Mystery Solved

Sermon Transcript

I hate spoilers. When I first watched the TV show Lost on Netflix, back when you had to send in the DVD and get DVDs back, I forbade my parents from even asking me questions about it, because I figured if they asked me something about Benjamin Linus, then I might know he lives long enough for that thing to happen that they asked me about, and then I’d be robbed of the suspense of the next episode when it looks like he’s going to die. My wife and kids are currently a book and a half ahead of me in the fantasy books Wingfeather, and they are similarly forbidden from talking to me about it or reading it aloud while I’m within earshot. The endings of such stories are exciting to me, and I can’t know them unless someone who does know them reveals them to me. I don’t want to know that part of the future yet in these imaginary worlds.

 

But there are some things we need to know about the future in the real world if we are to live wisely in the present. If the story of our world ends with a total loss of consciousness as many atheistic visions of the future do, then how you live now doesn’t matter very much. Do good or do evil—the end is the same. But, if the story ends with a cycle of reincarnation and your odds of a better reincarnation increase the more spiritually engaged you are, as in Hinduism, then you better engage in Hindu spirituality. If the story ends with the victory of some ideal like tolerance or acceptance, then you better get on board with the ideal now and so be on “the right side of history” as we are so often told. Well, in the story on which we are focusing today from the book of Daniel, the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, has a dream about the future, but he doesn’t know what it means. And the dream includes a revelation of what will happen in the end to all the earth. So it’s the sort of thing that both he and we need to know to live wisely in the present, and yet, just like I can’t know how Lost or Wingfeather will end unless someone who knows tells me, so we can’t know how the story of our world ends unless someone who knows tells us. The good news we’ll see in this passage, then, is that Our God has revealed the mystery of his plan. First we’ll look more at why we need his revelation, then more at the God who makes the revelation, and then finally at what it is that he reveals.

 

Why we need his revelation

 

This story took place in the second year of King Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, and it begins with troubling dreams the king was having. He wanted to know what the dreams meant, so he called in the best of his best: The magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans. The first three of those are not terms with a technical meaning; they’re just different ways of referring to the spiritual gurus of Babylon. They’d be the Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, and Dali Lama of their day, the tarot card reader, the palm reader, and others like that. The Chaldeans is a term that can be used to refer to Babylonians in general, but here it refers especially to the ruling class in Babylon and its sages. In our society these would be something like the professors. So Nebuchadnezzar gets together his best advisors, like a United States President might gather spiritual advisors and America’s best and brightest to give him advice on some troubling issue.

 

But Nebuchadnezzar didn’t just ask them to tell him what his dream meant. First he asked them to tell him what his dream was, and then to explain what it meant. Nebuchadnezzar didn’t become a great king by being a dummy. He knew as well as we hopefully do what he says in verse 9: That magicians, enchanters, and sorcerers are the kind of people who lie to you. If he tells them his dream, he knows they can just make up any interpretation, and he won’t know whether they’ve truly perceived the dream’s meaning or not. So he tells them to tell him his dream first, then tell them the meaning. In fact, he doesn’t just tell them to do it. He threatens them that if they do not do it, he will not only fine them, imprison them, or even sentence them to a swift execution—no, he says in verse 5 that if they don’t make known to him the dream and its interpretation, he will tear them limb from limb and lay their houses in ruin. He’s not just coming for them; he’s coming for their whole family. Such reveals the proud, domineering heart that was characteristic of Babylonian kings.

 

The Chaldeans respond on behalf of Babylon’s best and brightest starting in verse 10: “There is not a man on earth who can meet the king’s demand, for no great and powerful king has asked such a thing of any magician or enchanter or Chaldean. The thing that the king asks is difficult, and no one can show it to the king except the gods, whose dwelling is not with the flesh.” The Babylonians were polytheists, meaning they believed in multiple gods, and so the Chaldeans don’t say that the king’s dream is entirely unknowable—instead, they say that not a man on earth could meet such a demand, for the only one who could not only know the interpretation of the king’s dream, but the king’s dream itself, would have to be some spiritual being with access to the mind of the king. The Chaldeans express a belief that such beings exist, but what they don’t do is dwell with the flesh of humans, and therefore even if they do know, the implication is that they aren’t going to tell us.

 

So why do we need our God’s revelation? Because there are limits to what we can know. We can’t know what someone else dreamed about last night unless that person tells us, for example. And even if somehow we could develop the technology to image peoples’ dreams, we wouldn’t thereby know what they mean. The main object of knowledge in this story is not what some guy dreamt last night. The main object of knowledge is the mystery of God’s plan, and especially, what is coming in the future, and that is something no amount of technology will ever reveal to us. If the world in which we lived were a machine that behaved according to deterministic laws, then we could predict the future with precision if we could just get access to all the variables. If I drop a ball from the third floor window of my house, I can predict its future with stunning accuracy, because the ball behaves according to deterministic laws—in this case, the law of gravity. But beyond even the infinitude of variables, quantum physics has shown us that matter doesn’t behave deterministically at the quantum level, and even slight fluctuations somewhere in the universe can lead to massive changes in the future. In other words, it’s not just that we don’t yet know the future, but give us enough time, and we’ll figure it out—it’s that we can’t know it.

 

How’s that hit you? For most of you, without even the little excursus on quantum physics, that’s just probably just a matter of common sense, but human pride resists it. Another way of saying it would be simply to say that you are not God, and it’s not just that you aren’t yet—it’s that you can’t be. The creature cannot become the creator. The finite cannot become infinite. We can say with the Chaldeans, “There is not a man on earth who can meet the king’s demand.” Our world is not a machine whose behavior we can predict; it’s a story, and as with any story, like Lost or Wingfeather, only the author knows the ending before readers get to it.

 

But how the story ends is vital to how we live now! Earlier I alluded to the impact it would have on how we live now if the atheistic, Hindu, or “tolerant” visions of the future were correct, because these are just some of the visions of the future the wisdom of humans has thus far generated. But why should we trust any of these? I mean, just look at our track record in predicting the future. If you’d have asked an enlightened, secular thinker in America in the early 1900s, just 100 years ago, how to end up on the right side of history, they may very well have told you to support eugenics, the idea that we should try to improve the genetic quality of a human population by weeding out “deficient” genes, i.e., people you view as inferior to your people group. Those ideas were being promoted as progressive in mainstream science textbooks in American public schools. Now that we saw how the Nazis used them to justify the holocaust, we look back on such ideas with moral outrage, and rightly so, but my point is simply that at the time, according to human wisdom, such ideas looked progressive! On a simpler level, who predicted the iPhone? Every now and then someone gets it right, but we don’t know ahead of time who it is, because, once again, we simply cannot know by our own human wisdom what God has in store for the future. We aren’t the authors of the story, and none of us have lived in the future to report back on the ending. And yet we need to know where the story is heading if we are to live wisely now. And so we need the author of the story to reveal it to us. Let’s look next, then, at the God who makes the revelation.

 

The God who makes the revelation

 

So after the Chaldeans admit their inability to meet the king’s demand, the king begins to follow through on his word and in his anger and great fury he commands that all the wise men of Babylon be destroyed, and that includes Daniel and his companions, who had been brought from Jerusalem into exile in Babylon. But Daniel understandably asks for an explanation from Arioch, the head of Nebuchadnezzar’s guard, and when Arioch tells Daniel why this is all happening, Daniel asks him to get him an appointment with the king, that he might show the interpretation to the king.

 

Mind you that at this point, by the end of verse 16, when Daniel requests this meeting to show the king the interpretation, God hasn’t yet shown it to Daniel. He doesn’t know anything more than the Babylonian wise men about Nebuchadnezzar’s dream yet. And yet, he does know someone the Babylonian wise men don’t: our God. While the Chaldeans said only the gods can know the king’s dream, and we all know their dwelling isn’t with flesh, Daniel seems confident that his God not only knows the king’s dream, but that his God would be willing to reveal it to Daniel. So in verse 17 he goes back to his companions, and together they seek mercy from the God of heaven. Notice that the Babylonians didn’t even try seeking mercy from their gods. Why not? Because they don’t know their gods to be merciful. Their gods were presented as powerful, but the idea that their gods might actually care about them enough to reveal mysteries to them doesn’t even seem to occur to them.

 

But brothers and sisters, our God is different. First, notice that he is referred to as the God of heaven. The Bible agrees with the vast majority of human history and the vast majority of humans in the world today that there is a spiritual realm made of multiple spiritual intelligences, but it’s equally clear that there is one spiritual being who is distinguished from all the rest in that he is the creator, while the rest are creatures, beings he made. And that one creator, God, created heaven in the beginning as well as earth (Gen 1:1), in which he reveals his presence uniquely as the one God above all he made. That God is the God of Daniel’s fathers, as he calls him in verse 23, and that is our God. He’s the God of heaven, who dwells in heaven because he is the one being who simply is, who exists eternally, who made everything else, and who therefore has a rightful rule and authority over everything else. When he sits on his throne in heaven, he’s sitting in the right seat.

 

And from that throne, he invites his people to come to him and ask him for mercy, because he is a merciful God! He is able and willing to help in our time of need. This is why we pray. When we pray, we aren’t engaging in a mere mental exercise or just sending words into the air. When we pray to our God in the name of our Lord Jesus, we are asking the merciful God of heaven to give us mercy to help in our time of need. Bear in mind that Daniel and his companions are youths at this time, probably teenagers. Kids in the room, if you can speak, you can pray, and there is a God in heaven who hears the prayers of his people. And so here, in verse 19 we read that the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision of the night. And since Daniel had prayed for that revelation, he responds by blessing God for it.

 

Look at what Daniel affirms of our God in verses 20-23. He says that to him belongs wisdom. What we can’t know, he does know. In verse 22 he says he even knows the deep and hidden things, the things in the darkness to our perception. Our God is the God who knows everything, because everything that exists exists by virtue of his creative act, and everything that happens happens in accordance with his sovereign decree. We know what happens in a book after we read it. But an author knows what happens in a book because the author wrote it. And the author knows deep things about why she wrote what she wrote, what she didn’t write, why the character got that name, things we simply could not know unless the author chose to reveal it to us. We know what’s in the book because the book was written, but the book was written because the author first knew what she wanted to write. So we know a very few objects of knowledge in creation because they exist, but they exist because God first knew them, and then chose to make them.

 

And we know that our God is not only the maker of his creation, but the ongoing ruler over it, because verse 20 says to him belong not only wisdom, but might. He doesn’t just observe the times and seasons ahead of time, verse 21 says—he changes them. He doesn’t just observe ahead of time who will be removed as king and who will be set up as king. No, our God removes kings himself, and sets up kings himself. He doesn’t know how the story ends because he flipped ahead and read the last page. He knows how the story ends because he wrote it! So in Isaiah 46:9-10 our God says, “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, 10 declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.’” Do you see it there again? Why can God declare the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things not yet done? It’s not because he simply looked ahead and perceived it; it’s because he planned it, and can confidently say that it’s his counsel that will stand, and he says, “I personally will accomplish all my purpose.”

 

In the 2003 NFC Wild Card playoff game, Seahawks quarterback Matt Hasselbeck won the coin toss in overtime to decide who would get the ball first. After winning the coin toss he confidently declared that, “We want the ball, and we’re gonna score,” only to then go on to throw an interception to Green Bay Packers Cornerback Al Harris, who ran it back for a touchdown to win the game for the Packers. Matt Hasselbeck had a plan, but because he was limited in might, he couldn’t accomplish his plan, and therefore his prediction for the future proved false. But since our God is unlimited in might, our God always accomplishes his plan, and therefore his predictions for the future always come true.

 

The book of Daniel itself carries evidence of this with it. Today we’ll see that it predicts the future of kingdoms to come after the Babylonian and Persian empires of Daniel’s day, and later we’ll see that it predicts with great specificity the historical event we now know as the Maccabean revolt, an event that took place about 350 years after this book claims to have been written. Seeing this, of course many critical scholars assume the book was actually written after the Maccabean revolt, because they “know” as well as the Babylonian scholars did that no man is able to predict the future. But starting in verse 4 of chapter 2 of our passage, when we read that the Chaldeans spoke in Aramaic, the book itself was originally written in Aramaic, another regional language of the time, until the end of chapter 7. And languages, as we know, evolve over time. Try reading a book written in “English” from 350 years ago—you can do it, but it’s harder than reading something written today. Well, we have Aramaic works from the 500s, when the book claims to be written, and we have Aramaic works from the 100s, when critical scholars say Daniel was written, and guess which Aramaic Daniel’s matches? The works from the 500s. There are multiple other good arguments for seeing Daniel as written prior to the events it predicts, but that’s just one I mention for now as yet another evidence that there is a God in heaven who knows all things such that he can say ahead of time what will happen in the future, while we cannot.

 

And, what’s really amazing about our God is not only that he knows these things, but that he reveals these things. Recall that the Babylonian wise men allowed for the possibility that the gods could know the king’s dream, but they assumed no god would ever tell them. The method of enchanters, sorcerers, and magicians was to “divine” spiritual truth. Their gods were out there somewhere and they had to use elaborate, secret techniques to “get to” to them. Daniel and his friends simply ask, And God reveals the mystery of the dream and its interpretation to them. So when Daniel appears before Nebuchadnezzar and Nebuchadnezzar asks him, “Are you able to make known to me the dream that I have seen and its interpretation?” Daniel responds in verse 27, “No wise man, enchanters, magicians, or astrologers can show to the king the mystery that the king has asked, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries.”

 

Because our God is a merciful God, he actually wants us to know how the story ends, so that we know how to live in the present. So let’s look next at what he has revealed.

 

What he has revealed

 

In verse 31 Daniel begins telling the king what his dream was, and he then proceeds to the interpretation. In the dream Nebuchadnezzar saw an image like a man of exceeding glory and brightness. Its head was of gold, its chest and arms of silver, its torso and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, and its feet partly of iron, and partly of clay, the clay there being like terracotta, the kind of clay from which you’d make a flower pot. Then as Nebuchadnezzar looked, a stone was cut out from another stone by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them into pieces. Then all the rest of the statue tumbled with it, to the point that they became like the chaff of the threshing floors, and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. At that time, when they would harvest grain, they would remove the edible wheat from the husk, known as the chaff, by tossing it up and down, and when they would, the wind would blow the inedible chaff away, leaving the edible kernels to fall to the ground. This stone broke these precious metals so much that they became as light as chaff, like a fine dust, that the wind then came and blew away, so that not so much as a trace of them was left. The stone, on the other hand, after striking them in this way, expanded and became a great mountain that filled the whole earth.

 

And thankfully for both Nebuchadnezzar and for us, Daniel gives the interpretation. The head of gold is Nebuchadnezzar, who at that time ruled over much of the known world and appeared majestic in his power and wealth. But as Daniel said when he praised God earlier in the chapter, our God removes kings and sets them up. So after Nebuchadnezzar, God will remove him and set up another kingdom, though inferior to his, then a third of bronze, which shall rule over all the earth, and finally a fourth, so strong that it will break and crush all that came before it, though it itself will be crushed with the rest by the stone that will expand into a mountain, which we learn in verse 44 is the kingdom that the God of heaven himself will set up, a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, and never left to other people. He concludes in verse 45 by saying that a great God has made known to the king what shall be after this. The dream is certain, and its interpretation sure.

 

We now have the benefit of having seen this come to fruition, and can even start to see its fulfillment within the book of Daniel. Remember chapter 1 ended with the statement that Daniel remained in his position until the first year of King Cyrus, the king of the silver empire, the Persians, who succeeded the Babylonians. We can then see the bronze, the empire that rules over all the earth, as that of Alexander the Greek, the Greek king who conquered the Persians and the rest of the known world at the time. And finally, the Romans defeated him and all that came before him.

 

And it was in the time of the Romans that the king of God’s kingdom came. Like a stone cut by no human hand, he was born by no human man—born of a virgin, Jesus Christ was born in the time of Ceasar Augustus. Though the Babylonian wise men said the dwelling of their gods was not with flesh, in Jesus Christ our God took on flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). A long time ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, and God revealed the mystery of his plan through dreams and visions like the ones given to Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel in this chapter, but in these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son (Heb 1:1-2). Jesus Christ is himself the ultimate revelation of the mystery of God’s plan, for he is at the very center of it. He is the stone, that though rejected by men, has become the very cornerstone of the kingdom God has set up.

 

But he did not crush the former kingdoms in the way you might expect. At the pinnacle of his life, he was not lifted up on a throne like Nebuchadnezzar’s; he was lifted up on a cross, a Roman cross no less, a symbol of Roman power, and on it he died. On it he was crushed for the sins of his people, bearing the judgment from God that we deserved, so that we might be released from the condemnation we were under and reconciled to God as citizens in his kingdom. Where it looked like Rome was snuffing out his little fringe movement, by his blood he was winning for God a kingdom that would both outgrow and outlast the Romans. The western Roman Empire fell in the year 476, the Eastern in the year 1453, but three days after he was crucified, Jesus rose from the dead, and now his reign has spread so far and lasted so long that here we are today, about 6,000 miles away from where Jesus was crucified, calling him our Lord and King, and worshipping him as the God of heaven, along with countless others throughout the world and gone before us into heaven.

 

Our God has indeed revealed the mystery of his plan, and this revelation pushes us beyond even our present moment, to the day when Jesus will come again and bring his kingdom to its consummation, when every knee will bow to him, and every tongue will confess him as Lord, those who did so in this life with great joy unto everlasting life with him, and those who rejected him in this life with great regret unto everlasting condemnation away from him. There is not a man on earth who could have predicted this. We needed our God to reveal it to us so that we could know how to live in the present. How then, given that our God in his great mercy has revealed to us the mystery of his plan, should we live in the present?

 

First and most obviously, we should make sure that we are aligned with God’s kingdom in the present, for it is the one that will outlast all others, and will never fade. The catch with it, though, is that none of us were born into it. That’s why Jesus said that “unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Nor can we become citizens of this kingdom by living some kind of vaguely “kingdom lifestyle” while we remain in rebellion against the king. You can’t reject the stone and hope to inherit the kingdom built on it. You come into this kingdom by embracing the stone, the king, Jesus Christ himself. Turn from your sins, trust in him for salvation, and submit to him as king. Forget trying to fit in to majority American culture. Forget trying to fit in to minority American culture. Those are just next in the line of kingdoms that God sets up and removes; many of us felt more of America’s instability this past week. Like chaff, one day the wind will blow on this nation, and it’ll be gone too. Stand firm on the solid rock of Christ, and you will never be moved.

 

Second, if our God has revealed to us the mystery of his plan, and in it he reveals things we can’t just figure out by human wisdom, it behooves us to be students of his revelation. God revealed this dream to Daniel in a vision of the night, but how has God revealed it to us? In Daniel’s writing, or in other words, in the Bible. The apostle Paul describes the same phenomenon after the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus: “The mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I have written briefly. When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ” (Eph 3:3-4). The mystery was made known to Paul by revelation, and when we read it, we can perceive that mystery too. As you seek to understand the thoughts that swirl in your mind, as you seek to understand our world and where it’s heading, as you have decisions to make, where do you turn? What counselors do you call into the room? Is it the spiritualists of our day, the professors, ChatGPT? Or do you turn to your God, and what he has revealed in scripture? Do you come to it with your own wisdom, demanding what it is allowed to say and not say, or do you come in recognizing the limits of your wisdom, and ready to receive whatever the God of heaven has revealed in it? Don’t expect to flop open to a random page when you face a hard decision and get an answer. Grow in wisdom daily by studying this revelation and asking our God for mercy to understand and apply what he has revealed.

 

Third and finally, if our God has revealed to us the mystery of his plan, and in it he reveals things not a man on earth can figure out by human wisdom, it behooves us to share that revelation with others. Though the Babylonians were a foreign nation to Daniel, though they were even his enemies, did you notice his concern for them throughout the passage? In verse 24, after he’s received the revelation, he goes to Arioch, the king’s guard, and says, “Do not destroy the wise men of Babylon!” even though the wise men of Babylon didn’t show him anything! They were still just a deserving of death, but he interceded for them, and isn’t that just like our Lord Jesus, who though we deserved death, interceded for us while we were still his enemies? Then Daniel goes further and doesn’t keep the revelation to himself, but makes it known to this enemy king, Nebuchadnezzar. Brothers and sisters, let’s not keep the revelation of our God to ourselves. That mountain of his kingdom is still in the process of expanding. You have family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers who are not living in submission to king Jesus. They’ve allied themselves to kingdoms that he will crush in the end, and they don’t even know it! I’m sure many of them have heard of Jesus, but do you honestly think that if you asked them what the main message of the Bible is, they’d be able to tell you? And how will they know unless someone tells them? There’s not a man on earth who can just figure it out! And let’s not forget that there are many groups of men and women on earth still, like in the thousands of such groups, who have no one in their language proclaiming God’s revelation to them. How will they hear unless someone goes? Maybe some of you in this room today will move from here, go learn a new language, and proclaim this revelation to people who have never heard it. The training is available, and the money is available. Come talk to me after the service and I can review with you a step-by-step plan to get from here to there.

 

But most importantly, the revelation of the mystery of God’s plan is available, because our God has revealed it. We could never have known it; God has given us wisdom to know many things, but they are a mere fraction of a percentage of some infinitesimal part of what he knows. He is the one God in heaven who rules over all other things, who knows the future exhaustively because he has planned the future exhaustively, and who is merciful to reveal it to us so that we might know how to live in the present. The stone on which his kingdom is built, Jesus Christ, has come, died, risen, and ascended into heaven, where he rules now, until he comes again, and the mountain of his kingdom fills the whole earth. So submit to him, study his revelation, and proclaim his revelation to the nations.