The Ruler Over the Realm of Mankind – Selected Scriptures from Daniel

The Sovereignty of God in the Book of Daniel

To the book of Daniel, please, in the Old Testament, the book of Daniel. And in case you're not familiar with where that might be located, it is for the end of the Old Testament. It's the 13th book, right at the end of the major prophets, the book of Daniel.

When you found your place there, let's pray together. Father, it is our desire today that your word may come alive to us and that we may see it, not that it is not alive, but that we would be able to apprehend that quality of it, that it would impact our hearts and our minds, that we would be conformed to the image of Christ, that you would use your word to change us today and help us to think biblically about all things that pertain to life and godliness and life in this world.

We pray that you would use your word to fix our hope and our attention on things above and not on things of this earth, and that you would comfort us, your people, and conform us, we pray, to the image of Christ.

Again, we ask this in his name, amen. Well, I don't know if you've heard or not, maybe you already have, but there is an election coming up this coming week. It is all the rage. Everybody's talking about it.

If you go on social media, you might see a post or two about it. If you search the internet, you might find a news story or two about it. Everybody's talking about it, so I figured I might as well talk about it.

As if this year could not get more crazy than it already is, we have a global reaction to a virus that has caused every civilized world, a country in the world, to decide to shoot itself in the foot and cripple itself and wreck and destroy lives.

And then on top of that, we have an election that is thrown into the midst right about the same time as we seem to have a Marxist revolution taking part in our streets. And the election, of course, means that there is the potential for all kinds of chaos and violence and disruption and disturbance, and our hearts and minds are all tied up into that because we live in this world.

And so I figured it would be good to take a break from the book of Hebrews to address this topic that I think is on our minds and at least help us to think biblically and Christianly about how we ought to be approaching this week and what we ought to be thinking about and what it is that we're gonna fix our hope and our attention on.

I wish these things wouldn't be on our minds. I truly do wish that we lived in a world where whoever was elected president of the United States really didn't matter. That would be nice, wouldn't it? Like if you could just not care if somebody got elected and they would have so little influence in our lives, so little power to get into our lives that we just would think, oh, that's interesting.

It's a reality show winner, that's fine. Or a show host or a movie actor or a peanut farmer or a community organizer, whoever it is, we just don't care. Let's just go all back to our lives and go on about our business.

And they're gonna have so little impact and so little effect upon our lives that it really doesn't matter. That's the world I wish we lived in, but that's not the world we live in. We live in a world, unfortunately, where the people that we elect or vote for or vote against end up having so much control and so much influence into every area of our lives that it does concern us.

And the more power they have, the more consequential they are. And the more consequential they are, the more consequential they want to be. And history does not record the names of people who acquired positions of power and then left other people alone.

History doesn't record, can you name one? Somebody who acquired a great position of power over many people's lives and then just said, I just don't wanna have anything to do with any of it. I just wanna leave people alone to live their own lives.

Can you name anybody in the history of humanity? We can't name those people, but we can name the people who acquired positions of power and then said, now I want to change things and I want to make all of humanity after my own image.

We wanna control this. I wanna exercise and wield this power. I mean, obviously I wouldn't have this power if I weren't wise enough and good enough to use it for the wisdom and good of all people. That's not the world that we live in.

This can be a subject that causes us great angst and hand-wringing. I mean, the hand-wringing in our culture right now is almost a fever pitch, is it not? Within recent weeks, we saw people melting down on video over the death of a Supreme Court justice and then posting that to social media.

Multiple people.

That is what happens when peak narcissism meets peak idolatry. And those are in the same person. When you have an idol that has fallen and you are so narcissistic that you melt down over that and then broadcast your narcissism and your idolatry to the rest of the world, that's the culture in which we live.

We are in interesting times. So the hand-wringing in our culture and our society is a fever pitch because we are told every election cycle that it's the most important election, what? Of our lifetime.

Have you heard that before? Yeah, I heard that. 1980, I heard that. 1984, I heard that. 1988, I heard that. 1992, I heard that. I heard that again in 96. Again in 2000. Again in 2004. Again in 2008 and again in 2012.

I think I heard it 2016. And if memory serves me, I think I may have picked up a few people in this election cycle saying, this is the most important election in our lifetime. We have heard that. And it certainly feels as if it is.

Just looking around us. Looking around us at what's going on. It feels as if we are in the middle of a civil war. At least a cold civil war. It feels as if we are on the brink of cultural collapse, on the brink of persecution, and worst case scenario, all three of those things at the same time.

I don't think that the hand-wringing amongst our congregation is in a fever pitch. So I think it's on our minds. So let's jump into Daniel chapter two. And here's what we're gonna do today. I'm not coming into Daniel chapter, well, it's not just Daniel chapter two.

It's actually the whole book of Daniel. You can believe that or not, but we're gonna go through most of it. Here's what I wanna do. I wanna remind us today of God's view of rulers, kings, and nations.

That's what I wanna do. I'm not up here to tell you how to vote, tell you that you should vote, that's your patriotic duty, it's your Christian duty. None of that. And listen, amongst us as a congregation, I don't think that the hand-wringing and the anxiety is at the fever pitch that it is amongst the rest of the culture.

For this reason, that we as the people of God, and we understand the sovereignty of God. You hear the sovereignty of God preached every Sunday. You hear it prayed every Sunday. You see it modeled every Sunday.

We're not in panic. We're trusting in Him. This is a congregation that lives and breathes that air, that oxygen. This is the waters in which we swim are the waters of divine sovereignty where this is part of our theology.

It's part of our philosophy of ministry. It is simply how we interact with one another. It is our environment here at Kootenai Community Church. So consequently, we're not constantly out in the foyer arguing with each other about which candidate we're gonna vote for, or what policy we want to see put in place, or whether we should or we shouldn't vote.

And that I believe is the work of the Spirit of God amongst us as His people, that that's not what we gather here to do. We have a different purpose, a different focus, a different worldview, a different mentality here than it is elsewhere out in the culture.

And I wanna help foster that again here this morning. So I simply wanna remind us of God's purposes, His power, and His sovereignty. Because though I live in a world where I cannot choose how much elections matter, I do live in a world where I can choose how much I'm going to worry about elections.

That I can control. I do live in a world where I can choose whom I trust and how much I trust Him, and what I think about these things. And I can live in a world where I can choose to have my mind and my heart informed by Scripture concerning all of the issues of this world.

So that's what we're doing here in the book of Daniel. I got permission, by the way, from Cornell before I dove into this this week, because if you're thinking, this sounds a lot like Sunday school, and it's going to for a few minutes.

I got permission from Cornell to dive into this because I didn't want to steal his thunder. I've been falsely accused of that in the past. And I'm not doing that. We're gonna actually go through a theme and not a particular passage in the book of Daniel.

And I wanna show you a theme that is repeated over and over again. It is illustrated, it is portrayed, it is lived out, it is boldly stated in every conceivable way. And the theme is this, that the Most High God is the King of heaven, and He is the ruler in the realm of mankind.

The Most High God is the King in heaven, and He is the ruler over the realm of mankind. That is the theme of the book of Daniel. And you don't necessarily really pick it up if you're just reading through Daniel and you're kind of visions of animals, weird animals and statues and fiery furnace and lions dens.

Those are the things that tend to grab our focus and grab our attention in the book of Daniel when we're reading it. But when we go through it as I'm about to go through it with you, you will see that Daniel is driving at one thing.

The Most High God is the King in heaven, and He rules over the realm of mankind. And Daniel repeats this from every angle he can repeat it from. He states it every way that he can state it. He illustrates it every way that he can illustrate it.

That is what the whole book of Daniel is written around. That one theme, that our God Most High rules in heaven, and He is the ruler over the realm of mankind. And I'm gonna say that over and over again so that we get that into our hearts and into our minds.

The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar and the Rise and Fall of Kingdoms

Daniel chapter two. Let me give you just briefly a background of Daniel and Cornell's going through this in Sunday school. So I don't need to repeat this. I'm just gonna give you the high points. Daniel was written around 530 BC.

He lived during the fall of the Southern kingdom, the kingdom of Judah, that was his kingdom. He lived to see the end of that Davidic monarch in the Southern kingdom of Judah. As the Babylonian empire came in and laid siege to the city and deported a group of young, handsome, wise, brilliant, smart, articulate young man, Daniel and several of his friends, there was a large number of them that were deported to the city of Babylon, which was hundreds of miles away.

So Daniel was removed from his land, removed from amongst his people and his family. And he was taken to live in a foreign city under a foreign monarch. And there he ended up serving the king. And probably he was a teenager at the time that the Southern kingdom fell and Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, took him to Babylon.

So Daniel was probably in his early teens, possibly as old as 15 when that happened. Imagine being ripped from your family when you're that age and taken to a foreign land to live amongst a foreign people who speak a language that you've never spoken or heard before.

Well, that was the story with Daniel. There was another deportation. The first one was in 605, the second one in 597. And then there was a third one in 586. Nebuchadnezzar set up these little puppet kings, these little proxy kings to rule in Judea.

And their job was basically twofold. Their job was to collect taxes and keep peace. And if they didn't fulfill either one of those tasks, they were executed and replaced by another king. So there was a series of little puppet kings that sort of ruled there under the auspices of Nebuchadnezzar after 605.

Daniel, in the book of Daniel and Daniel's life covers the 70 year Babylonian captivity. So if you go back to the book of Jeremiah, you'll see that Jeremiah had prophesied that the Southern kingdom would fall, that would be taken captive by Babylon and that they would be exiled to another land for 70 years.

And so we refer to that as the Babylonian captivity. It was a 70 year period of time. Daniel was alive at the beginning of that in 605 BC. He lived all the way through almost probably to the end of that 70 year captivity, dying at probably the ripe old age of 85 or more at the end of that 70 years.

So Daniel lived through that whole captivity, which started under Nebuchadnezzar and ended under another kingdom. And so that's the scope of the entire book of Daniel. And this, by the way, raised a pressing question for all the Jews that lived at the time of Daniel.

And the question was this, all the way through from the time of David, all the way through until the end of that kingdom, God had promised us through the prophets and to David, a kingdom that was to come.

It was supposed to be a Messiah. He was supposed to set up a kingdom. He was supposed to rule and reign forever. He was gonna come and free us from Gentile dominion and domination. And he was gonna establish a kingdom and rule was gonna be prosperous and it was gonna be beautiful and it was gonna be peaceful.

And we were to enjoy this and we were to be the apple of God's eye and none of the Gentile powers would oppress us. That was what they had expected, but then that never came to pass and the kingdom crashed and they were exported to Babylon.

And so now what's the pressing question? The pressing question is, what about those promises to David? What about the promises of a kingdom and a Messiah? What about the promises of a rule and reign? Are those still a thing?

Are those still happening? Which is why, by the way, when you get into the prophets who lived during the exile and after the exile, they kept going back to this one theme. There's still a kingdom to come.

It's that promise is still on the table.

God will still fulfill that.

He'll fulfill it in his time and his way, but that kingdom is still going to be established. And we see this theme in the book of Daniel. Daniel ends up in the court of a Gentile king who thinks he is God and he rules as if he is God.

And that creates a perfect backdrop for God to say, no, you're not God, I'm God. And to show the kings who think that they rule as God, that they are not God and that there is a God most high who rules in the heaven and he rules in the realm of mankind.

That's the theme of the book of Daniel. Now, Daniel chapter two. So after all of that introduction, are we really gonna have time to go through all of this? No, but you have nothing else to do this afternoon.

So we might as well spend the time here. In Daniel chapter two, by the way, Daniel chapter one is the story, remember of Daniel being conscripted into the king's service and there is that conflict over the food and Daniel wouldn't eat the king's food.

And so God in a very subtle way ends up demonstrating to the king that he is sovereign even over those things. And so that basically takes up chapter one. In chapter two, the king has a dream and he asked the people, his conjurers, his magicians, his astrologers, his charlatans, everybody else who would have a program on TBN today.

The king gathers all of them into his court and he says, tell me the dream and tell me its interpretation. And of course they can't. They say, what kind of a request is this? Tell you the dream? How are we supposed to know what you had a dream of last night?

You see this anytime anybody shares a dream with me and they say, hey, do you wanna know what I dream? I always say, no, I don't wanna know what you dream. I'm not interested in hearing your dreams. I think dreams are stupid.

And I think the only thing stupider than dreams is sitting down and listening to people tell you about their dreams. So I kind of wish that my wife would say, hey, tell me about the dream I had last night and then tell me its interpretation.

And then I could say, you didn't have a dream last night. It was only in your imagination, didn't exist. Let's go on with our day. So the king says to his conjurers, his magicians and all of his TBN stars, tell me about the dream that I had last night.

And they say, we can't do that. Nobody's ever been able to do that. And he said, then all of you are executed. If any of you have the abilities that you claim as magicians and soothsayers and sorcerers and these intellects, you would be able to do this.

If you were able to tap into the divine realm as you claim that you can, you would be able to tell me what my dream is. So he orders their execution. And the word comes to Daniel that the king has ordered the execution of all of them.

And Daniel says, hold on just one second. Give me a chance to petition God to see if God might reveal to me the king's dream. So Daniel and his friends do that. And the Lord does reveal Daniel's dream to him.

So that brings us up to verse 17, chapter two, verse 17. Then Daniel went to his house and informed his friends, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah about the matter so that they might request compassion from the God of heaven concerning this mystery so that Daniel and his friends would not be destroyed with the rest of the wise men of Babylon.

Then the mystery was revealed to Daniel in the night vision. Then Daniel blessed the God of heaven. And look what he says. This is where our theme begins, at least explicitly stated in verse 20. Daniel said, let the name of God be blessed forever and ever, for wisdom and power belong to him.

It is he who changes the times and the epochs. He removes kings and establishes kings. He gives wisdom to wise men and knowledge to men of understanding. It's he who reveals the profound and hidden things.

He knows what is in the darkness and the light dwells with him. To you, O God of my fathers, I give thanks and praise for you have given me wisdom and power. Even now, you have made known to me what we requested of you, for you have made known to us the king's matter.

So God had revealed this. I want you to notice what Daniel says. For wisdom and power belong to him. All power and all wisdom belongs to God. Now, if you do not understand the power of God and the wisdom of God and the goodness of God's nature, then the next statement that Daniel makes should terrify you.

It's he who changes the times and the epochs. He removes kings and establishes kings. There's one in heaven who determines who is going to be king. And if you don't understand that everything that God does is according to his infinite, perfect, and loving wisdom, that thought should terrify you.

Why? Because you and I are not the ones who determine who's gonna be king. You see, the minute we take something out of my hands and we put it in somebody else's hands, then we start to ask what? What kind of a person is it that's making these decisions?

We better hope that he is good and we better hope that he is wise. God is infinitely good and he is infinitely wise, which is why you and I can rest that he is the one who puts up kings and removes kings.

He is the one who changes, in the words of verse 21, he is the one who changes the times. And here's what we see in the book of Daniel. There was a time for Babylon to be in charge, then there was a time for Medo-Persian to be in charge, then there was a time for the Greeks to be in charge, and then there was a time for the Romans to be in charge, and then there's gonna be a time when another is in charge.

And God is the one who has established all of this, and he changes it. When it's time for Babylon to go away and the Medo-Persians to become the ruling, dominating kingdom of the world, it happens like that, and God is the one who just removes Babylon and establishes the Medo-Persians.

That's all under his sovereign control. He is the one who removes kings and sets up kings. So Daniel gives the king the interpretation. Here's the vision. Verse 31, you, O king, were looking, and behold, there was a single great statue.

That statue, which was large and of extraordinary splendor, was standing in front of you, and its appearance was awesome. The head of that statue was made of fine gold, the breast and its arm of silver, its belly and its thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.

You continued looking until a stone was cut out without hands, and it struck the statue on the feet of iron and clay and crushed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were crushed all at the same time and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors, and the wind carried them away so that not a trace of them was found, but the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.

That was the dream he had. Then Daniel goes on to give the interpretation of the dream. Look what he says in verse 36. This was the dream. Now we will tell this interpretation before the king. You, O king, are the king of kings to whom God of heaven has given the kingdom and the power and the strength and the glory.

Who gave Nebuchadnezzar the kingdom, the power, the strength, and the glory?

Who did that?

God of heaven did it because he's the ruler in the realm of mankind. And so in raising up a king, which Daniel said earlier in the chapter, in raising up a king, he appointed Nebuchadnezzar to rule. Was Nebuchadnezzar a righteous man?

He was a wicked man. Listen, if you think that either of the two candidates that we get to choose from, if you think that they are wicked, they are choir boys compared to Nebuchadnezzar. They're pastoral quality compared to Nebuchadnezzar.

Not pastors in this church, but I mean, you know, other places maybe. Incredibly wicked. God appointed him as king. Look at verse 38. And wherever the sons of men dwell or the beasts of the field or the birds of the sky, he, that is God, has given you them into your hand and caused you to rule over them all.

You are the head of gold. Then Daniel goes on to describe that the chest of silver and the other parts of that statue, he assigns them to each of these succeeding kingdoms that would come after him, taking him all the way up almost to the time of Jesus with the Roman empire being the last of that.

There is a divided kingdom, which is the two legs and the divided kingdom that is weak in some ways and strong in other ways. That's the feet of clay mixed with iron. And there is probably there a reference to a future kingdom as well in that.

But look at verse 44, and this is still future to us. All of those kingdoms are passed to us. This part is still future to us. Verse 44, in the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed.

Remember, what was the pressing issue at the time of Daniel? What about that kingdom that we were promised as a nation? What about that? Here's the answer to it. Daniel in captivity. No more Judean empire, that's gone.

The throne of David, the Davidic monarchy, it is a thing of the past. It didn't exist anymore in those days. Nobody could go into Jerusalem, walk into the king's palace. There was no Davidic monarchy in Judea at the time of Daniel.

There was no physical kingdom there. But here's God's promise. In the days of those kings, that is those kings who were represented by the feet mixed with iron and clay, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed.

And that kingdom will not be left for another people. In other words, there's this succession of kingdoms that come right after another, but there is coming one final kingdom that will not be left to another people.

It will not be superseded or replaced or conquered by anybody else because it will never be destroyed. It will crush and put an end to all these kingdoms, but it itself will endure forever. And as much as you saw that a stone was cut out of the mountain without hands and that it crushed the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold, the great God has made known to the king what will take place in the future.

So the dream is true and its interpretation is trustworthy. What was Daniel doing? Giving the king a preview, saying the vision that you had is a succession of kingdoms that were gonna come, but there is a final kingdom.

We'll look at that in just a bit. Later on in the book of Daniel, there's a final kingdom that is going to come. That kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom and it's not gonna be superseded by anybody else.

And by the way, the king of that kingdom.

Will not be elected.

We don't choose that king. You won't wanna choose that king. In other words, you won't want that king, his rule to be determined by human election or human choice. That king is the sovereign king. We'll look at that a little bit later on.

The Fiery Furnace and Faithful Resistance

In chapter three, there is the story of the fiery furnace where Nebuchadnezzar demands what belongs to God. Chapter three, Nebuchadnezzar having had that vision, thought, hey, that statue in my mind in the dream looked wonderful, let's make it a real one.

So he builds a real statue, makes it all of gold and tells everybody about it and worship him. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego say, no, we're not doing that. You've asked of us something that doesn't belong to you, so we're not gonna give you that.

And at the end of that, you remember how they responded to the king's demand? It's in verse 16 of chapter three. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to give you an answer concerning this matter.

If it be so, our God, whom we serve, is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But even if he does not, let it be known to you, O king, we're not gonna serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up.

That was their response. Listen, you can only respond to that way, to a king, when your life is on the line, when you believe that there's a God in heaven who rules in heaven and he rules in the realm of mankind.

If you don't believe that, you cannot give an answer like that. These men understood that, which is why they can answer the way that they did. They believed that there's a God who establishes, sets up kings and he takes down kings.

Then in chapter four, we have what I think is the most beautiful condensation of all of this, the condensing of all of this theme that we have anywhere in the book of Daniel. Daniel chapter four, look at Nebuchadnezzar's confession.

Now look, and he was a wicked man. Keep in mind, he's a wicked Gentile king. Chapter four, verse one, Nebuchadnezzar the king to all the peoples, nations, and men of every language that live in all the earth, may your peace abound.

It has seemed good to me to declare the signs and wonders which the most high God has done for me. This is an odd confession coming from a pagan king, is it not? Well, Nebuchadnezzar is gonna tell his story about what happened to him through chapter four.

Verse three, how great are his signs and how mighty are his wonders? His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and his dominion is from generation to generation. Here's Nebuchadnezzar, a pagan king, recognizing what?

There is a God who rules in the realm of mankind because he sits in heaven and he rules there. And this most high God has a kingdom. It is an everlasting kingdom and his dominion is from generation to generation.

Now, Nebuchadnezzar tells the story of how he had a vision, a dream, in which there was this big tree and this big tree gave shade to all the beasts of the field and all the creatures on the earth. And it was a massive tree, it was a glorious tree, and all the birds would land in the branches of this tree.

And it gave food to the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, et cetera, food and shelter. And then in steps an angel and determines that this tree is to be cut down. Verse 13, I was looking in the visions in my mind and I lay on my bed and behold an angelic watcher, a holy one descended from heaven.

He shouted out and spoke as follows, chop down the tree and cut off its branches, strip off its foliage and scatter its fruit. Let the beasts of the flea from under it and the birds from the branches, yet leave the stump and its roots in the ground, but with a band of iron and bronze around it.

In the new grass of the field, in the new grass of the field and let him be drenched with the dew of heaven and let him share with the beasts in the grass of the earth. Now we start suddenly move from talking about a tree to talking about a person, right?

Let the tree be cut down and let him be drenched with the dew of heaven and let him share with the beasts in the field. Let his mind to be changed from that of a man and let a beast mind be given to him and let seven periods of time pass over him.

This sentence is by the decree of the angelic watchers and the decision is a command of the holy ones in order that the living may know that the most high is ruler over the realm of mankind and bestows it on whom he wishes and sets over it the lowliest of men.

Man, that's a magnificent declaration of the sovereignty of God. The most high is the ruler over the realm of mankind and he bestows it on whom he wishes. That should terrify you unless you believe that God is infinitely wise and infinitely good in his choice of who rules us.

That should terrify you. But God is infinitely wise and he is infinitely good and therefore we can trust that what? He will set over it the lowliest of men and it will be according to his will and according to his goodness.

It would be whom he wishes. Nebuchadnezzar had this dream and then Daniel comes in to interpret the dream for him and look it down in verse 24. You'll see verse 24, this is a decree of the most high God which has come upon the Lord the King.

Daniel says to the King, you are that tree. It's gonna be cut down. The stump will remain in the ground and the roots in the ground because God's gonna preserve your kingdom for you. But look at verse 24 or verse 25.