Day 239: Daniel 1-3 | Read The Bible In A Year | Bible Study with Commentary by Dr. Manny Arango

Hey, Bible nerds, this is Dr. Manny Arango. Welcome to the Bible Department podcast powered by Arma. We are walking through the entire Bible in a year. You can go to the description or thebibledepartment.com to download a reading plan and join the journey. Hey, family, welcome to day 239. I'm super excited because we get to jump into a brand new book of the Bible today. We get to jump into the book of Daniel. What a good book. We're gonna be in the book of Daniel for about four days, I believe. And the book of Daniel is easy to read through. It's a good mix of what we would call narrative or story, but also apocalyptic prophecy. So we've got a lot to unpack for the whole book. Today, though, we've got Daniel chapters one, two, and three. If you haven't done the reading, go do the reading. It's easy reading today, all right? It's not difficult reading. This is nothing like Leviticus or some of the really, really hard portions of Jeremiah. So we got Daniel chapters one, two, and three. If you already have done the reading, you're gonna have so much context for everything that I'm going to say. And I'm really, really excited to dive in. Always, like always, I'm gonna give you context clues so that you can get oriented. I'll try to give you as many nerdy nuggets as I can.

We don't want the episode to get too long, but I'll try to give you as many nerdy nuggets as possible. And I'll always leave off with the timeless truth. And I'm actually really, really excited for our timeless truth today, because the message of Daniel and the writing of Daniel, the book of Daniel, the message of Daniel is insanely relevant for us today. So let's dive in. Let's dive into some context clues. Daniel chapter one, verse one, is gonna start out with these words. In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, if you've been on this journey with us for a long time, you probably remember Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it. So we've got a siege. And I'm gonna tell you exactly what date this siege is happening. This is 605 BC. This is one of the really, really, really important dates that we need to know in order to stay oriented in what's going on in the Bible, 605 BC. And the Lord delivered Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand. Who's the him? Nebuchadnezzar. Along with some of the articles of the temple of God, these he carried off to the temple of his God in Babylon

and put them in the treasure house of his God. So the thing that preempts all the events of the book of Daniel is the fact that Nebuchadnezzar, he's come to Jerusalem, he's laid siege to it, and he is exerting power and dominion and force over the king of Judah and the subjects of Judah. Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring into the king's service some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility, okay? Young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well-informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king's palace, okay? So now these young men, these royal noble men, are now going to get carted off into captivity. If you take Daniel chapter one and just go look at 2 Kings chapter 24, you're gonna realize that 2 Kings chapter 24 is telling the exact same story. Now, here we go, I'm gonna give you context and some nerdy nuggets all mixed together. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel are all alive at the exact same time. Actually, there's probably a window of time where Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel are all living in Jerusalem together. But as the story is gonna tell us, Daniel is gonna get carted off to Babylon as an exile

and Ezekiel is gonna get carted off into a Babylonian exile as well, okay? So because Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, because their lives all overlap, what's happening if you're following along this journey in chronological order is that we keep moving forward in history and then we have to go back to get the next person's perspective on these same events. And then we get that person's perspective and then we move forward in the story and then we gotta go back again, okay? So I'm sorry, we're going back in time to 605 BC because although we have heard about the events of what's gonna happen, we're just hearing them now from Daniel's perspective as opposed to Ezekiel's perspective or Jeremiah's perspective, okay? So Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, all living at the same time, obviously all contributing to the canon of scripture with their writings and their... all going to talk about these exact same events and we're even going to look at the book of Isaiah because Isaiah is going to predict what's going to happen to Daniel and his three friends who we unfortunately know by their slave names instead of by their Hebrew names but we'll get into that in just a minute. All right if you open up 2nd Kings chapter 24 says during Jehoiakim's reign Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon invaded the land. Jehoiakim became his vassal for three years so and what did it say in Daniel chapter 1 verse 1 in the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim okay so we've got Jehoiakim in 2nd Kings 24 Jehoiakim here in Daniel chapter 1. What is Nebuchadnezzar going to do? He's going to take some folks captive and then actually we get a changing of the guard we get a new king verse 8 Jehoiachin is going to begin to reign and in the eighth year of the reign

of the king of Babylon he took Jehoiachin prisoner so this is now the son of Jehoiakim and what's going to happen as the lord had declared Nebuchadnezzar remove the treasures from the temple of the lord from the royal palace and cut up the gold article that Solomon king of Israel had made for the temple of the lord he carried all Jerusalem into exile all the officers and fighting men skilled workers and artisans total of 10 000 only the poorest people of the land were left okay so who's going to get deported verse 15 Nebuchadnezzar took Jehoiachin uh captive to Babylon he also took from Jerusalem to Babylon the king's mother his wives his officials and the prominent people of the land okay so 605 BC Daniel and his three friends who we unfortunately know by their slave names are all going to get carted off to Babylon now here's what's fascinating is that Isaiah here's kind of our first nerdy nugget of the day is that Daniel and I'm actually gonna say their correct names okay because I'm this is kind of I'm I've got an axe to grind with this one Daniel Hananiah Mishael and Azariah I'm actually retraining myself to call them by the Hebrew names Daniel Hananiah Mishael and Azariah okay you probably know Hananiah as Shadrach you probably know Mishael as Meshach you probably know Azariah as a Bendigo but these are the names given to them to humiliate them these are slave names these are Babylonian names okay their Hebrew names are Daniel Hananiah Mishael and Azariah Daniel's name is going to get changed to Belteshazzar Bell is a Babylonian god uh and Belteshazzar means may Bell protect his life okay so Nebuchadnezzar is essentially saying hey who cares about Yahweh you are now a subject of Nebuchadnezzar me the king and my god Bell Hananiah his name in Hebrew means Yahweh has been gracious but his name gets changed to Shadrach which means I am fearful uh Mishael so we got a cop we got to stop calling this guy Shadrach it's so unfortunate that we know him as a slave name that means I'm fearful when his Hebrew name is Hananiah which means Yahweh has been gracious okay Mishael is Meshach's Hebrew name Mishael means who is what god is but they changed king Nebuchadnezzar change his name to I am of little account this is so so humiliating okay so Meshach means I am of little account Azariah his Hebrew name is Azariah it means Yahweh has helped his name gets changed by Nebuchadnezzar to a Bendigo which means servant of the shining one which is another Babylonian god so they are given pagan names Babylonian names so that Nebuchadnezzar can prove that he is now their king okay you are no longer Jewish you are fully Babylonian this is the atrocity of Babylonian captivity so one of the key messages of the book is that these boys Daniel Hananiah Mishael and Azariah are going to stay loyal and faithful to

Yahweh even as the Babylonian system tries its best to force them to assimilate in the Babylonian culture they are going to hold true to their Jewish identity and they are going to be loyal to the identity that God has placed on them that is the key to understand this entire book key word here is identity that although you are in Babylon you are not Babylonian this is why the book is so relevant for Christians because we are in the world but not of the world and it's very unfortunate that we've been calling these guys Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego because the enemy wants us to know them as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, but God wants us to know these boys as Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. So it's odd though, we know Daniel based on his Hebrew name, not his Babylonian name, but we know Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah based on their Babylonian names as opposed to their Hebrew names. And so first nerdy nugget of the day, okay, is that Nebuchadnezzar is gonna come to Jerusalem 605 BC, that's our context clue, and then what is he gonna do? He's gonna take some of the prominent people, he's gonna take royalty, the Bible's gonna say that he's not going to take any poor people, he's gonna take people of the royal family, he's gonna take nobility, he's gonna cut them off to Babylon, and he's gonna change their names. Not only is he gonna change their names, he's most likely, I know this is a trigger warning here, he's most likely going to castrate them and make turn them into eunuchs, because a foreigner cannot serve in a king's palace without being made into a eunuch. Why did foreign powers turn you into a eunuch? First of all, to exercise power and force and dominion over you, that's number one, but also because men who are made into eunuchs cannot sexually assault the Queen, so they cannot R.A.P.E. the Queen, and also they're less aggressive, which means they're not going to try to overthrow the king. It is a political, physical way to subdue the masculine population of a subjugated people group, and I won't go on a rant about men being emasculated, although I could, we could totally make that into a timeless truth, but we are currently living in a generation of spiritual eunuchs, but that's a whole other problem altogether. Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Ezra are most likely eunuchs. The way that we

actually really, really know this is we got to go further back into time, and we're gonna look at 2nd Kings chapter 20, and we're gonna look at Isaiah chapter 39, okay? 2nd Kings chapter 20. If you remember this, if you've been rocking with us all the way from the book of Isaiah, you definitely remember this. There's a moment where Hezekiah allows, this is when the Assyrian Empire is still in power, and Hezekiah is being disloyal to the Assyrians by kind of flirting with the Babylonians, and Babylonian officials come to see how wealthy Hezekiah really is, and it says this in Isaiah chapter 39 verse 5, Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, Hear the word of the Lord Almighty. The time will surely come when everything in your palace, and all that your predecessors have stored up until this day, will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord, and some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood, who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon. So Isaiah prophesies that your own descendants are gonna become eunuchs, so Daniel, Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael are most likely the eunuchs that Isaiah is prophesying about here. Man, Hezekiah's response is really sad. Verse 8, this is Hezekiah's response, The word of the Lord you have spoken is good, Hezekiah replied, for Hezekiah thought there will be peace and security in my lifetime. Ooh, that stings! He doesn't care what's gonna happen five generations later, he's just cool, he's just happy that his his lifetime, there'll be peace in his lifetime. Now, to orient you just a little bit, so I just read Isaiah chapter 39 verse 5 to 8, 2nd Kings chapter 20 verse 16 to 18 says the exact same thing, so you can fact-check me if you want, but 2nd Kings chapter 20 verses 16 to 18 and Isaiah chapter 39 verse 5 to 8 say the exact same thing. I just want to give you both references. So Isaiah prophesies that Daniel, Azariah, Mishael, and Hananiah, there we go, training myself to say their Hebrew names, are gonna get carted off to Babylon and are gonna become eunuchs. Now, just to orient you, between Hezekiah and Jehoiachin, there are five kings who reigned, and I'll give you all the names, Hezekiah, and then Manasseh, and then Ammon, and then Josiah, and then Jehoiahaz, and then Jehoiakim,

who Nebuchadnezzar is going to start this whole ordeal with, and Jehoiachin who's gonna get carted off to Babylon, okay? So Isaiah is gonna prophesy to Hezekiah, and by the time we get to Jehoiakim and then Jehoiachin, that prophecy is gonna come to pass, and there are gonna be eunuchs now in Hezekiah's bloodline. Alright, that's a lot, okay? I know you're drinking from a fire hose. We're gonna... keep it moving, okay? All right, so let's talk about language, okay? Last big picture, just big picture idea. Daniel is one of the only books of the Bible written in multiple languages, okay? So Daniel chapter 1 to Daniel chapter 2 verse 4 is written in Hebrew, okay? Just like the rest of the Old Covenant, or the Old Testament, or the First Testament, okay? Written in Hebrew. Then, this is interesting, Daniel chapter 2 verse 4 to Daniel chapter 7 verse 28 is all written in Aramaic, okay? Written in a foreign language. And then the Hebrew comes back. So Daniel chapter 8 verse 1 to 12 verse 13 is written in Hebrew again, okay? So the book starts in Hebrew, the whole middle is in Aramaic, and then the last chunk is in Hebrew. Hebrew, Aramaic, Hebrew. If you are sitting in Babylonian captivity, and you're encountering a book that starts in Hebrew, but then it goes to Aramaic, now let me help you. Aramaic is the language of the foreigner. Aramaic would be like a trade language. It was the lingua franca of the day, okay? Everybody kind of could speak Aramaic. It was a trading language. It was a language that people would use to conduct business. So, the book switches to Aramaic, which immediately communicates to someone who's a Hebrew that we are losing our identity. The Hebrew language is a part of the identity. So, the same way that the names of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah are changed to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the language of the book is also communicating the idea that Babylon is trying to rob the Hebrew people of their culture, not just of their bodies, not just of their physical existence, but of their culture, of their language, a language that the Lord has given them, a language that their holy scriptures are written in. And then what happens? Chapter 8 hits, and the book switches back to Hebrew, which anyone reading these texts in their original context would go, oh, hope. Hope is on the horizon. Restoration is going to come. In the same way that the text returns to the Hebrew language, the underlying theme of the book is that the people of God who are currently in exile in Babylon are going to return to the land of Israel. They're going to return to their homeland. You see how subtle that is? Just by using two different

languages, the author of the book begins to communicate that although the Babylons have robbed you of your names and your language and your culture and your identity, or at least have tried to rob you of those things, God is going to restore. And not only is God going to restore, but you have to remain faithful and loyal in the middle of an empire that is trying to steal your language, your name, and your identity from you. See, this gets down to the crux of the mess of the book, that the world that we live in as Christians is constantly trying to rob us of our names, of our identity, of our culture, of who we are. But we have to go in the same way that Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah are faithful to Yahweh and reject Nebuchadnezzar as their king. We have to declare we reject the world's systems as the way that we're going to act. That's not the culture. We don't live in a culture of, we're not going to operate in a culture of pride and backbiting and selfishness. Oh no, we have a counter-cultural ethic and we have a king named Jesus and we're loyal to that king. Family, the wait is over. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos, is out now and available everywhere books are sold. Literally today, I walked into a Barnes and Noble and I signed a bunch of copies at a physical location. So, you can grab this book at a physical Barnes and Noble or you can go to a Books A Million or Amazon or anywhere books are sold and grab a copy. If you enjoy reading the Bible from an ancient perspective, if you understand that the beauty of scripture is actually knowing it in context, then you'll love this book. And if there's any chaos in your personal life, I think that reading the Bible from an ancient perspective can actually help to crush the chaos in your life. I think this book is going to be a New York Times bestseller. I really do. I think we wrote a good one. I think you should get a copy today. All right, back to the episode. Let's kind of break down the chapters a little bit. I'll give you kind of a nugget on chapter one, two, and three, and then we'll switch to our Thomas Truth and we'll be done for the day. I hope all this context, I've got a bleeding together some context clues and some nerdy nuggets all at once here at the top of the book of Daniel. And so, Daniel chapter one, we're going to get Daniel and some kosher food laws, okay? This is the first, we're going to call it a hero story, okay? The first hero story is all about food, okay? And Daniel is, of course, reluctant to eat the food that's been provided by Nebuchadnezzar. And he makes a bargain with the chief eunuch for he and his fellow Jews to just eat kosher food to see if they are healthier or not. They were healthier, so they were allowed to eat what they wanted. The simple story strikes at the heart of what

the book is teaching. I want you to hear this. Daniel was a Jew in a foreign land, exiled from home, living among pagans, their customs and their food. It would have been easy and even understandable for Daniel to compromise or to simply submit to his new reality, but he refuses. He may no longer be in Israel, but he was Israel. Oh, that's good. He wasn't in Israel, but he represented Israel, and now Israel was in him, and therefore Israel was in Babylon. So many of us, we make so many excuses. Well, no, I can't live for Christ. I'm around heathens. I'm around pagans. People cuss at my job. That don't mean you got to cuss at your job. People do this. People do that. Hey, are you influenced or are you the influencer? Because if God's called you to his kingdom, he's called you to be a leader. He's called you to be a kingdom ambassador, and it's your job to represent the king and be loyal to the king everywhere you go, no matter where you go. It would have been understandable. It would have been easy. It would have been quite convenient for Daniel to simply submit to his new king and new rules and new realities, but you can't always be a rule follower. At some point, you got to protest against a culture that wants to rob you of your name, your identity, and your language, and you got to stick up for godly values and declare, nope, I am definitely, it doesn't matter. You can cancel me if you want to. I am going to stand up for godly values. That is what the book of Daniel is really getting at. Daniel number two, let's go on to Daniel number two. There's a dream, and I actually just want to give you three views of how this dream is going to get interpreted, okay? There's what's called the Maccabean view, there's a messianic view, and then a dispensational view. If you've been rocking with us for a while, you already know I'm steering clear of anything that sounds dispensational. So the Maccabean view is going to see the head of gold as Babylon, the chest and the arms of silver as Media, but that's the Median empire. They're going to see the middle or the thighs of bronze as Persia, and the legs of iron as Macedonia, and the feet of iron and clay as Ptolemy and Seleucids, and then the stone kingdom as the Maccabean kingdom. That's a Maccabean view, okay? The messianic view is going to see the head of gold as Babylon, the chest and the arms of silver as the Medo-Persian empire. That's our first change. The middle thighs of bronze as Macedonia, the legs of iron as Rome, and the feet of iron and clay as the Rome, the emperors of Rome, the individual emperors of Rome, and they're going to see the stone kingdom as the kingdom of Christ. Dispensational view is going to see the head of gold as Babylon, the chest and the arms as the Medo-Persian empire, the middle thighs of bronze as Macedonia, the legs of iron as Rome, the feet of iron and clay as the kingdom of

the antichrist, and the stone kingdom as the millennial kingdom. So there's three different ways to interpret Daniel chapter 2. I'm just going to give you all three, and I'm not going to tell you which one I believe in, but it's the second one. That was funny. Okay, anyway, all right, so the dream is about a series of future empires that will rise and fall, and then the establishment of God's kingdom that will last forever. But which part equals which empire is where the different views disagree. Okay, and then we are going to have Daniel chapter 3. We move out of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and we are going to get the image that Daniel's friends refused to bow down to. Now, the image, I want us to think of this, yes, yes, foreign kings demanded that they be worshiped, but this idea of image is actually very, very normal. It's why our currencies have money on them, because kings and emperors believe that their image should be everywhere. Okay, so not only are they not wanting to worship Nebuchadnezzar, they're saying, we don't even agree with your image being anywhere, which is why they're gonna be threatened with death. And again, this story mimics the first. Even in Babylon, we are faithful. Even when it's inconvenient, we are loyal. Loyal to who? Loyal to our real king. Nebuchadnezzar, doesn't matter what you say, you're never gonna really be our king. Yahweh is our king, which leads us to our timeless truth. Our timeless truth is really, really simple. As I spent a decade in youth ministry, I can tell you right now, the American, America, American culture at large, and Western culture in general, are no longer Christian cultures.

These are post-Christian, we're living in a post-Christian era, which means we're no longer discipling people for Jerusalem where everybody lives the same way and everybody understands godly values and everybody understands what the Bible is and everybody's memorized the 10 commandments. No, we're discipling people for Babylon. And if our Daniels, Hananias, Azariahs, and Mishaels are going to withstand the current of culture, in our cultures today, then we better be discipling them, not for Jerusalem, but for Babylon. The test of whether or not you're really a Christian is not can you be a Christian in a, essentially in the most safest environment ever? No, it's can you be a Christian in the middle of an empire that is anti-Christian? Okay, can you stand up for what you believe in even though everybody says that it's crazy? Can you go against the current? Can you swim upstream? That is actually the real question. And these guys, these four guys, Daniel, Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael, were discipled not just to survive in Jerusalem, but to survive behind enemy lines in enemy territory. And we gotta get back to the place where we're discipling people, we're discipling young people

so they can actually survive in the real world, not just in the Christian bubbles that we create for them. And so that's my timeless truth for the day. You gotta disciple. If you're a pastor, if you're a leader, you gotta disciple people, not for Jerusalem, but for Babylon. Because guess what, baby? We are in exile. That is the reality. All right, tomorrow we got day 240. We're gonna be tackling Daniel chapters four, five, and six. We're gonna talk about chiasms. It's gonna be so much fun. I know you just dying to just rip apart a chiasm. If you're on a streak, I'm so proud of you. I'll see you right here tomorrow for day 240 as we continue our trek, the Book of Daniel. Love you guys, peace. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. If this episode was helpful, how about you leave a comment, share with a friend, and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. To learn more about the show, head to thebibledepartment.com. We'll see you right back here tomorrow.