Verse of the day · September 19
What had just happened to Daniel when he said that wisdom and might are God's?
Daniel prayed for his life that night, and what got written down was the thanks he gave afterwards.
Read one of these every day in the THNK GOD app →
Daniel answered and said, Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever: for wisdom and might are his:
Daniel 2:20
A king in Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, lay down one night thinking about what would come after him — what would become of everything he had built. He dreamed, and the dream tore him out of his sleep, and when he woke it was gone. He could not call it back, but he was sure he would know it if he heard it again, and it had left him badly shaken. So he sent for the wise men of his court, the magicians and astrologers whose trade was dreams, and set them a test he could check: tell me what I dreamed, and then tell me what it means. They asked him, reasonably enough, to tell them the dream first. He could not — and that was the test — so he insisted: the dream first. He suspected they were stalling, either until he stopped caring or until the last of it had faded and they could call anything his dream. If they could not do it, they would be cut to pieces, limb by limb, and their houses pulled down.
They told him that no man on earth could do what he was asking; only the gods could, and the gods do not live among flesh and blood. They were right that no man could do it, and it made him furious. A decree went out that every wise man in Babylon was to be killed, all of them, with no exceptions.
Daniel was a young Jew, carried off to Babylon and trained there for the king's service. He had already seen his own king made a tributary and himself carried out of the country. When the king examined him at the end of that training, he found him ten times wiser than every magician in his kingdom. And then, when the king needed exactly that wisdom, everything was done in anger and in a hurry, and nobody thought to send for Daniel. The order covered him anyway, and the first he knew of any of it was the captain of the king's guard, a man named Arioch, arriving to take him away to be killed.
Daniel did not lose his temper. He did not tell Arioch the order was unjust, and he did not resist it. He asked, mildly, why the decree was in such a hurry, and promised that, given a little time, he would give the king everything the king wanted. Then he went in to the king himself and asked for a little time. The king, remembering now who Daniel was, put the killing off to let him try. The sentence was delayed, not lifted. Daniel did not spend that time going through the other wise men's books. He went home. He told the whole thing to the three friends who had been carried off from Jerusalem with him and were under the same decree, and the four of them asked the God of heaven for mercy, to be shown the king's dream, so that they would not die with the rest.
God answered in the night. The dream and its meaning were shown to Daniel together, in a vision in the dark. It was the same God who had sent the dream to the king in the first place, and sent it for a reason: he had been answering the king's own question. He did not wait until the king had heard it and owned it as his dream. He blessed God there and then, in the dark, with the decree still standing. His prayer was not recorded; his thanksgiving is.
"Blessed be the name of God," Daniel said, and the first two things he blessed him for were wisdom and might. The wisdom had just been given to him. The might was in what the dream showed. What the king had seen, and lost, was a statue. A huge figure of a man, dazzling and frightening to look at, with a head of gold, a chest and arms of silver, a belly and thighs of brass, and legs and feet of iron, the feet mixed with clay. Then a stone, cut out of a mountain by no human hand, struck the feet. The whole statue came down and was ground so fine that the wind carried it off like chaff, and the stone grew into a mountain that filled the earth.
The four metals were four kingdoms, one after another, and the head of gold, Daniel would tell him, was Nebuchadnezzar himself and his Babylon — the empire that had carried Daniel out of his own country and held him there still. That was the answer, and Daniel knew, lying there in the dark, that it was not the one the king wanted. He was the gold — and Daniel would have to tell him where the gold had come from, that the God of heaven had given him the kingdom and the power and the glory, not his ancestors and not his own skill in war. After him the metal fell away: silver, then brass, then iron, then iron mixed with clay. His own kingdom would end. So would all of them: when the stone struck, the whole figure went down together. And the stone was Christ's kingdom, set up by God in the days of the last of the four, and that one would never be destroyed. That was the might Daniel was blessing God for: the power to bring every one of those changes about, to remove kings and to set up kings.
In God, strength and wisdom go together. In men they are often parted, and this story had parted them: the king had power enough to kill every wise man in Babylon and none of it could get him back one night's dream. The answer went instead to a captive far younger than any of them. The thanksgiving runs on for three more verses after this one, and the friends who had prayed with him are in it: what they had asked of God together, Daniel says, God had made known to them all.
Then he went to Arioch, the man who had been sent to kill him. The first thing he did with the answer was ask for the lives of the men whose failure had condemned him. They were dying for not doing a thing no man could do. Do not destroy the wise men of Babylon, he told Arioch; take me in to the king. He had saved their lives before he ever reached the throne room. Arioch rushed him in, and Daniel told the king the dream and what it meant. The king heard his own dream told back to him by a captive, and knew it — the thing he had been sure of, that he would know it if he heard it — and he fell to the ground in front of Daniel. A man bent on making his own kingdom everlasting had just been told to his face that it would fall, and he took it as an oracle rather than an insult. "Your God," he said, "is a God of gods and a Lord of kings and a revealer of secrets." He had himself judged Daniel wiser than all of them, and not thought to send for him; now he made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon and chief over every one of them.
All of that came afterwards. The verse was said in the night, with none of it done. When Daniel said it, the king had heard nothing, and the decree still stood. The wisdom he was blessing God for had already been given him, in the dark. The might he had only seen in the king's dream: not one of those kingdoms had moved, and Babylon still stood, a head of gold. One half of what he thanked God for had already happened; the other half was still only a promise, and he put both in one line anyway, before the king had heard a word of it. He had asked the king for a little time, and he blessed the name of God for ever and ever.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, Albert Barnes, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and Adam Clarke. How these teachings are made