40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Daniel 1:1-21 (Episode 509)

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

Chad and Daniel begin the book of Daniel in this episode. Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah find themselves in Babylon with new names. The four young Hebrews stay faithful to God and find favor with the king. Have a listen. More from 1517: Give to the June 1517 Podcast Network Fundraiser! Learn more about the 1517 Podcast Network Fundraiser 1517 Podcasts 1517 on Youtube 1517 Podcast Network on Apple Podcasts 1517 Events Schedule 1517 Academy - Free Theological Education New Books from 1517 Publishing: By Water and the Word by Brian Thomas Being Family by Dr. Scott Keith A Reasoned Defense of the Faith by Adam Francisco Stretched: A Study for Lent and the Entire Christian Life by Dr. Christopher Richmann The Essential Nestingen: Essays on Preaching, Catechism, and the Reformation More from the hosts: Daniel Emery Price Chad Bird

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We'd love to see you. Chad, new book. We get to start a new book. The main character in this book, we were joking beforehand, but this is the truth. I am named after this person. I don't have like a great-grandfather named Daniel or anything like that. I have been informed by the people who named me that this is precisely who I was named after. Yeah, well, it's a great name.

I mean, I wish I could point to a biblical book that I was named after. My name's in the middle of Nebuchadnezzar, but I don't think that. You're named after a place. Yeah, that's right. I'm named after an African country, I suppose. Well, I guess there's worse things. Yeah, but I've been looking forward to this. And, you know, our longtime listeners, new listeners wouldn't realize this, of course, but our longtime listeners might be thinking, hey, you guys, what?

You skipped a couple of books there. Yeah, well, we covered Isaiah. And we thought, well, you know, let's do something different. But rather than jumping into Jeremiah, which is, man, a massive book, we decided we would take on something that was a little bit shorter. Daniel's only 12 chapters and different, of course. A little more narrative. Yeah, yeah. Got some narrative going on here.

First six chapters especially have quite a few narratives. Narratives that are, you know, well-known. Who hasn't heard about Daniel in the lion's den or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego thrown into the fiery furnace. So some well-known narratives, which will be fun to kind of stop and maybe look at on a little bit deeper level than what we learned in Sunday school. So, yeah, a lot of, and of course, I mean, Daniel is the revelation of the Old Testament, more or less. You know, it's the Old Testament twin to Revelation. And you don't spend much time in Revelation before you realize, oh, man, this has Daniel stuff all over it. Or reading Daniel, you're like, man, this sounds a whole lot like Revelation.

Well, of course, that's on purpose. They both fall into the apocalyptic genre. So you're going to, of course, you're going to have a lot of overlap between these books. So yeah, it's going to be fun. And I thought I'd touch on just a few intro kind of things, just kind of prepare us before we actually jump into the text. So setting ourselves historically where we're at. So this is Daniel was among a group of guys who went to Babylon a lot earlier than a lot of other people went to Babylon. You know, so a lot of people know the date 586 B.C. because that's when the Babylonians came in, they destroyed Jerusalem, they take the remainder of the Judeans, they take them into exile, temples destroyed, all that kind of stuff. I mean, we covered that when we were going through 2 Kings. So, you know, fairly well-known beginning of the exile. But what some people maybe didn't realize is that, well, they were Judeans exiled well before the 586 date.

In fact, there's a couple of these exiles. So 605 BC is when Daniel is deported. So the Babylonians grab up a few of kind of the royalty, the royal family members, and off they go to Babylon. So Daniel, we don't know how old he was, probably a teenager. But he and his three friends, they get shipped off to Babylon, 605 BC. A few years later, in 597, you have a second deportation. And then finally, you have the beginning of what we think of as Babylonian exile happening in 586. So Daniel finds himself far from home. And in that way, there's a lot of parallels between Joseph and Esther and Daniel in the sense that you've got three Israelites who are far from home.

They're in exile and all three of them, of course, end up not out in the fields doing the work of a slave, but they all are right in the thick of things. I mean, you've got Esther, who's the queen. You've got Joseph, who is basically what I like to call the vice pharaoh. And you got Daniel, I mean, who is one of the closest confidants and advisors to the king. So we'll hear about his rise early on in this first chapter. Of course, he's known for his wisdom. He's known for his faithfulness. He's known for his insight into the interpretation of dreams and visions and all sorts of things like that. What else? well i know that i know this uh it seems to me if you read the old testament that i don't think this is a thing anymore but uh being a good interpreter of dreams is a good way to stay out of the field yes yeah that's a gift that's going to keep you from walking behind a plow yeah i mean that that's what pulled joseph out of prison right yeah uh the being a good interpretive dreams uh that's definitely what is going to well it's not just going to uh bring daniel up the the political ladder it's actually going to save his life you know as we're going to

we'll hear right away that the uh the king had this dream and unless you had people to tell him not just the interpretation but even the dream itself that he was going to execute them all so it certainly saved his life. So a couple of these are kind of Bible trivia stuff, but I think it's interesting nonetheless. So one thing that sets Daniel apart from basically every other Old Testament book, with the exception of Ezra, is that actually a significant part of it is not in Hebrew. It's in Aramaic. So when we get to chapter two, we'll have a verse which says that they responded in Aramaic. And from that verse in chapter two, all the way through chapter seven, it's in that kind of a cousin language to Hebrew, which is Aramaic, which was kind of the

international language, kind of like English is today. You know, basically anywhere you go in the world, you're going to find somebody who speaks English. Well, in that ancient world, it would have been Aramaic is kind of the lingua franca. And then besides the Hebrew and Aramaic, so for those of you out there who might be interested in the Apocrypha or, you know, books, parts of the Apocrypha, well, we actually have some what are called additions to the book of Daniel. So if you've ever come across Belle and the Dragon or Susanna or even liturgically the Song of the Three Young Men or the Prayer of Azariah, all of those are what are usually called additions to the book of Daniel. So the short narratives, or maybe a little bit longer narratives, that are

inserted into the book in the Septuagint, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And I guess we should probably just mention right away that if you're the kind of Bible student that likes to read commentaries or maybe study Bibles or things like that, you are going to come across two very different understandings of authorship. So the traditional authorship understands this author to be the guy in the book, Daniel. He's living in exile. He's going through the rise and fall of Babylon, actually is around until the Persians. And so historically, that is the understanding of the author.

You will also encounter lots of more modern scholarship, which will hold that actually the author of part of it was the traditional Daniel, but that especially when you get to chapter 7 and those ensuing chapters, that a later author who lived in the 2nd century BC wrote those. And we'll talk more about that when we get to those sections, but what we will be—the belief, the teaching that we'll be holding up is that Daniel is, in fact, the author of all these chapters. Speak for yourself, Chad. Yeah, well, Dan— No, I'm joking. We'll have to edit out Dan's comments on the— I'm kidding. Yeah. Well, I just say now, so the reason, if anyone's wondering why in the world would somebody say they wrote this in the second century B.C.?

Well, the reason is when you get to especially like chapter 11, you have prophecies of what's going to happen, especially during the kingdom of Greece, which are very, very specific. You know, this is going to happen and that's going to happen. Like every couple of verses, you've got a new prediction or prophecy of what's going to happen, all of which actually conform to what we know of that period of history. So those who those who believe that no prophecy could be that detailed and accurate will simply say, oh, well, it's written after these things, but it's written as if it's a prophecy. Well, you're already in a bad place there because you're attributing false words to whoever the author was, and you're also denying the fact that God actually gave the prophetic ability to people like Daniel. This is my favorite thing that textual critics do is they're like, listen, no one ever has risen from the dead. And because we know that, we just take out every example of someone rising from the dead. And you're like, well, I mean, yeah, if you remove every instance of someone rising from the dead, then yeah, then no one rises from the dead.

And we know that no one can know and prophesy what is going to come to pass. So we therefore say that these things must be written after those things came to pass. And you're like, well, yeah, prophecy doesn't exist if you remove every instance of prophecy. It's the weirdest thing. Yeah. Yeah. Ironically, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy on the part of the critics, right? Yeah.

So, we'll be approaching this with a traditional understanding of good old Daniel as the true author of these 12 chapters. Okay, enough preface stuff. We'll get into this. I'm going to read the first seven verses of Daniel chapter 1. In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand with some of the vessels of the house of God And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his God And placed the vessels in the treasury of his God And then the king commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel

Both of the royal family and of the nobility Youths without blemish of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom endowed with knowledge, understanding, learning, and competent to stand in the king's palace and to teach them the literature and the language of the Chaldeans. The king assigned them a daily portion of the food that the king ate and of the wine that he drank. They were to be educated for three years, and at the end of that time, they were to stand before the king. Among these were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah of the tribe of Judah. And the chief of the eunuchs gave them names. Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, Mishael he called

Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego. So that is just kind of getting us introduced to the history and what was going on back in Judah, and also, of course, these particular characters who are going to feature so prominently, all four of them, really, in these first six chapters. So this is, we talked a little about the history, so there's not much to cover there as far as filling in any of the gaps, but, so this is 605, third year of the reign. Other texts in the Bible will say fourth year, and that's simply because years, the reigning years of kings were counted differently. So sometimes, let's say a king came to the throne in July.

Well, some would begin counting his reign from that particular year. Say, just to use a modern example, so the king came to the throne in July of 2025. Well, many would count his reign as beginning in 2025. Other numbering systems would begin actually counting only when he got to his first full year. And so they would say he began to reign from 2026. So that's why you have some saying third year. That's why you have some saying the fourth year. And Nebuchadnezzar, so interestingly, he was, I mean, he was just starting out.

In fact, when he did all this, he was just the crown prince. He's called king of Babylon, but that's kind of in hindsight. He would become king very soon. But at this point, his dad's still alive. He's just the crown prince. And he is engaging in quite a few victories against the Egyptians. and then he sweeps down to south, and he makes sure that he gets some of Jerusalem, besieges it. And I think it's important here to look at verse 2 to highlight these three words.

And the Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand. In fact, we're going to see language like that a couple of other places too. Verse 9, God gave Daniel favor and compassion. Verse 17, as for these four youths, God gave them learning and wisdom and skill. I think the reason those words are important is because it tells us, hey, this is not just describing a sequence of events. This isn't just kind of retelling history. Oh, this happened and this happened and this happened. It's pinpointing the fact that, no, behind all of this and that happening is the divine hand who is engaging in the shepherding of history.

And in this case, he's engaging and actually fulfilling the threat that he multiple times leveled against Judah, saying, hey, if you don't turn from your idolatry, you're going to end up in exile. You're going to end up in the hands of your enemies. And, of course, that is what began to happen during the reign of Joachim. I have Babylon, like, taking all these other places, and God giving Judah to Babylon, like, just, like, giving this to Nebuchadnezzar is another way of saying he didn't do anything to stop it, because that's all it was going to take for this to happen. I mean, it's not like Judah had any chance unless God does something, right? Right. Yeah, that's very true. It wasn't like, oh, man, yeah, we could take out the Babylonians, no problem, just to get our few horses together and we'll go take on this Babylonian army who is like wiping out every single person that tries to oppose them.

So they take, of course, their besiege and they take not only these guys, but also, we're told, the vessels of the house of God. And that's kind of a foreshadowing, because in a few more chapters, we're going to hear more about these vessels of the house of God. So this would have been, you know, stuff from the temple, basically. They're taking that along with some of the captives. Now, it's kind of an antiquated phrase here. In verse two, we're told that he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his God. Well, at this particular time, nobody, at least in the literature that we have, nobody referred to Babylon as the land of Shinar.

But the reason this is important is because this, this kind of language takes us all the way back to Genesis chapter 11. And that's where you have Babylon called the land of Shinar. And I think that the reason that's important is because it's saying, hey, Babylon has been around for a long time. So the Hebrew for Babylon and Babel are spelled exactly the same. So this goes all the way back to Babel in the land of Shinar, back in Genesis chapter 11, where you had them engaging in rebellion against God. So Babel or Babylon, they become this archetype of worldly rebellion against God.

And in this case, I mean, it even follows up by saying to the land of Shinar, to the house of his God, and they put the vessels in the treasury of his God. So just like Egypt is archetypical of rebellion against God and trying to make humans into gods like Pharaoh was, well, Babylon remains the same thing. And that's why you – Babylon all over the New Testament as well, especially when you get to the book of Revelation. Yeah, one of the things I think is interesting in this text too is the fact that they rename all these guys. and so it and you can speak to this uh more but initially what it feels like is well i mean oh you guys are you guys are kind of smart you know clever guys we're going to use you for other things but man we can get rid of these hebrew names for sure right so you're going to be not in the field but in the house like i'm i'm not doing these hebrew names i'm going to rename all

of you, which is an interesting thing, because it tells you that we know that names mean a lot to God. I mean, God puts a lot into names. But when somebody else is coming in, maybe this picture of people being enemies of God, they don't want to use those names. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's very true. Yeah, in fact, it's just kind of a rule of thumb.

So if you read through the Old Testament and you come across a name that ends in I-A-H, like Hananiah or Azariah, and there's a, I mean, I don't know, there's probably hundreds of these. Think of Jeremiah, Zechariah, Hezekiah, Josiah, Uzziah, Obadiah. So any name in the Old Testament ending in I-A-H, that I-A-H represents in Hebrew, Yah, which of course is short for Yahweh. And then, as another rule of thumb, any Old Testament name ending in E-L, like Daniel or Joel or Bethel or Ishmael, that E-L is the word for God. So these guys all have names ending in E-L or I-A-H, meaning that Yahweh or El, I mean, it's a theophoric element of the names. That's saying, hey, these guys are Hebrews. so they're given these different names uh most of which have the babylonian names of gods that are inserted into them so i mean it's i can't imagine that it'd be kind of like you know say

someone is named christopher and of course christopher is built upon the name of christ and uh they're kidnapped and they're in an islamic state and their name is changed now to muhammad something like that i mean that would be the that would be kind of the uh the impact of this this kind of this kind of name change what's weird is that we still know daniel by the name daniel but shadrach meshach and abednego that's we go we go ahead and go with that i'm gonna blame all our sunday school teachers over the years it is kind of strange you know why don't we why don't we refer to daniel henaniah michelle and azariah but you know it just it doesn't roll off the tongue like Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego do.

Yeah, that Shadrach, Meshach, you can remember that. If you can get one, you can get both, and then Abednego. Yeah, just so, yeah, Tom and Jerry, right? It just kind of goes together. These guys were, I mean, they were chosen because they were smart. I mean, I think that goes without saying. I mean, they were good appearance, no blemish, wisdom, all that kind of stuff. But they were smart, too, because these guys were going to be learning

for three years, the literature and the language of the Chaldeans. Now, the language of the Chaldeans that they would have been learning was Akkadian, which, you know, if you've seen these clay tablets that look like they have the cuneiform on, you know, the little wedges, well, that's Akkadian. And there's hundreds of these signs. It's not an easy language to learn. I haven't learned it, but I have talked to plenty of people who have. It's not easy language to learn you know most of our alphabets have 20 to 35 letters in the most modern languages and you're learning hundreds of these particular images and it's not like Daniel and his friends would have known Acadian they had to learn that and then of course they had to learn

the literature too just to kind of understand the world view and everything from agriculture to astronomy of uh of the Chaldeans so they're for three years educated for for three years before they were ready to stand before the king. I think one more detail. I just learned this, and it's intriguing. I don't know the answer to it, but we are told that the king commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to choose these guys, and they're under the authority of this chief eunuch. So the commentators that I've looked at, they kind of go back and forth, But there's a chance, a chance, a real chance that these guys were made eunuchs when they were taken to Babylon. I mean, so eunuch can either refer to someone who is literally physically made into a eunuch, is castrated.

It can, in some cases, refer more just as a title. So maybe you're a eunuch, but you're still intact, but you have a certain office. but there's at least a possibility that part of their uh brutal initiation i guess you would call it into this new culture would have entailed them becoming becoming eunuchs but again kind of opinions are going to to vary there as to whether that happened or not hopefully you don't you never hear anything about daniel's children no you don't you know that is um or why for anything else no none of that with it with any of these guys and so yeah whether that's an office which also being you know part of that office is like hey this you're going to you might not be a eunuch but

you're going to act like one uh you're going to live like one or if you know they went ahead and said you actually you are one uh and did that way but yeah it is interesting that you know there's there's no like lineage of daniel no no it's all mine may have may have happened either he was literally made into one or he lived the life of one those both of those are possible possibilities so you kind of put yourself in the shoes these guys uh i i mean i i can't really imagine it i mean i've had some times in my life where you know everything i took for granted was uprooted and you're kind of in chaos you know for a long time but i can't imagine being uprooted to the extent to where you're you're taken captive you're shipped away

possibly made into a eunuch forced to learn another language all this literature and now you go from living in a predominantly monotheistic culture at least uh officially monotheistic culture among people that you know speaking the language that you know with your family with friends and now you are in babylon you're uh you're under the authority of your captors you're forced to do this to that i mean it's it's the kind of situation where it would be very easy just for the sake of survival right to just basically embrace the culture to accommodate whatever is put in front of you. It's like, okay, I don't want to ruffle any feathers here.

So I say all that because what we're about to hear in verse 8, because right away Daniel and his friends are going to be challenged as to how far, how much of cultural accommodation they should say yes to and kind of where they should draw the line. So beginning here at verse 8, we read that Daniel, but Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's food or with the wine that he drank. Therefore, he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself. And God gave, here's one of our other God giving kind of verses, God gave Daniel favor and

compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs. And the chief of the eunuchs said to Daniel, I fear my Lord, the King, who assigned your food and your drink. For why should he see that you were in worse condition than the youths who are of your own age? And I love how he answers, you would endanger my head with the King. I mean, this is a real possibility. I mean, you don't have to read much history to know that kings back then, really, I mean, throughout most of history you know they were taking somebody's head off with just another Tuesday for them this was this was no big deal so uh Daniel is putting him in a situation where he's gotta he's gotta make a decision yeah this is interesting right that is Daniel's like hey

I'm not gonna eat this food and uh it's an interesting dilemma that it puts in he's like yeah well if you start looking worse physically that's not good for me like so like how is this gonna work like so if uh if you're out here like looking bad for lack of protein that's not good for me like it's such a it's such a strange thing that you can't just be like well he won't eat it they'll be like well that's that's your fault if you won't eat yeah the buck the buck stops with you right yeah well then make him eat it right whatever you what do you have to do yeah so he daniel draws a line here uh because he's going to be if he were to consume the the wine and the uh the food of the king then at least part of what's happening is he would be breaking the dietary laws

right that he grew up with you know because an animal had to be butchered just in the right way So the blood was drained from the body. As far as the wine goes, there's a high likelihood that both the food, both the meat as well as the wine, were part of a dedication to a deity. And so both of those would have defiled Daniel. And so he's like, nope, not going to do it. So he can't change the name that they give to him. He's like, no, I'm not going to answer that name. You can only call me Daniel.

But he at least draws a line here with the food. so uh verse 11 picking up there says that daniel said to the steward now now we have a different subject so this is no longer the chief of the eunuchs the one who's afraid of losing his head daniel's now turning to the steward whom the chief of the eunuchs had assigned over daniel hananiah michelle and azariah and so here's here's daniel's proposal to the steward verse 12 test your servants for 10 days let us be given vegetables i would i would trend most english versions do have vegetables but i would translate that as grain and produce so literally the hebrew there are things sown which would included grains so bread it's not like just you know

give us broccoli and water for 10 days let's see how we look it's a terrible diet yeah no thanks I almost rather fast, but this are so grains and produce, we might say, let us be given grains and produce to eat and water to drink. Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who don't eat, who eat the King's food, be observed by you and deal with your servants according to what you see. So real simple, right? Listen, here's a proposal. I don't, nobody wants to lose their head. I'm turning to the steward and say, listen, just try this out. Give us 10 days. don't give us the meat and the wine from the king's table just give us kind of the your the basic stuff right give us bread and veggies dude we're eating some avocado sandwiches here yeah

yeah and then you know after 10 days okay check us out line us up you're the four of us you know we'll strip down to our boxers you can check us out how do we look not compare us with these guys how do we look? I mean, it seemed like a pretty reasonable expectation. This testing for 10 days, by the way, in some commentaries in Revelation, they think that this is kind of the background of Revelation 2.10. In the letter to Smyrna, he says, don't fear, talking to the people in Smyrna, don't fear what you're about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison so that you may be tested, and for 10 days you will have tribulation. So taking that as kind of a, just a good kind of round biblical number connected in Daniel with this time of testing

that the four Jewish youths are undergoing. So after Daniel's proposal, verse 14, we're told that the steward listened to them in this matter and tested them for 10 days. And at the end of 10 days, it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king's food. So the steward took away their food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables or gave them, that's the same word, gave them the bread and the vegetables. See, fatter in flesh is how you know that there's bread involved. yeah all those carbs they're just like see carbs and veggies man we'll we'll be able to keep the weight on yeah keep eating those carrots and bagels yeah i mean bread is a pretty pretty quick way large consumption of bread is a pretty quick way to look fatter in flesh than the people who

are around you so i mean it worked even better right it wasn't like they oh you guys all look the same i guess i guess we'll just let you stick with that diet no they looked even looked even better i wonder too what so what did they the steward took away their food and their wine i bet you anything he took it home with him probably i mean it's not like he's going to tell the king king chefs hey you don't you know four of those meals you've been sending us you don't need to say that anymore no he's gonna get their food and he's gonna enjoy it himself with Maybe he was with his family. Who knows?

He was probably in a predicament where he's like, man, this would have made Daniel very unpopular. But he said, man, I think I'm going to take it away from everybody. Just have everybody eat the vegetables and the bread. I'm sure that would have – people would have been like, thanks a lot, man. Yeah, his teammates would not have been happy with that decision. Okay, so picking up with verse 17. as for these four youths, God gave them, one of our God verbs here, God gave them learning and skill in all literature and wisdom. And Daniel, so God gave them that learning and skill. Daniel

seems to be singled out in the latter half of that verse. And Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams, which of course is going to serve him very well. At the end of the time, when the king had commanded that they should be brought in, the chief of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar. That had to have been quite a day. And the king spoke with them, and among all of them, none was found like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Therefore, they stood before the king, which is a technical term. You'll often hear that in the Old Testament, somebody standing before the king. It's not referring to a physical posture as much as it is means they are now royal servants standing in his presence as his servants

and in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them he found them 10 times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom and then the last verse 21 just like rockets forward to uh decades it says and daniel was there until the first year of King Cyrus. That's quite a ways into the future. In fact, basically takes all of the Babylonian exile and goes right past it to the time when Cyrus the Persian conquers the Babylonians and eventually, of course, lets the Jews go back to Jerusalem. This is interesting with Nebuchadnezzar. So he's interested in having really good advisors.

I spent this last year a lot of time kind of studying Greek and Roman history, especially Roman history. And the Romans, both royalty as well as just kind of the wealth do folks. Like if they were looking for someone who would be an advisor, or especially say there's an extremely wealthy Roman family who wanted to basically hire a teacher for their kids, they would commonly get a Greek-speaking scholar to do that. And in that way, well, their children would learn not just Latin, but also Greek. And the Greeks were just known for being excellent teachers of literature and all kinds of knowledge. And so, yeah, that same kind of thing was at work here. You know, I don't want people around me who just think the way that I do and know what I do. I want people from other cultures, other perspectives.

So he brought them in. That does seem like the thing there is that you're like, yeah, I mean, all these other advisors that are local, I mean, they're not telling me anything I don't know. like we all kind of know the same stuff like we have the kind of we have we raise the same way like we have the same ideas so yeah it it is make it does make sense to be like maybe these guys have a different perspective and uh and that could benefit me yeah yeah i mean and so it's definitely going to benefit nebuchadnezzar as well as subsequent rulers you know all the way to to the persians because daniel is going to well the thing about daniel he's he's not only just wicked smart and has divinely given gifts to where you know he can understand interpret dreams and

visions uh but he's you know he's he's got the hallmark of the best kind of advisors where he he's not afraid at all times even when it's dangerous for him to tell the truth i mean they just is there any better advisor that a ruler can have than someone who's not going to be a yes sir man, not going to be a bootlicker, not going to be someone who's always just trying to say whatever's going to make the ruler happy. But even when he knows this might upset him, nevertheless speaks the truth. And he's going to do that to Nebuchadnezzar. I mean, when we get to the chapter where Nebuchadnezzar has this super weird season in life, you know, where he's out living like an animal, then Daniel's the one who told him that's going to happen.

Yeah. So he wasn't afraid to to look the king in the face. This guy who could just with a snap of his fingers have Daniel executed in a particularly long and brutal sort of way. And nonetheless, to say, well, this here is here is the truth. So a great, great kind of advisor. You know, when I think about this chapter as a whole and the situation that these four guys are in, I love stories like that, as well as like Esther and Joseph, too, because, you know, even though these are ancient stories, I mean, they're describing situations that people are, all of us are still in, right? I mean, we're living in, no matter where you live, maybe you're listening over in Europe or in Africa or some other place where you're a believer who is an alien and a stranger in an exile in this world, right? Yeah. And you're in the midst of a Babylonian culture, whatever that looks like for you, whether it's American culture or English culture or whatever it might be. So stories like this are encouraging and instructive, too. You know, how do you navigate living as a believer in this world that is full of unbelief and idolatry? Yeah, I mean, in the New Testament, I mean, we are certainly referred to as exiles, and this doesn't change until the second coming, right?

The church is sort of in captivity. Yeah, and when we're in captivity, well, we're in the same place as Daniel and his three friends. And so good literature for us to be studying. Absolutely. And that gets us through 40 minutes. Yep, that's it. We are out of time. Next episode, Daniel is going to do a little dream interpreting.

So he's going to make himself real valuable coming up in Chapter 2. So we will do that then. Chad, I'll see you next week. All right. See you then. I'll see you next time.