Neb has taken over. He decides that he want to adopt some young boys. He has the leader of the eunuchs bring him some (I love when the eunuchs get involved) that he can have educated? Daniel and his 3 buddies are the chosen ones. They move into the palace and the education begins with a feast of rich food.
Daniel decides he shan't defile himself with the kings gross-o food, and asks that he may have a veggie diet, yeah Daniel. And guess what? The veggies made them big and strong. This should be the lesson we learn from Daniel.
Then the king has a dream that he wants interpreted, so he calls as the sorcerers and the like in to tell him what it means, and if they can't he gonna kill em, hows that for pressure?! Can they? No. But guess who can?
Joseph?
Nope cause hes dead....
Daniel?
Yep. God came in and told him what the dream was AND what it meant.
So Daniel saved the day for himself and all the wise men that the king was going to have axed.
Of course the dream was about the kings empire taking a fall and another one rising up.....
Maybe because he was so happy to have his dream interpreted or maybe in an effort to not have it come true, the king had a giant golden statue made. He then ordered that everyone who sees it, shall bow down before it. Daniel and his cronies refuse and sentenced to a fiery demise. The fire is lite and the boys tossed in. But they don't burn? They just sorta hang out in the fire and talk and play games and toss around the ole pigskin....
This freaks Neb out (as one might imagine) so he orders everyone to worship their God or be cut to pieces. I guess that's one way to convert the masses?
Oh yeah....and they boys get a promotion to boot.
1 comment:
I think the food they ate served them well because it was blessed by God because they refused to defile themselves with the king's food, not because it was a veggie diet. Science has already disproven that whole thing. Veggies lack iron, omega-3 fatty acids, and protein in the form of ALL the branch chain amino acids which are necessary to build a muscle cell in the quantities that meat has or at all. But I digress.
There are two things I wanted to point out in this text. I though 2:43 was interesting..."but they will no hold together [for two such elements or ideologies can never harmonize}... This makes me think of what happens when people try to blend a little religion with a little secularism. Or a little Christianity with a little paganism. Examples: Christians who, out of ignorance, try to combine evolution with creationism; or Latin and South American people who try to combine Catholicism with their ancestral pagan beliefs. This makes you neither hot or cold for God, and we'll read in the N.T. what God thinks about luke warm beliefs/people.
The second thing is the specifics of the fiery furnace story...which I think are important to view from their viewpoint in this time period....a time when mass communication (even imagined) was not existent. Shad, Mesch, and Abed (not Daniel) showed a tremendous amount of faith in God when they told the king, 'look, we don't have to answer you on this point, cause whether God has it in His will to save us or not, we are not worshipping your statue.' The king has the furnace heated SEVEN times hotter than normal, and has his STRONGEST soldiers tie them up. In fact, the furnace is so hot that the soldiers all died from the heat when they went to throw the three boys in the furnace. Yet, YET, when they came out of the fire they were not only alive, but their clothes weren't singed, clothes hadn't changed color, and they didn't even smell like smoke!!! Why such overwhelming details?!! There's no mass communication, there's no hope of converting billions of people. It's the truth that shows that it doesn't matter what we face in the 'natural', God is a supernatural God. I think this is an amazing story. Even in the midst of the fire, God is with you. And He'll bring you out as good or better than before you went through it (like He did with these boys....they got promotions!). Our job, like S, M, and A is to stay in faith regardless. REGARDLESS.
Tomorrow's (today's) is Dan. 4-6
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