The Forgotten Dream and the Unforgettable Daniel

When it comes to very special tasks, God wants uncompromising people with character. Now Daniel was such a person, and God uses Daniel as the vehicle through which he reveals the unfolding of the redemptive plan of the history of the world.

What a calling and what a privilege. Thanks for setting aside this half hour for practical Bible study here on Grace to You. I think you'll be encouraged and maybe a bit intrigued as we look back to the prophetic book of Daniel for the series, The Rise and Fall of World Powers. Well, John, this is a rare study from you, being from the Old Testament, and from the title, The Rise and Fall of World Powers.

I think some of our listeners might be wondering, how does that have any bearing on the here and now? What's the value of understanding ancient history and prophecies from the Bible that are thousands of years old? Well, because in the Old Testament, and particularly we're going to be looking at the book of Daniel, Daniel was given visions that made predictions about world empires that would rise and fall.

And guess what? They came, they rose, and they fell. It's one of the great proofs of the authority of Scripture.

Right. Scripture was predicting those great world empires. In fact, predicting the Babylonian Empire, then the Medo-Persian Empire, then the Roman Empire, and the ultimate and final empire of Antichrist is yet to come.

And so because part of the prophecies were fulfilled historically, and we have all the evidence of those fulfillments, we can trust what is said about the rise and fall of the final future world power, world empire. This is really incredibly dramatic material from the book of Daniel. And the study is going to trace God's sovereign hand at work in the course of human history by looking to the life of Daniel and the prophecies that God gave him. And we're going to let the Bible shed especially interesting light on ancient history, exploring the rise to power of men like Alexander the Great. Our study is going to unearth the kinds of sins that topple even the most powerful nations.

And the study is going to prove instructive for modern times. You're going to see that in spite of the turmoil that never stops in the Middle East, or anywhere else for that matter, God is still sovereign, still in control of where we have been and where we are headed. This promises to be a fascinating two and a half weeks of study in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament.

Be with us every day. Yes, and in this study, as Daniel reveals God's sovereignty over world affairs, you're also going to see the kind of servant God uses, and how to cultivate humility, and how you can honor the Lord in the midst of a society that rejects him. The book of Daniel is loaded with practical wisdom that applies perfectly to us today. So let's get to it. Here's John launching his series, The Rise and Fall of World Powers.

We're going to be looking at the second chapter of Daniel. George Washington once said, few men have the virtue to withstand the highest bidder. End quote.

He was right. Most people have a price. A truly uncompromising man is a very rare commodity. But that is exactly the kind of a man and the kind of a woman that God looks for to do His work. When it comes to very special tasks, when it comes to very great privileges and opportunities, God wants uncompromising people with character.

God wants choice servants for choice ministries. Now Daniel was such a person. Daniel was a man who wouldn't compromise. Daniel was a man who had amazing character qualities. And God uses Daniel as the vehicle through which he reveals the unfolding of the redemptive plan of the history of the world. Now that's a monumental assignment to be the vehicle through which God gives a prophetic perspective on all of human history.

What a calling and what a privilege. In chapter 2 we begin to see that calling unfolding. This amazing teenager, in fact in a way beyond any other Old Testament saint, is given the most complete, the most comprehensive and the most extensive prophetic picture of human history ever given in the Old Testament.

An amazing prophecy that begins to unfold in verse 31 of chapter 2. And given this, not only because he was gifted...now mark it, folks...not only because he was gifted but because he was of such character that he would receive God's highest service. His life was usable. Daniel was a man who influenced the world. This kind of uncompromising virtue, this kind of amazing character put him in a position to influence the whole world and that is precisely what he did and what he still does through his book, his prophecy. The whole marvelous plan of God for the nations, the Gentiles, the whole marvelous plan of God for Israel, his very special people is all unfolded to this wonderful man, Daniel. As we divide the first 30 verses, they divide obviously into two very simple thoughts. First is the forgotten dream and secondly, the unforgettable Daniel.

The first 13 verses, the forgotten dream, verses 14 to 30, the unforgettable Daniel. And what we have here is this...now mark it, folks...we have really two things going on. One is a divine commission to be the vehicle of God's revelation. And the other is a crisis that's going on. This is God's man to reveal a message in the midst of a crisis. So he is not only a messenger of God, he is a man in the midst of a crisis.

And it takes the kind of uncompromising character that Daniel had to withstand the crisis that he's going to get involved in. Now let's look at the first 13 verses, the forgotten dream. First we're going to see the dream, then we're going to see the dilemma, then we'll move to the deficiency and finally the decree...the dream, the dilemma, the deficiency and the decree. First of all, look at the dream in the first three verses. And in the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar dreamed dreams.

Notice it's plural. And his spirit was troubled and his sleep went from him. So Nebuchadnezzar, this king, dreamed dreams.

Now how did this happen? Well, go down to verse 29 and it kind of gives you a footnote about it. Verse 28 ends with the statement that he was dreaming on his bed.

And then verse 29 says, "'As for thee, O king, thy thoughts came into thy mind upon thy bed.'" This is his thought right here. What should come to pass hereafter?

That was basically his thought. He was lying in bed one night and he was thinking to himself, you know, I'm not going to live forever. I wonder what's going to happen when I die. I wonder what's going to take place in the history of the world. Cataclysmic things had taken place. The Assyrians had been wiped out. The Egyptians had been decimated, never to rise from their own ashes. The land of Israel had been completely taken into captivity and never returned.

Judah was now in the process of its dissolution. And Nebuchadnezzar is saying to himself from the vantage point of ruling the world as he knew it, I wonder what will happen to this whole thing when I die. And as he went to sleep, God gave him the answer and he dreamed dreams.

Now notice it's plural there. In verse 1 he had several dreams. And apparently these dreams were so shocking and they were so deeply alarming that he was unable to sleep and his sleep went from him.

He couldn't sleep. The dream was so devastating. Now I believe he had several dreams because of the plural, but I think it was one particular dream that gave him the greatest amount of anxiety. The word trouble there means a very deep disturbance. Now ordinary dreams would trouble us, but not in the intensity that is met here.

This was really deep trouble of his soul. And I believe that was because God had ordained this dream. Now you say, well, isn't it a little strange for God to reveal things in dreams? I mean, didn't He usually just write the Bible? Didn't He just tell somebody in their heart and their mind while they were awake? I mean, this dream thing sounds like a kind of an occultic thing. But it's not abnormal at all for God to do that during periods of revelation.

He did it a lot. In Numbers 12, 6 the Lord said He would speak to Moses face to face, whereas with others such as prophets in visions and dreams. In Genesis, Jacob saw a dream that promised him the land of Palestine. In a dream, God appeared to Joseph. In a dream, God spoke to Ahimelech. In a dream, God appeared to Solomon.

In a dream, God spoke to Pharaoh and revealed the seven years of plenty and the subsequent seven years of famine. In a dream, God spoke to one of the soldiers of the Midianites and gave a vision for the encouragement of Gideon. It was not abnormal at all for God to speak in dreams.

Now I would say it's abnormal today if God has finished His revelation. So don't go to sleep at night hoping you'll get a revelation from God in your dream. I don't think God is in the business of revelations anymore since Hebrews 1 says He's spoken unto us finally in His last days through His Son. I don't think there is anymore revelation, but in those days God chose to speak through dreams. Now the king had this dream and it panicked him. And what was even worse, really amazing, he couldn't remember the dream.

I think what he remembered were some bits and pieces. I think he vaguely remembered some things that sort of ephemerally swept through his brain, but he couldn't grasp the dream again. And I believe that as much as God gave him the dream, so much did God remove it from his memory.

Now you say, wait a minute, that makes no sense. I had enough trouble figuring out why God gave him a dream. Now you say the same God that gave him a dream took it away from him?

Well, yes, essentially, I think God had a purpose for both and we'll see it as we go. I think he remembered the terror of the dream. I think he remembered the fearfulness of the dream. But I believe the specifics somehow floated out of his mind and he couldn't recover the memory of it.

Only the fear remained and the sleepless hours added to his anxiety and his fear. By the time the morning came, he was a wreck because of a dream he couldn't even remember. And so he acts, verse 2, Then the king commanded to summon all the magicians, the astrologers and the sorcerers and the Chaldeans to show the king his dreams. So they came and stood before the king. And the king said unto them, I have dreamed a dream and my spirit was troubled to know the dream. Now he gets all of the brain trust of the Babylonian empire and he pulls them all in.

He appealed to the intellectuals because he couldn't figure out his dream and he was afraid. The terms here are kind of interesting. The magicians...there's two possibilities for this. Basically the term can refer to fortune tellers, but sometimes we find it seemingly associated with people who were scholars. In one sense it would be more academic and in another sense it would be more occultic.

But for the kind of society of that time it's very possible that they were engaged in both. And then there are the astrologers and those are the stargazers. Those are the monthly prognosticators. Those are the people who charted the course of the stars and determined destinies on the basis of how they arranged themselves like horoscopes do today. And then the sorcerers. The sorcerers are the spiritualists. They are the enchanters.

They are the mediums. They are the ones that talk with the dead. And then the Chaldeans. And the Chaldeans are the leading group because they do the talking. They, I suppose, were the wisest of the wise. By the way, originally the Chaldeans were simply a group of people in southern Babylonia. They were simply a group of people who eventually under Nabopelassar, that's where they came from, Nabopelassar being a Chaldean, conquered the whole thing and so this one particular group of people rose to be the highest in the courts of Babylon.

They were supposedly the wisest and the most knowledgeable in all of the arts and science of Chaldea or Babylon. And so everybody came together with all of the scholarship that was available, with all of the occultism that was available, with all the demonism that was available, with all of the human wisdom that was available. He got all of the brain trust, the fortune tellers and the futurists and the palmists and the tea-lieve readers and the crystal gazers and the horoscope people, just like we do today, trying to get a hedge on tomorrow, trying to figure out what was going to happen.

It's amazing that that's what our world does because we don't know God. Whenever somebody in our society wants to know what's going to happen in the future, they pull together all the brain trust and try to figure it out. Now they believed that dreams were very important in that day and so they were very anxious to help the king in this matter. And when they saw no doubt how concerned he was, they were even more anxious. Now let me tell you about these Chaldeans. They had a dream reading system.

You ready for that? They worked on this principle. I think this is so fascinating.

I got into reading this and it just was amazing to me. They worked on the principle that dreams, now watch, and their sequels follow an empirical law which given enough data can be established. And so what they did was they kept records of all dreams and then they charted after a person had a dream the way their life went. And so they concluded a guy had this dream and his life went like this. A guy had a very similar dream and his life went like this.

And they found out the similarities and said, if you have a certain kind of dream, your life will go like this. It wasn't a lot unlike what happens in the legal profession today. They based the current interpretation of the law on how it was interpreted in the past. I don't know if you've ever gone to an attorney's office and seen the volumes and volumes and volumes of books that give you all these law cases, all this stuff, data on what's gone on in the past.

And when anybody wants to interpret the constitution now, wants to interpret the law now, they go into there and check all the past. Well, believe it, the Chaldeans and all the sorcerers and all these people had manuals. They had massive libraries. We've even found their dream manuals in archaeological studies. And you could go to a dream manual and you could look up the elements of your dream and they would tell you what it meant. Now of course it's all a bunch of hocus pocus because they really didn't know. But they had tried in their human ingenuity to devise a clever system. They had a very systematically arranged, easy reference dream manual.

Now let me tell you something. There were so many of these books apparently and there was such a huge amount of material to follow that they needed some time. And we'll see a little later that the king wasn't about to give it to him. These dream manuals apparently covered every eventuality possible and they had to spend time looking through to find out all the little parts and pieces to put the guy's dream together. But the problem was this.

I love this. He forgot the dream. He announces to them his problem.

Verse 3 singularizes it. I have dreamed a dream and my spirit was troubled to know the dream. Now he had a lot of dreams, but only one of the dreams really hit him. And he said, I want to know that dream. That's their problem.

They can do pretty good with their stuff. They can pull out their bag of tricks and pull their chicanery if they got a dream to work on. But he tells them, I don't know what the dream is. You tell me the dream and then interpret it for me. And that leads us from the dream to the dilemma, point two.

That's a little tough. Verse 4, then spoke the Chaldeans to the king in Aramaic. And this is kind of an interesting note. From here on through chapter 7 verse 28, the whole section is written in Aramaic. Aramaic was the common language at that time in the courts, later became the common language of that whole part of southwest Asia.

And because it was the court language of Babylon, this particular section which involves the court of Babylon is written in Aramaic, which is a language similar to the language Hebrew, although different in many ways. So then spoke the Chaldeans in Aramaic and they said this, O king, live forever. You always say that to a king, right?

That's just standard fare. O king, live forever. Long live the king.

You know, court etiquette. And so they got through with that deal. They said, tell thy servants the dream and we will show the interpretation. What confidence. Just tell us your dream, king, and we'll tell you exactly what it means. We'll go back and we'll get our dream manuals and we'll find out what your dream means. We'll show you the interpretation.

All they needed to know was the dream. But the king wasn't about to operate on their conditions. Look at verse 5. The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, the thing is gone from me.

It's gone from me. If you will not make known unto me the dream with the interpretation of it, you shall be cut in pieces and your houses shall be made a dung hill. Now he is upset. That dream has really disturbed him. You see, and then he says in verse 6, but if you show the dream and its interpretation, you shall receive from me gifts and rewards and great honor. Therefore, show me the dream and the interpretation of it. You've got two choices, he says. You cannot show me the dream or its interpretation and I'll turn your houses into dung hills after I've chapped you to pieces.

On the other hand, just tell me the dream and its interpretation and I'll give you great reward and great honor. It's easy. Ooh, he's putting them on the spot scene. You know, I believe basically Nebuchadnezzar was a cynic. I believe Nebuchadnezzar was too smart to buy his own system. He must have thought the whole pile of them were a bunch of charlatans.

And he finally got his moment where he'd really lay it on him heavy. You're so smart. You've got all this supernatural information.

You're always saying you speak for the gods. You know the destinies of men. All right, tell me the dream and its interpretation.

Let's see if you can pull it off. And so, added to his frustration and his irritability, he decides to put a test on his court wise men in order to find out whether they've been telling them the truth in the past and whether they're worth anything in the future. By the way, in the Orient it was considered ominous to forget a dream. It meant the gods were angry with you, so he was really panicky. He makes the statement in verse 5, the thing is gone from me. Now some people have translated that differently. Some say that it can mean I am sure of it and say the very opposite, that he does know the dream and he's holding it back from them.

It's so difficult for me, you know, studying all these commentaries, one goes one way, one goes another. I think the weight of evidence, and you can trust me at this point for it, is on the side that he had forgotten the dream. It seems the only thing that makes sense in the context. And I believe it makes sense from God's viewpoint too. I really feel God's involved in this and that God wanted him to forget the dream in order for once and for all to reveal the whole fakery of all the supposed wise men and their idols. It's devastating to Babylonian wisdom.

And I think it sets up Daniel for the rest of the years of his life as the mouthpiece of God, unequaled by any of the Babylonian wise men. And so I think he's giving them the ultimate test. He is tyrannical. He is unreasonable. He is demanding. And in the process, he's going to find out whether they're for real or not. Leupold, who's a very fine Old Testament commentator says, we venture to say that if the Chaldeans had not made pretense of having access to the deepest and most completely hidden things, the king would never have made this unreasonable request of them, end quote.

I mean, as long as they were going to pretend to know all the secrets, he wanted to find out if they knew this one. This phrase there in verse 5, you should be cut to pieces, is amazing. I'll whack you into little pieces.

That's a pretty devastating thing for a whole huge group of people. And then he says, I'll make your house a manure pile. You know, this was often done. When somebody had dishonored themselves or somebody wanted to be defamed, or someone wanted them to be defamed rather, they would kill the person, they would smash down the house and they would build a public outhouse on the same piece of property.

I'll turn your houses into outhouses, is what he's saying. Read 2 Kings 10 27, you'll see it there. On the other hand, if you do what I ask you to do, I'll reward you greatly. Well look at their reply in verse 7. They answered again and said, let the king tell his servants the dream and we'll show the interpretation. They're really sticking to their ground. They haven't got any other choice. Just give us the dream, king.

Don't be unreasonable. You see, they faced an impossible dilemma. There was no way they were going to come up with the dream. And I, as I said, believe God let the king forget in order that God might show the stupidity of their whole dumb phony system of religion. They didn't have any corner on divine truth.

They didn't ascend into the supernatural world at all. They couldn't do a thing with their fakery and their trickery unless they knew the dream. So the king replied in verse 8. The king answered and said, I know of certainty that you would gain the time because you see this thing is gone from me. All you want is to buy time, that's all. You're just stalling. You're stalling hoping that I'll forget about it and it'll all blow over and I'll cool off.

You're just stalling. But verse 9, if you will not make known to me the dream, there is but one decree for you, for you have prepared lying and corrupt words to speak before me till the time has changed. Therefore, tell me the dream and I shall know that you can show me its interpretation. He says, look, I'm going right back to verse 5. There's only one decree for you.

If you don't tell me that dream, I'll cut you in pieces and your homes will be made into a manure pile. There's no alternative at all. Why? Look at it in verse 9. This gives his true indication of how he felt about these guys, for you have prepared literally wicked lies to speak before me. That's why I say he wasn't even convinced of his own system. He saw the phoniness in the whole thing. I'm sure he knew the past stuff that they had told wasn't true, that they had made great predictions that never came to pass. He didn't believe the whole thing. He was cynical. He may have been sort of an atheist at this point, not believing in any God. And he wanted to show them up for the phonies that they were.

It's amazing that God uses this man against his own system. So the dream and the dilemma. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur.

Thanks for being with us. John is chancellor of the Master's University and Seminary in Southern California. The study John began today is titled The Rise and Fall of World Powers.

As John continues this series, he's going to show you that Christians actually have reasons to be hopeful, and even optimistic, as we look to the future, as we wait for Christ's return. So if you've never taken an in-depth look at this magnificent section of scripture, Daniel 2 through 5, I would encourage you to pick up a copy of John's current study, The Rise and Fall of World Powers. Get in touch today.

Shipping is free on the six-CD album. To order a copy of The Rise and Fall of World Powers, call us toll-free, 800-55-GRACE, or you can go online to gty.org. And as always, you can download the MP3s and the transcripts immediately and free of charge. Just go to our website. Again, that's gty.org. And thanks for remembering that it's friends like you who help us connect people around the world with biblical truth. Every day, church leaders, missionaries, and so many others across the globe are encouraged by this broadcast and the resources available at our website and the free books and CDs we send out each month. To have a role in that, to partner with us, call 800-55-GRACE or make your tax-deductible donation at gty.org. That's our website, gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to be here tomorrow when John looks at why God used Daniel in such mighty ways and how the Lord can use you. John will continue his study, The Rise and Fall of World Powers, with another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.