coming to an end, but he's lived most of his life, all of his adult life in exile. So that's where it fits in the history of Israel. Now to understand Daniel, you also need to know not just what's going on in Israel, but you need to know about some world superpowers because these play into a lot of the visions in Daniel. So here is the history of the Middle East and by history of the Middle East, I mean these are the successive empires that ruled this territory. First there was Assyria, the Assyrians came and Assyria was the one that conquered the northern kingdom of Israel and took them into exile. Then came Babylon and that is, I underlined that one, had you fill that one in because that's where Daniel gets taken during the time of Babylon. Then it is the Medo-Persian Empire, then it is the Greek Empire, then it's the Roman Empire, right there, right in a row, all of them play a role in Daniel's visions. Here are some maps, just because I like pictures, this is the Assyrian Empire, we're just going to go in order. Each map has a circle, go back one more, each map has a circle over Jerusalem, so you can see where Jerusalem is in all of these empires. So there's Assyria, next comes Babylon, mostly in that yellow section right there, okay? Not quite as big as Assyria geographically. And after Babylon is the Medes and the Persians, and the Persians went way, way much further east than Babylon did, and after the Persian Empire came Alexander the Great, who basically, if you go back to the Persian and then go to Alexander the Greek Empire, he basically just took it over, right, didn't add a whole lot but he just took all that they had and it was his and he did it very quickly, we'll talk about that later. So there's the Greek Empire, and then lastly is the Roman Empire, and this one the orientation shifts, and Rome conquers a whole lot more land going west, some of these other kingdoms or empires conquered land going east. So there you go, those are the empires. Now put yourself in Daniel's shoes, okay, you filled in Babylon. Daniel goes into exile to Babylon. Babylonians conquer his city, his kingdom, they haul him off, and Daniel goes into exile into Babylon at the height of their power. They are dominating everybody militarily, imposing their will on people, and a lot of what Daniel says as he's interpreting dreams and having these different visions is about the kingdoms that are going to come after Babylon. So you can imagine some of that didn't set well with Babylonians, does that make sense? Babylonians are ruling the world, they're the United States, it was just flexing their muscles, they're big time. And then here comes Daniel and he starts talking about other kingdoms that are going to just knock them off, just here comes another one, here comes another one, here comes another one. And the Babylonians, they don't know who this Jewish guy is, a lot of these Babylonian guys are saying, hey, we don't like you, shut up. They're talking bad about Babylon, we're going to rule forever. And a lot of what Daniel had to say is, no, you're not. So we'll talk about some of that. Here's the outline of the book, it's really a simple book. Chapters one to six are stories. These are the stories that kind of make the book of Daniel famous. These are the stories that probably you know when you think about Daniel, okay? And six chapters, six stories. I think four of those stories are about Nebuchadnezzar, one is about Belshazzar and one is about Darius. So four stories, they're written in the third person and they are written in Aramaic, okay? Then there's chapter seven to 12, second half of the book, it's not really stories, it's visions, different visions that Daniel has. It's written in the first person, so instead of he, she, they, it's I, we, and they're written in Hebrew. Daniel, one of the only books in the Bible that has a significant part of it, one of the only books in the Old Testament that is not entirely written in Hebrew, part of it written in Aramaic, okay? And that makes sense when you think about these stories in chapters one to six, Daniel's not living in Israel, right? He's not living in Judah. And so he was writing these stories in Aramaic, which is more of a common language, more of a trade language, that all of these people where he's at will be able to read these stories about what's happening. Second half of the book about visions, about more things to come in the future and he's giving hope to God's people. And so he writes those in the first person and he writes them in Hebrew. So there you go. That's the, the general outline of the book. Now, tell me when you think about Daniel, tell me the stories that you think about. Tell them the lines then, okay? Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, Daniel's buddies, okay? What's that? The statue, Nebuchadnezzar, okay? Great story about Nebuchadnezzar getting basically turned into a cow. Really cool story. God just sort of slaps him around a little while. The handwriting on the wall, I remember that story. You think about the very first story is the story about the food, his buddies and him get taken and they don't want to eat the food at the king's table and so they do their own diet and all of that stuff. So great stories. People know these stories. Here's the cool part about Daniel. When you look at these stories and even when you look at the visions, the big ideas in Daniel are not debated, okay? The big central truths that you need to wrap your arms around are not questioned and there's really two of them. This is the first one. First one is about you. God expects you to be obedient and faithful in the darkest of days in the most dire circumstances. That's the first thing you take away from Daniel, okay? So that's something for you, your life. What do I need to do? I need to be obedient and faithful even in really, really, really bad times. And a lot of those stories you just mentioned are about that, right? Daniel, faithful not to break the Hebrew dietary laws, obedient. When it would have been easy, mom and dad weren't with him. He was a long ways from home. He could have just said, "Ah, nobody's going to know. They're making me do it. What are you going to do?" But he's faithful and he's obedient. What about the story with Daniel in prayer? Remember that story? You can't pray to anybody but the king and what does Daniel do? He goes home as was his custom. He opens the doors. He opens the doors to Jerusalem and he prays exactly like he's been doing. He doesn't start doing it once they make the law. He just keeps doing the same old thing, faithful and obedient. Daniel in the lines then, that's pretty dire circumstances, right? Same story with the prayer. He gets thrown in because of that. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, his buddies, again, pretty dire. You're about to get burned up but they're faithful in their obedience. So there's the first lesson. Here's the second. God is sovereign over all the nations of the earth and he's able to deliver his people in amazing ways. God is sovereign, means he can do whatever he wants to do, whenever he wants to do it. He doesn't ask anyone for permission or counsel. He's in complete control and he can deliver his people in amazing ways. Again, you look at Daniel and his buddies, a bunch of nobodies that get taken into exile and they don't eat the food and yet even though they're sort of bucking the system, they're obedient to God and God blesses them, right? And they look better than everybody else and they're the ones that get promoted and everybody else doesn't like them. You think about Belchasar being warned that his days are numbered. You have been tried and been found wanting. Your days are numbered. Your kingdom is coming to an end. God's saying to Belchasar, I don't care if you're the king, I'm the king and I'm going to do whatever I want to do and I've evaluated you and your days are running up. So I'm warning you about that. God can do whatever he wants to do, whatever he wants to do. Those two big ideas, nobody argues about that. Now here's the downside to Daniel. Slide to Daniel is that there's a lot of stuff that does get argued about and we could spend weeks looking at the visions of Daniel and looking at the dreams that Daniel interpreted and I could sit down. I thought about this this week and I thought, how do we talk about all these? And part of me feels like I want to say to you, okay, here's a dream he interpreted or here's a vision he had. And let me explain to you all the different interpretations because I know if you've studied the Bible, if you've heard sermons on Daniel, you've been through different Bible study programs, you've heard interpretations of the book and the visions and all this stuff. And here's the thing, if you're really curious about how much variety there is in interpretation, just Google it. Don't believe 99.9% of what you find, but Google it. Google, Daniel 7 and just look at some of the things that come up and you'll find page after page after page after page of crazy view, crazy view, crazy view, and there's just all sorts of stuff out there. Really Daniel's kind of like the book of Revelation, right? There's a lot of sort of odd things in Revelation, there's a lot of odd stuff in Daniel. And when you have some odd stuff in the Bible, it's easy for people to just sort of swoop in and instead of understanding it in its context to bring their sort of preconceived ideas and their systems and to say, "Oh look, I can make this fit my agenda, I can make this fit my timeline, I can make this fit how I think things are going to happen," and they manipulate the book and so this is a little bit tricky. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to look at some of these dreams and these visions and instead of telling you sort of, "Here's some of the options," I'll just tell you the right one. Fair, I'll just cut to the chase, I'll do all the homework for you and I'll say, "Here's what it means." And if you want to argue about it later, we can argue about it later, I'm fine with that. But here we go. Let's talk about Daniel 2, okay? In Daniel 2, King Nebuchadnezzar has a dream and the dream is about a statue that you understand that this did not come from the annals of Babylon but maybe that looked something like this, okay? Giant statue and the head of the statue is gold and then the arms and the upper torso of the statue are made of silver and then the tummy and the legs down to the thighs are made of bronze and then the feet in the vision or in this dream, the feet are made of iron and clay and the dream is really simple, he's dreaming, he sees this giant statue and then a giant rock comes flying out of the heavens and hits the statue on its feet and the whole thing blows up and the rock takes over the world. That's the dream and Nebuchadnezzar has this dream and it's a really great story. Nebuchadnezzar gets all the wise men and the magicians and the seers and all these guys in Babylon and he says, "Here's what I want you to do, I want you to tell me what I dreamed and then I want you to tell me what it means." And those guys say, "How about you tell us what you dreamed and then we'll try to tell you what it means." And Nebuchadnezzar says, "No, I'm really freaked out by this dream and if you're worth your salt you'll be able to just tell it to me." So tell me what did I dream and then tell me what it means and there's panic, nobody can do it, nobody can do it, who can do it, Daniel can do it. And there's a great passage where Daniel finally comes before Nebuchadnezzar and Nebuchadnezzar says to him, "I hear that you can do this." And Daniel says, "Nope, can't do it, God can, not me, but God can do it." And Daniel says, "Here's what you dreamed and Daniel says, here's what it means. And the dream is about future world empires, okay? Here's the empires and here's what it means. The head of gold is Nebuchadnezzar and the kingdom of Babylon. The body and the arms of silver is the next empire that's to come after him, the Medes and the Persians. And then the middle and the thighs that are made of bronze is the Greek empire, Alexander the Great. And then the legs and the feet of iron and clay stand for Rome. And then the giant stone that comes crashing in is the kingdom of God. And here's what Daniel is saying to Nebuchadnezzar. God is warning you about something, okay? God is letting you in on something very, very important. And Daniel flatters him a little bit and says, "Look, you're an important God, no doubt about that. God has raised you up. You're the head of gold on the top of the statue. But there's going to be another kingdom after you. Your kingdom won't last forever. Medes and the Persians, they're coming next. And then after them, it's the Greeks who are going to come. And they're going to take over the world. And then after the Greeks, it's going to be the Romans. And in the days of the Romans, something is going to happen. This stone is going to come crashing down, boom, God's kingdom is going to take over. And obviously, we understand that that stone is Jesus who establishes this kingdom that is unlike anything else, right? It's not just another part in the statue. There's something from outside this world that comes in that blows everything up and that dominates the entire world. Here's the sad part about Daniel, too. Go back to that picture for me, Lucas. God gives him a vision of something like this. And the point of the vision is what? It's to warning and to say, "Look, buddy, you think you're big, but you're not. And your kingdom will not last forever, mine will. And I'm in control of what happens." And Nebuchadnezzar, not long after he has this vision that God intends to be a warning, does what? I think I'm going to build a statue of me from head to toe and make everybody worship it. He takes the grace of God, this opportunity that God gives him, and he squanders it and he perverts it and he twists it into his own idolatry and into his own ridiculousness. So there you go. That's Daniel chapter 2. What about Daniel 7? We're going to read a verse in Daniel 7, so you can find Daniel 7. Daniel 7, Daniel has a vision. And in the vision, he sees a lot of weird animals. And then he sees somebody that he describes as like a son of man, four weird animals, and then somebody, a figure like a son of man. So notice there's a lion with wings, and then notice there's a bear, and I know that's not the greatest picture I know that's really cheesy to look at, but I'm just trying to give you some kind of visual. There's a bear, and whether you can tell or not, it has three ribs in its mouth. Did not just eat barbecue, but it's got three ribs in its mouth. Then you got a leopard with wings and four heads, and then you've got a dragon with a bunch of horns, one big horn in the middle, and the dragon is sort of just unlike anything that we know of. That's pretty much what Daniel says, it's just this beast. So here's what it means, okay? The lion in the vision is Babylon. The lion is regal, the lion is the king of the beasts, and Daniel is saying to Nebuchadnezzar, you are a great king, and you do have a great kingdom, and he talks about the wings on this beast, and he says, look, your army is fast and vast. It's with an F and a V, fast and vast, and you go up and down and you are your ferocious. No doubt about that. Then there's a bear, the Medes and the Persians, and when he describes this bear, he says one side of the bear is bigger than the other, it's a lopsided bear, and you look at the kingdom of the Medes and the Persians, the Medes are a small group of people, the Persians are a big group of people. It's one kingdom, but it's dominated by one group. So that's the unequal sides, he says he has three ribs in its mouth, take a wild guess how many big, worldwide sort of massive military campaigns the Medes and the Persians went on. You guys are smart, three campaigns, three ribs. They went to Libya, they went through Babylon, and then they went to Egypt. So three different campaigns where they went and they fought, and then he says, there's a leopard, and the leopard is Greece, and when you think about a leopard, what do you think about? It's fast, right? It is just speedy, and I told you, Alexander's the one who at a very young age just hauls right through the Medes at the Persian Empire. I mean, he just flies through it and he just takes it over. That's why the kingdom doesn't change much, because he just sort of marches his army, boom, takes the whole thing. It happens very, very quickly, and it says that this leopard has four heads. If you just had to take a wild guess when Alexander died, how many generals do you think divided up his empire? Four, you guys are so sharp, four of them, four-headed beast, okay? Then there's this beast, there's no analogy for the beast. It's Rome, and Rome is really a kingdom like nobody had ever seen before. It was sort of a composite of all these different peoples. When Alexander, this is important for the Bible in general. Now Alexander went all through this Persian empire and took over everything. He made everyone learn to speak Greek. You had to learn it. That was really important, because when Paul started preaching, Peter starts traveling, the apostles go out. They can go anywhere, and people know how to speak Greek. They can talk to all sorts of people, all that because Alexander did that. When the Romans start bringing people into their kingdom, the Romans say, "We don't care what language you speak, just pay your taxes." We'll bring you in, and it's just sort of this amalgamation of all these different people. It talks about a horn in this vision, a horn that overthrows the others, and it's talking, I think. This is debatable, but I'm telling you the right answer, I'm telling you what I think. I think that horn describes figures in Roman history who overthrew the establishment, who turned things on its head, somebody like Augustus Caesar, talks about a horn that might represent an anti-God, or something that would set itself up in opposition to God's kingdom. So there's the beast. You don't honestly, honestly, don't worry so much about what is this, what is this, what is this. The details, you get lost in the details, and you can just lose your mind over this and this and this. The fourth beast is Rome. That's pretty clear. And then there's a king. Look at Daniel 7. There's something, again, you remember the first, the first dream of Nebuchadnezzar, statue, four different things, and then something completely different comes in, right? Completely not even the same, and you say Jesus' kingdom is not like those kingdoms. It's completely different, and it's the same thing in this one. He sees one, two, three, four animals, and they're all sort of beasts and they have weird features and all this stuff, and then something completely different comes in. Daniel 7, verse 13, Daniel says, "I saw in the night visions and behold with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the ancient of days and was presented before him, and to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom that all the peoples and nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away in his kingdom, one that shall not be destroyed." Again, animal, animal, animal, animal, boom, one like a son of man, completely different. And he gets a different kind of kingdom. He has a different kind of dominion. All of the peoples fall under it, and it's never going to be destroyed. The Assyrians gone, the Babylonians gone, the Persians gone, the Greeks gone, the Romans gone, on and on and on. This one never ends. This one's never destroyed. You and I understand that this one like a son of man is who? Jesus. No coincidence that when Jesus walks around and is telling people who he is talking about himself, what is the title that he uses almost all of the time? It's not Son of God, not the Messiah, not the Christ, I'm the son of man. In the end of the month of 1910, son of man came to seek and save the lost. And every time he said it, son of man, son of man, son of man, he's trying to say to them, Daniel 7, Daniel 7, right? All these kingdoms right in a row, now one like a son of man has come. So this is the vision that Daniel has in Daniel 7. How about Daniel 8? This one to me is a little bit weirder, and for Daniel it was a little bit weirder. And you can read it yourself, you can dig through it two animals in this vision. There is a ram, and there's a goat, a ram and a goat. And the ram's got his horns there, and the goat has an extra horn and talks about in the foreground there that's Daniel watching this, and he's seeing all this over a canal and as he's in exile. Here's what it means. The ram is the Medo-Persian Empire, the Medes and the Persians, and it talks about these two horns that are of different size, again, the bear, different sizes, the ram with horns of different sizes. The Medes are smaller, the Persians are bigger, and in this vision, the Medes and the Persians, the ram conquers to the west and to the north and to the south. That's which way the Medes and the Persians fought, to the west, to the north, to the south. Those are the ways that they expanded in significant ways their empire. So there's the ram. Then the goat is Greece, and this one big horn is Alexander the Great, comes from the west, okay, in the vision, just like Alexander came from the west, and then it talks about again, four horns, and you already knew that, four generals who ruled part of his kingdom. You can look in, look at Daniel 8, verse 9, look at one little detail here. It says, "Out of them came a little horn, which grew exceedingly great toward the south and toward the east and toward the glorious land, it grew great even to the host of heaven and some of the host and some of the stars that threw down to the ground and trampled on them. It became great even as the prince of the host and the regular burn offering was taken away from him." I'm just telling you, you can Google Daniel 8, and you can find 8,000 explanations for what that means. I think the best explanation is that that horn that becomes great and that is going towards the glorious land and that ends the regular burn offering is a guy named Antiochus, depending on how you want to say it, Epiphanes, who went into Jerusalem, slaughtered a pig in the middle of the temple to desecrate all of it, and that's what Daniel is describing in predicting. He was a general of Greece, and he did that, put it into the sacrifices at the temple. Here's the deal. Daniel sees this vision. Go back to the great picture. He sees this vision, and this is kind of unexpected in Daniel, right? He's talked about Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and he's come when there was handwriting on the wall. We skipped that part just for the sake of time, and he's had this vision of all these beasts. But then in chapter 8, he has this vision of this, and at the end of the vision, Daniel basically says, "This vision made me sick. This vision just knocked me on my backside. I physically felt ill when I heard about this vision. When I heard that after Babylon, there would be this ram, the Medes and the Persians, unequal horns, and then after the ram, there would be this goat from the west, and this Alexander comes and he conquers and he destroys the Medes and the Persians, then this horn comes up in Tychus Epiphanes, and he puts an end to the sacrifice at the temple. He ends the regular burn offering. Here's why this one bothered Daniel, okay? We're at the many, many years into his exile, okay? He knows that the time of exile is coming to an end. He knows the people are about to go back, and Daniel is starting to think, "Okay, exile is over, then it's all going to be better. Then we're going to go back to the land, and it's just going to be like it used to be. It's going to be so great." Then he has this vision that's not really a warning against any pagan king, but it's a vision about once you get there back to the glorious land, somebody's going to come and it's going to just get messed up again. They're going to desecrate the temple. They're going to put an end to the regular burn offering, and Daniel literally is sick. In his response, if you look at Daniel chapter 9, the heading in my Bible says Daniel prays for his people. He's just so torn up about this vision that bad things are coming, that his response is to pray, and I'll be honest with you, let's see how much time we have. Let's just read it. Daniel 9, "If you want to learn how to confess your sin to God, do it like Daniel did it." In the first year of Darius, son of a hosaurus, by descent of Mede, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans or the Babylonians in the first year of his reign, I'd Daniel perceived in the books the number of years that according to the word of the Lord Jeremiah, the prophet must pass before the end of desolations of Jerusalem, namely 70 years. What that means is Daniel said, "I read the book of Jeremiah and the light bulb went off." We're going to be in exile 70 years, and then he starts counting up, "How long have we been here?" 5, 10, 15. Hey, this is pretty close. We're about to go back. Then he says, "Wait a minute, I just had this vision that once we get back, it's not going to be that great." And so his response is verse 3, "I turned my face to the Lord God seeking him by prayer and pleas for mercy with fasting and sackcloth and ashes, and I prayed to the Lord my God and made confession saying, 'Here's how you confess your sins, O Lord the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments. We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules. We have not listened to your servants, the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes, our fathers, and all the people of the land. To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us, open shame, as at this day to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to all Israel who are near and those who are far away in all the lands to which you have driven them, because of the treachery they have committed against you. To us, O Lord, belongs open shame to our kings, our princes, our fathers because we've sinned against you. To the Lord our God, belong mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against him, and we have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God by walking in his laws, which he set before us by his servants, the prophets. All Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice, and the curse and the oath that are written in the law of Moses, the servant of God, have been poured out upon us. In other words, you did exactly what you promised us you would do. You said if we turned away from you, you would just slap us around, send us into exile. You did that. You did exactly what you said you would do. Verse 12, he's confirmed his words, which he spoke against us and against our rulers who ruled us by bringing upon us a great calamity. Under the whole heaven, there's not been anything like what has been done against Jerusalem. As it's written, "All this calamity has come upon us," yet we have not entreated the favor of the Lord our God, turning from our iniquities and gaining insight by your truth. In other words, we're still wicked. We're still slow to learn. We haven't figured it out. Therefore, the Lord is kept ready, the calamity, and brought it upon us, where the Lord our God is righteous and all the works that he has done, we have not obeyed his voice. And now, O Lord, our God who brought your people out of the land of Egypt with the mighty hand and have made a name for yourself, as at this day we have sinned, we have done wickedly. Lord, according to all your righteous acts, let your anger and your wrath turn away from your city, Jerusalem, your holy hill, because of our sins and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people have become a byword among all who are around us. Now therefore, O our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his pleas for mercy. And for your own sake, O Lord, make your face to shine upon your sanctuary, which is desolate. Oh, my God, incline your ear in here, open your eyes and see our desolations in the city that is called by your name, for we do not present, this is a great verse, we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. O Lord, here, O Lord, forgive, O Lord, pay attention and act, delay not for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people who are called by your name, that's how you confess your sins. You lump yourself in with everybody else. You don't sort of say, well, I'm a bad person, but they're really bad people over there. You just say, you know what, we're all a bunch of scumbags and you gave us your laws and it's pretty clear and we didn't do it. And you told us what would happen if we didn't do it and that didn't stick and you did exactly what you said you would do. We deserve it. You're in the right, we're in the wrong. You always do what's right, we deserve it. And now the 70 years is about to come up, temples still flattened, people are still laughing at you because the people you brought out of Egypt, you then allowed to go into exile and you look bad. He doesn't ask God to have mercy on them because they're so lovable or so nice or so faithful. He says, we want you to look good. So if you would have mercy on us, it would make you look good. Just like when you brought us out of Egypt, that made you look really good. If you would bring us back and we rebuild the temple and we go back to the glorious land, you're going to look really good and what we want more than anything else is for you to look good. And so he says, look, I'm not asking for this because of our righteousness. I'm asking this because you are a merciful God and we care about your name. And so that's his prayer, prayer of confession. Now jump down and look at Daniel 924. God sends Gabriel, Gabriel brings an answer and Gabriel starts talking about 70 weeks and all sorts of stuff. Look at Daniel 924, he says, 70 weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin into a tone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness to seal both vision and profit into anoint, a most holy place. Again, you can get on the internet, you can go to Mardell in Midland, family Christian down the road. You can find books that will tell you whatever you want to hear about that verse. Doesn't matter what you want to hear. You can find a book that will tell you, oh Daniel 9, that's about that. And they'll take these 70 weeks and you can keep reading the 62 weeks and the extra week and the half week, all this stuff. And you can find people that will make it say whatever you want it to say or whatever they want it to say because they've got these preconceived ideas about how things are going to happen in the end days. But just listen to this verse with me and just be honest. Put aside anything you've heard, put aside any sort of preconceived idea or system about what's going to happen in the last days when Jesus comes back. And just listen to this verse, Daniel 9, 24, 70 weeks, decreed for your people, your holy city to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for iniquity and to bring in everlasting righteousness. Knowing what you know about the New Testament, what does that sound like to you? It sounds like Jesus to me, in Jerusalem, the holy city, bringing in everlasting righteousness, making atonement for iniquity, putting an end to sin. In my mind, I look at that and I say, that happened at the cross. I think the best interpretation, we're not going to read the technical stuff. You can read it. You can look at it here in Daniel 9. I think the best interpretation of this is the one, and I don't think it's a stretch, by the way, that takes you right up to about the year when you look at these weeks and this stuff right up to about the year 30 A.D. Anything important happened around 30 A.D.? Jesus died on the cross. Okay. Listen, I've heard, I've heard Jewish people, non-Christians, you understand? Not Messianic Jews, Jews still waiting for the Messiah who look at Daniel 9 and they say, "You Christians are idiots." You sit there and you argue about Daniel 9 about the end times and this and that and the weeks and you're waiting and all this sort of crazy interpretations. You make it fit whatever you want to say. And I've heard people say, I've heard a man say, "That is the best argument, the best Old Testament proof that Jesus Christ was the Messiah in all of the Old Testament." We don't buy it, but if there was one that we were going to give you, that would be the one. And so many Christians look at this and play around with it and twist it and turn it upside down and say, "No, let's talk about the end times and the anti-Christ and this and that." What he's talking about is Jesus in Jerusalem dying on the cross. I think that's plain. You can disagree with me. Lots of people do, but I think that's pretty, pretty direct. Other things we can debate in Daniel, lots of other things for the sake of time we can't look at, back up and let's just talk about one more big idea from Daniel. This is not debatable. This is pretty plain. Last thing you need to know, even when God's people are dispersed in an exile, God is still in complete control of human history. God is in control of the nations and the kingdoms of this world. Even when it doesn't look like God is up to much, God is working behind the scenes to bring about his kingdom and in the end God wins. Even if you want to disagree with me on some of the interpretation of Daniel, I think we both end up at that spot. And we say the big point of the book is that God is not surprised by the next kingdom that rises up. God's not wringing his hand saying, "Oh no, what am I going to do to get rid of these Greeks before I need to sin Jesus?" He's got it all planned out. He's in complete control. He's the one that's over all of it, sovereign, completely over every detail, working sometimes behind the scenes when it doesn't look like much has happened. When it looks like he's forgotten as people and they've been hauled into exile, he's still working exactly how he wants to work on his timetable, not frustrated, to bring about his kingdom. Apply that to today when we look at our society. And sometimes as Christians, as maybe we call ourselves evangelical Christians, maybe we get frustrated and we say, "Man, it just seems like the whole thing is going to hell in a handbasket." It just doesn't seem like anything's going our way. It seems like everything's going the wrong way. And it just seems like it's getting worse and worse and worse and sometimes we wring our hands, "Oh man, what's going to happen if we don't get a good president next time? What's going to happen if we get a worse president next time? Can you imagine why it's going to be the end of all of it?" People said that in Daniel's day and Daniel says, "Whoa, timeout. God's got him lined up. He's okay." You see the same thing we talked about in my Sunday school class in the book of Ruth. Ruth takes place during the book of Judges. You go back and read the last half of the book of Judges. It's like an X-rated movie. You say, "How could it get worse than this?" Nothing is going right. And then you read this little parentheses, "Oh yeah, but this is what God's doing through Ruth to bring David, the king, who eventually leads to Jesus, the king of all kings." And so I know that's helpful for me. We were talking today and we took our secretaries to eat lunch for secretaries day and we got to talking about politics and who's running for president and this and that and hope this person doesn't run. I hope this person does run and wouldn't this be terrible? I know for myself at some point I just got to kind of take a breath and say, "Is it going to be okay?" It may get worse and it may get really worse. It may get worse than I can ever imagine, but God's not ringing his hands over it. He's on his throne. He has a plan. Jesus is still the king and even when it's behind the scenes and it's not broadcast in neon lights. He's always working to advance his kingdom and to take care of his people. So there you go. That's Daniel. I'll pray and then we will share some prayer requests. Father, we love you. We thank you for the book of Daniel and we acknowledge that there's some stuff in here that's hard to understand and there's some things in here we may disagree about. But I think that the big things in Daniel are really clear and the things that we need to take away and apply to our lives are very, very plain and easy to pull out in this book. And so we pray that you would help us to be faithful to you even in difficult circumstances. Even in dark days, we pray that you would help us to rest on your power and your sovereignty to know that you are in control of the kingdoms of this world. And Father, help us to look at these dreams and these visions and these things that we read in Daniel and just remember that Jesus has come, he has established his kingdom. It is unlike any other kingdom this world has ever known and it is a kingdom that will have no end, that will include all peoples and that will endure for all time. Father, we thank you that we know the king and that gives us great, great hope as we live in this world. We love you. We thank you for this book and for the truths and for its application to our lives and we We pray in Jesus name, amen.