Welcome back to our Daniel series. Today, we begin a three-part look at chapter 5:  Belshazzar’s Feast.

Daniel 5:1-4 King Belshazzar gave a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and drank wine with them. While Belshazzar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken from the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines might drink from them. So they brought in the gold goblets that had been taken from the temple of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines drank from them. As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone.

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Yesterday, we read most of the way through the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Daniel 4:1-33). The king dreamed of a tree – the symbol of created order, given by the gods and maintained by the king. (In other words, he dreamed of himself.) But the tree was cut down, sent mad, and forced to live like a wild beast, in one of the weirdest mixed-metaphors of the Bible. The message to Nebuchadnezzar was: because you’ve been proud-  thinking that your status, power, and wealth is all your own doing – you’ll be cut down, sent mad, and driven out of your position and away from human society. And you’ll live like that until you repent of your pride, and acknowledge the sovereignty of God.

As one writer puts it: “A man who thinks he is like a god must become a beast to learn that he is only a human being” (Danna Nolan Fewell, Circle of Sovereignty, p.101).

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Continuing in our series in Daniel, we begin a two-part look at chapter 4: the story of King Nebuchadnezzar, and his dream about a tree. Today, we’ll mostly just read the story (with a little bit of comment). It’s a long one, but we need the whole story before we can think about what we might learn from it.

Some context: remember that Nebuchadnezzar has twice been forced to acknowledge the power of Israel’s God (Daniel’s interpretation of his previous dream, in chapter 2; and the miraculous preservation of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednigo, in chapter 3). Yet it seems to take this encounter with God, in chapter 4, for him to completely get the message. It’s written in the first person, as a letter from the king to his whole empire, testifying to the lesson God had taught him:

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Yesterday, we started the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego – three faithful Jews who defied King Nebuchadnezzar’s order to bow down before a 90-foot-tall golden statue whenever they heard (memory test: can you name all the instruments?). We ended with their expression of loyalty to God – whether he ended up rescuing them or not:

Daniel 3:16-18 Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to him, “King Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. ¹⁷ If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. ¹⁸ But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up.”

It’s a response that didn’t make the king too happy.

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In chapter 2, we saw how Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream led to the king acknowledging Daniel’s God as “the God of gods and the Lord of kings” (2:47). But it seems the king isn’t quite ready to act like that’s the case. As in the very next chapter, we read this:

Daniel 3:1 King Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold, sixty cubits high and six cubits wide, and set it up on the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon.

That’s about as tall as a twelve-storey building. But what’s it for?

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Last week we looked at the story of Daniel miraculously recounting and then interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, and how it portrayed him as a “new and improved” Joseph. It gave a model (for second century Jews, and for us) of how to relate to a secular culture in a way that doesn’t sell out to its values, but commends God and his values. Today, we look at the content of the dream.

Gold, silver, bronze, iron & clay… rock!!

Here’s the dream, as described by Daniel:

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We continue in our series in the OT book of Daniel, with a three-part study in Daniel 2. Yesterday was all about the story surrounding the dream (which you’ll need to read first), and on Monday we’ll look at the content of the dream itself. Today, however, we look at how Daniel’s story reminds us of another famous dream interpreter.*

Joseph 2.0

There are many similarities between Daniel 2 and the story of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41. Here’s a quick overview:

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We continue in our series in the OT book of Daniel, with a three-part study in Daniel 2. Today will be all about the story surrounding the dream. Tomorrow we’ll look at how the story intersects with that of  Joseph, and on Monday we’ll look at the content of the dream itself.

By the end of chapter one, Daniel had risen to importance as one of king Nebuchadnezzar’s wise men. His wisdom gets put to the test, as Nebuchadnezzar has a dream.

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In our Daniel series so far, we’ve looked at three background stories: Daniel in exile in Babylon in the sixth century BC, Jews living under Greek rule in the second century BC, and us. Despite their differences, they all have something in common. They involve the the people of God facing the dilemma of how to remain faithful to God while living in a world that doesn’t acknowledge him.

Today, we look at the first story in the book of Daniel, where Daniel himself is confronted with this dilemma right from the get-go.

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