Daniel's Vision (pt. 2)

I have entitled these two lessons, Daniel's Vision, Part 1 and Part 2, but that's really a misnomer. This isn't Daniel's vision. This is Nebuchadnezzar's vision and Daniel's interpretation thereof. If you want to get to Daniel's visions, you need to start in Chapter 7 to the end of the book.

It covers the things that Daniel has seen, and you will find remarkable parallels in that passage of Scripture to the book of Revelation. In fact, Daniel is sort of the Old Testament revelation. But this morning we're going to look at the remaining half of Daniel Chapter 2 that we did not cover last Sunday.

And if you'll recall, last Sunday we sort of set the stage where we looked at King Nebuchadnezzar. He has this vision and it disturbs him a great deal to the point that he actually becomes an insomniac.

His sleep's gone from him. He can't sleep at night thinking about this vision that he has seen and what could it possibly mean. He realizes that this vision is something of great significance and it has great significance to him.

He's just not sure what it is. And so he does what you would expect a king to do in those days and calls in all of his advisors in his cabinet and all of the soothsayers and the magicians and all of those types of people and he puts a task to them that he's never done before in which he says, I want you to tell me what my vision is and then tell me what it means.

Because he has come to suspect over the years that these guys really can't tell me the future after all. And while up to now it hasn't been a big deal, I've sort of just let it slide, this time I want to really know what this really is.

So they of course panic and duck the situation and try to put the king off and try to stall for time and do all of those things that we normally do when we get faced back into a corner like that. So the king basically loses his temper and he says, hey, here's the deal, either you tell me what this vision is and what it means or I'm going to kill all of you, I'm going to kill all your families, I'm going to take all of your houses and I'm going to make them all into trash heaps.

Sort of, you know, gives you incentive there. And so they're all panicking but here comes Daniel. Now Daniel is also ranked as one of the wise men because the term wise men covers everybody in the Babylonian kingdom or the Chaldean empire that knew how to deal with matters of science, matters of mathematics, any of those types of things.

They were the advisors to the king and of course he comes under this decree as well. It doesn't matter that he is one of the exiled Hebrew children, the young men of the Hebrews that have been taken into the king's court, that he and his friends, you know, they haven't been lying to the king for years and years and years, it doesn't matter.

They fall into this category so their necks are on the chopping block as well. But Daniel, as we saw, approaches this from a totally different perspective. First thing he does is ask for time but not in the way that the other wise men had done.

He asks for time in saying, oh king, there's a God in heaven that can reveal this and if you'll give me a little time that I can spend in prayer, God will show me the interpretation of your dream. He'll show me what your dream was and the interpretation of it.

And apparently Daniel sat rather well with the king because the king grants this to him. And then the next thing Daniel does is get his three friends and they all hold a prayer meeting to get down on their knees and go before almighty God and to pray for wisdom and the revealing of this vision and God grants their desire.

And so Daniel then is able to go before the king but again with wisdom and with counsel, he tells the king, none of the wise men can interpret this dream for you. He's not claiming credit for himself and his three friends.

He's also making sure that the rest of the wise men can't claim credit after the fact. But he gives all the credit where it belongs to God. He said there's a God in heaven and he emphasizes this is the creator God.

This is the real God. This is the God that really exists. This is the God that is in heaven and knows all things in all the hearts of men and has revealed this unto me. And so now he's about ready to start revealing the king's dream and to begin interpreting it.

And so he starts in in verse 31, thou, O king, sawest and beheld a great image, this great image whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee, and the form of it was terrible or awesome. The image's head was of fine gold, its breast and its arms of silver, its belly and its thighs of bronze, its legs of iron and its feet part of iron and part of clay.

And thou sawest until a stone was cut without hands which smote the image upon its feet that were of iron and clay and broke them to pieces. Then were the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold broke into pieces together and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors and the wind carried them away that no place was found for them.

And the stone that smote the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth. And you can imagine that right about that time, the king wanted to say something like, bingo, that's it exactly. Now, kings don't say things like that, so he probably restrained himself, but that's what he was thinking.

He said, you've got my dream exactly. Because up to now, the standard reaction has always been, well, king, tell us the dream. And then the wise men would come up with some interpretation that they thought would please the king.

And the king is caught on to this. He's not being fooled. The king is actually a very wise, very smart man. And so he says, I want you to tell me what my vision was first, because if the gods can reveal the vision to you, then I know that you also can tell me what the interpretation is.

And Daniel comes in and he says, actually, king, there is a God, capital G in heaven, who can do that. And so here he is, he starts out. And what this vision does is lay out before King Nebuchadnezzar the flow of history.

This covers everything from Nebuchadnezzar himself all the way to the second advent of Jesus Christ. There will be four great Gentile empires that are going to arise. And this is going to detail all of those.

And so the first key principle we want to take away from this passage, that every historical event is keyed to the plan of God. It is all tied to the plan of God. Nothing is happening by chance. Nothing is handling at random.

And history is unfolding precisely as God has decreed that it would. Everything is going exactly at the right time. Everything is going exactly in the right place. And that applies whether you're talking about nations and empires or you're talking about individuals.

Our times, the Bible says, are in God's hands. And so we should take great comfort from this, that things are not chaotic, things are not running at random, that God is, after all, in control. We sometimes sing that.

I wonder if we believe it, that God really is in control of our lives. And so here's Nebuchadnezzar's vision. And this is called the times of the Gentiles. Because remember, the Jewish nation has been taken into exile.

It has been captured. It has been taken into exile. It no longer exists as a nation, with the exception as a puppet state of some other power. The 10 northern tribes no longer exist as a political entity at this point.

Only the two southern tribes, Judah, the tribe of Judah and Benjamin, thank you, that was a test. No, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin are the only two that even exist as political bodies at this point.

And so things are changing. And you might ask, if you were alive at that time, has God abandoned his people? Because God made some covenant promises to Abraham, renewed them to Isaac and to Jacob. He's made covenant promises to David and to Solomon.

And has God abandoned all of this? Because there are things that are unfulfilled in these promises. So what's going to happen here? It looks like Israel is going to disappear. And as a matter of fact, Israel is going to disappear.

It's going to take it a few more hundred years from this point. But Israel, as a political body, is going to cease to exist. And it's going to cease to exist for almost 2 ,000 years until today. But God has his own timetable.

And God keeps careful notes. God knows exactly where he's going. And God always comes back and fulfills his promises. We can count on that. And so Daniel describes this image. It's described as bright.

It's the image of a man, very large, very bright, very excellent. It's described as terrible, which is a description, actually, of its strength and of its power. And top to bottom, first of all, there's a head of gold.

There's a head of gold. And then there's a chest and arms that are of silver. And there's a belly and thighs that are of bronze, of brass. And there are legs that are of iron. And finally, there are feet that are of iron and clay mixed.

And then he sees this great stone. And the text describes not a stone, but a huge boulder or a huge rock, if you will, that comes and smashes this thing and destroys the image completely. And finally, the rock grows and fills the entire earth.

And so notice about the image, first of all, that as you go from head to toe, the materials decline in intrinsic value. Gold has the highest intrinsic value of any of the materials in this statue. Silver has a little less value than gold.

Bronze has less value than either silver or gold. And iron, less value still. As you go down the four empires that are laid out there, the intrinsic value or the moral quality, if you will, is going to decline.

And that's kind of the history of mankind. Now, you look at the human viewpoint. Human viewpoint is that man has struggled himself up out of the primordial ooze. And we're constantly clawing our way up.

And we're getting better and better. Every day in every way, I'm getting better and better. My apologies to anyone that's a member of that organization. But that's the attitude that we have. And we look around.

Look at us, how great we are. The Bible's view is exactly the opposite, that man started way up here. God created Adam innocent, if you will. He was created in sinless perfection. And he fell. And it's been downhill ever since.

So that as time goes by, as history unfolds, mankind is getting worse and worse. And the Bible actually tells us to expect that, that things will get worse and worse until Jesus comes and sets things right.

Now, we are not to become complacent. And as individuals, as individual believers, we are certainly to resist evil whenever it is in our power to do that. We're not just to throw our hands up and say, oh, well, let's bring on evil to speed up the return of Jesus Christ.

That's the wrong attitude. But that is the trend of history. Fortunately for civilization, there are times when God seems to set the hands back on the clock a little bit. But if you look at the general decline of civilization as we've gone through the various empires, we're going downhill.

And so head to toe, you start out with gold and you wind up with iron and clay mixed. But notice also as you go down the statue, the strength of these materials increases as you go down until you get to the feet.

But, you know, gold is very soft. It's not exactly what you would use as a structural material. In fact, one of the things that makes gold so valuable is that it can be manipulated so easily. Gold can be beaten thinner and thinner to extremely thin sheets because it's so malleable.

But it has no real strength, but it's very decorative. And we use it for our...it's been used for money and for a medium of exchange for centuries, for millennia. And then silver, silver also has great intrinsic value, but not quite as much as gold.

But it's a little bit stronger, it's a little bit stiffer until you get down to bronze. And now bronze, you can start using that for structural things. Bronze is basically a tin and copper alloy. Yeah, Andrew, Daniel, excuse me.

I don't think that's specifically what they have in mind here. Although the kingdoms of Greece certainly did rack judgment upon the known world at the time, but I do not believe that that is what he's referring to at this point.

But bronze, for example, though, bronze was the material that you made swords and weapons out of. Because it was hard enough, it would take an edge and would keep that edge. And so as we entered into what was called the Bronze Age, where we could make tools and things like that out of bronze.

And then you get into iron, and iron is better still, again, for the making of weapons, the weapons that would take an edge and would hold it. It's even stronger, it's a structural material. You can build things out of it.

Iron and steel still form the backbone, largely, of our construction industry for heavy construction today. We put up the steel skeleton, and then we hang the facade on top of it. And then finally, you get down to the feet.

And you heard the expression, if you were growing up, so-and-so has feet of clay. Well, now you know where it came from. It comes right out of Daniel chapter 2. It refers to anything which it does have some appearance of strength, and it has some real strength.

There's some iron there. But clay is what? Fragile, breaks. It's not exactly what you would build out of if you want something to last. And so there he goes. And he goes to describe, excuse me, he goes to describe these four great empires that are going to arise.

Now, a little bit of history here. King Nebuchadnezzar's father was King Nabopolassar. And he was...the Chaldean Empire first began to arise out of what is today Iran. And King Nabopolassar was hired by the Assyrians, not to be confused with Syria today.

The Assyrians were occupying the area of the Fertile Crescent, which are basically the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, what is today Iraq. And so they hired King Nabopolassar. He had a pretty good army. Those guys were pretty good as a military force.

They were very effective as a raiding force. And so the kings of Assyria hired Nabopolassar to come and to defend their country against some invading forces that are coming in from the ocean side, from the side of the Mediterranean.

So he comes in, takes the job, comes in, enters Babylon under the banner of the king of Assyria and promptly takes over. Foments a revolution, takes over, and all of a sudden, I'm in charge. And presto, what was the core of the Chaldean Empire suddenly has come into being.

And he spreads himself out and he turns all of this over upon his death to King Nebuchadnezzar. And at that point, the Chaldean Empire is at its height. And Daniel says to King Nebuchadnezzar, you, O king, are the head of gold.

Good thing to say to the king. You know, you're the head of gold. You're the very top. You're the peak. You're the acme. It's just downhill from here, king. And so, and as we will see, Nebuchadnezzar gets a case of the big head out of this.

But anyway, what's going on is that they've destroyed all remnants of the Assyrian military. They've come to dominate this entire region. And like so often happens, he builds this great, great empire.

We still hear about the hanging gardens of Babylon that Nebuchadnezzar built for his favorite wife. And you can see the ruins of those today. It's still there down in Iraq, modern-day Iraq. But as so often happens, Nebuchadnezzar is succeeded by a series of kings who are either evil or weak or both so that it doesn't take too many years until after Nebuchadnezzar is gone that the Chaldean Empire is captured by the Medes and the Persians.

And you can look at Daniel chapter 5 to get the details on that. It happened literally overnight. There was scarcely a whimper from the Babylonian army. It just occurred and boom, all of a sudden, everybody, you know, the old guys are out, the new guys are in.

Now, as an aside, the remarkable thing, and this shows how God exercises his control over things because, I mean, kingdoms were always being overrun and conquered and what have you in those days. And what did you do as soon as you conquered a new kingdom?

You took all the guys that had been leading the kingdom up to this point and did away with them and put your own guys in. That's just the way it worked. Not so for Daniel. Daniel has risen to a very high position and a great prominence in Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom.

And when the Medes and the Persians come in, he is retained. In fact, not only is he retained in his position, he is promoted. And Daniel served a whole series of kings. Daniel is God's man on the spot, as are his three children, or his three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

And so, that's not really part of the lesson, that's just kind of thrown in. But we move on because the next thing is the arms of silver, the chest of silver, and that's the Medo-Persian Empire, which succeeded the Chaldean Empire under Nebuchadnezzar.

Now, the Medes and the Persians were also up in this area. Persia, again, always think Iran when you hear Persia. In fact, when you run into people who are from that part of the world today, in this country or in Europe, they will usually refer to themselves as Persian, not Iranian, to distinguish themselves from the current regime that is in charge there.

But the Medes and the Persians, they were basically cousins. And like cousins sometimes are, or brothers sometimes are, they were basically hostile to each other. They were constantly squabbling with each other.

They were constantly fighting for ascendancy one to the other. But if they agreed upon anything is that they might be hostile to each other, but they were definitely hostile to everybody else. And so the two of them would get together, the Medes and the Persians would get together and go out on raids and what have you and conquering.

And they gradually expanded their area of control until finally, as I said, they conquered the entire Chaldean Empire. And they did it literally overnight. When they invaded, essentially invaded and captured Babylon.

And it's the events that surround Belshazzar and the handwriting on the wall. Your kingdom's been... You've been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Your kingdom is taken from you. Well, that's who God gave it to.

Because it goes back, again, to the opening verses of chapter 2, where one of the things Daniel said about God is that there's a God in heaven and he sets up kings and he puts down kings on his timetable.

And so, oh, king, if you have power, it's because God in heaven has given it to you. God gave it to you. God can take it away. And so that's what happens. And so that brings Cyrus the Great onto the stage.

He conquered the Medes. He swept into the Fertile Crescent, again, the Tigris Euphrates Valley. He takes Babylon and he becomes one of the central figures that you find in this period of history. And he's mentioned all over the Old Testament.

There's a whole series of mentions of him. He figures very strongly in prophecy. He was actually welcomed by the Jews. If you look at Isaiah 45, verses 1 and 2, that's describing Cyrus the Great. And he is succeeded by Darius I or Darius the Great.

And the Babylonian captivity essentially ends. And Darius is also mentioned all through the Old Testament. He's mentioned in Ezra and Nehemiah and Daniel and Haggai and in Zechariah. And the reign of Darius is frequently used to date things because, again, God is a God of precision.

And we're talking about real history here. These are not made-up stories. These are not made-up myths about the time. They're real events that happened to real people. And King Darius is...and his reign is frequently used to date something in the first year of King Darius, in the fifth year of King Darius, whatever.

And that goes. And there's actually some indication and some scholars would say that Darius became a believer. So, we move on from there to the belly and the thighs of bronze. And this is basically the Greco-Macedonian Empire that rose later under Alexander the Great.

Now, Alexander was the son of Philip II and Olympias. And although he was, as a child, he was not thought of that he would be anything special, they didn't even call him Alexander the Pretty Good. You know, he turned out to be the greatest conqueror of his day.

He took off and basically he had one thing he was really good at and that was conquering things and running a military force. And first thing he did was conquer Greece. And then he organized the Greeks because at that time, Greece had been these little city-states, each one is independent.

Well, he organized them into a unified military fighting force. And as an interesting aside that shows you how God deals in history, you remember when Jesus Christ was born, it's described as the fullness of time?

Well, it really was the fullness of time. God had set up everything in place necessary for Jesus to come, Jesus to minister, and for the gospel to go out. And one of those things is occurring right here under Alexander.

Because Alexander has got a problem. He has got this army set up, you know, great army all ready to fight. So he says, you know, right face, forward march, nobody moves except for the Macedonians because everybody speaks a different local dialect of Greek.

And so again, the genius that he is, he says, I got a problem here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put my staff to work and we're going to invent a language. And the purpose of this language is to give instructions so that there can be no mistake about what I mean when I write down my orders and send them out to my commanders.

There can be no mistake whatsoever about what I intend for everybody to do. And this is where the rise of the Koine Greek begins. The common Greek, because these all guys all spoke Greek, but they all spoke the Spartacan Greek or the Attic Greek or, you know, some other Greek.

And so we're going to all speak a common Greek. And now Alexander goes out conquering the known world. And what's he doing as he goes? He spreads his language. As soon as he conquers a people, you know, brings the local leaders before him, he says, here's the grammar book.

When you have mastered my language, come and talk to me. And so Greek is being spread. And by the time that several hundred years go by and Jesus comes, Greek is the common language throughout the known world.

Everybody speaks Greek. They might speak something else too. They might speak Aramaic or Hebrew or Latin or whatever, but everybody speaks Greek. And so God is preparing the way as this goes. So anyway, back to Alexander, he goes out and 334 B .C., roughly, he starts out.

And by that point, he has essentially conquered the known world. Now, as these empires arise, we call them worldwide empires because at the time, they conquered the known world as it existed in their day.

It's not that there weren't people somewhere else, but the world of commerce, the world that was known at that time, basically during the time of the Chaldean Empire, it was what we now call the Middle East.

And then you get to the Medes and the Persians, and that's spread out a little more. And now you've gotten to the Greco-Macedonian Empire, and that has spread out into Egypt. And all over, you know, Greece, all of that area of what we would now call Asia Minor, he runs all of that.

He's conquered everything. And so, but as typically happens, excuse me, you know, again, Alexander died at a very young age, and his empire split up among his four generals. He had four generals, and they squabbled among themselves.

And finally, the empire sort of split into four pieces that are known to historians as the Hellenistic monarchies. And so, you get this dividing effect so that you get the belly and the thighs, the splitting of the thighs.

This is where you start dividing in to these four smaller kingdoms that are under these four generals that had been Alexander's generals. And out of this situation arises the Roman Empire, which to certain extents, at least, is the greatest empire the world has ever known.

It is the last of the truly worldwide empires that has ever existed. Nothing has arisen like it since then. Even the British Empire did not cover the known world the way, I mean, the sun never set on the British Empire, but there were places all around the world that were not under their rule.

The upstart Americans, for example. But the Roman Empire begins to arise out of this, and it starts off with a very humble beginnings, but basically, these guys know how to fight, and they know how to conquer.

And away they go. They conquer, first of the Italy, what is modern-day Italy. They conquer Spain. They conquer Sicily. They conquer Macedonia. They conquer Greece, and then Syria, and North Africa, and Asia Minor, and Gaul, or France, Egypt, Great Britain.

You go to Great Britain today, you will find things that the Romans built that are still there. The Romans were the great engineers of their time, and they built things that still last. It's an interesting experience.

I've had the experience of walking on Roman roads. Got a chance to go to Petra in Jordan. And the road that leads down to Petra, the Romans built. And it is the equal of any road that you've been on today.

It's cobblestone paved. It's arched the way a modern road is so that the rain runs off. There are gutters on the side to carry the rain away. I mean, these guys knew what they were doing. And they built to last.

And so they extend their influence over the known world. And they didn't just conquer. They conquered and they absorbed. They absorbed into their empire. So that when you became a part of the Roman Empire, this was a good thing in many, many ways.

Because what did the Romans do? Well, first of all, the Romans built infrastructure. They built these roads so that you could travel. And that means commerce can go on. And they established the Roman army all over the world to keep order.

So that you could always appeal to the Roman magistrate. And if you were a Roman citizen, this was called the Pax Romana, the Roman peace. And if you were a Roman citizen, you could go anywhere in perfect safety.

Nobody was going to mess with you. For example, what does Paul do when he's about to be strung up? He appeals to the Roman government. He says, I'm a Roman citizen. I claim the protection of Roman law.

And what does the Roman governor do? He runs out an entire battalion of troops to take care of this one guy and make sure that basically he gets to court safely. So that's happening. That's happening all over the Roman Empire.

And all of this begins to come up. Now, this is God at work. Like I said, nothing has happened like this before or since. And yet, this is exactly the time when Jesus Christ comes, he ministers on earth, he dies for our sins, he rises from the grave, and now the gospel is beginning to go out.

And it goes out, if you will, under the protection of the Pax Romana. The apostles can move around the empire. Paul can go all the way to Spain. On his missionary journeys, these people can go out protected.

They've got the infrastructure to move, and the world is set up for the spread of the gospel. Everybody speaks a common language. Everybody speaks a common language, and they can go out. It's the fullness of time.

And this can happen. Now, other things that happened under the Roman Empire, the final destruction, the final temporary destruction of Israel as a political body happens under the Romans. 70 AD, Titus sacks Rome.

The Israel, tiny little country of Israel, has caused the Roman Empire more headaches than practically half the rest of the empire combined. It's just one little bunch of guys over here that are causing all this trouble.

So finally, the Romans have had it, and we're going to go in here, and we're going to crush these people once and for all. And so they do. From the human viewpoint, 70 AD, Titus' legion sack Rome, throws down the temple, not one stone left on another, exactly as Jesus Christ predicted it would be.

And it appears that political Israel has disappeared. And as a matter of fact, there will be no political Israel from 70 AD until 1949. That's a pretty long time. But God is not through with his people.

Because what happens also in here is that there is a great parenthesis. Now, Daniel doesn't refer to this. Daniel didn't see this. The Old Testament prophets did not see this. But there's a great parenthesis that's called the mystery that comes right in here, and that is the church.

Starting at Pentecost, ending at the rapture, but here this period of time, which is at least a couple thousand years now, maybe goes on for another thousand years, who knows. But there is this thing called the mystery, and that's not a whodunit type mystery.

In the Bible, in biblical terms, a mystery is something that was hidden and is now revealed. And so Paul also uses the same phrasing when he says, behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep.

We shall all be changed, but some of us are not even going to see death. The ones that are going to be alive at the time when Jesus comes back for his church. And so the church age is going to be stuck in here.

Now, we're still running in what's called the time of the Gentiles, the overarching thing is called the times of the Gentiles, and that will not come to an end until the end of the Great Tribulation. But the church age is layered over that, if you will, and that's going on.

So that's the next thing that's going to happen. We're now running through this great parenthesis area, but at some point, Jesus Christ is going to come back for his church. This is called the rapture.

And we are going to be caught up and we are going to meet him in the air. At that point, Jesus Christ does not come back to earth. His foot does not touch the earth at that point. We meet him in the air.

If you are alive, you actually become, you go second, because what does Paul say? He says, the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we who are alive will be caught up to meet him in the air. And at that point, the church age is over, but we resume what's happening and being described in Daniel.

And like I said, if you want to go see Daniel's visions, start in chapter 7. And Daniel's 70 weeks, he says there are 70 weeks, and those are weeks of years that are laid out against my people Israel.

And 69 of those weeks have expired. There's one week to go, one seven-year period still to go. And that seven-year period, which we also call the Great Tribulation, will wrap up the time of the Gentiles, will bring all of this together, and will start into the kingdom age, which will follow.

And the promises that have been made to Abraham, to Isaac, and Jacob, and to David, and to Moses will all be fulfilled in that period of time. And so here we go. And during that period of time, there's going to be a revived Roman Empire, which will have the worldwide economic system under it.

It will have the worldwide religious system under it. And all of that will go forth, but it won't last very long. Because what's going to happen, and this is the culmination of the vision, he sees a stone cut without hands.

And the word that is used here is a gigantic rock. A gigantic rock. Jesus Christ, the rock on which the church is built. The rock on which the church is built is Jesus Christ. It's not Peter. I know all of you know that, but I'd emphasize it anyway.

Jesus is referred to as the rock in Deuteronomy chapter 32, in Isaiah chapter 8 and chapter 28, in Psalm 118, in Mark 12, in Matthew 16, in Zechariah 3. Over and over and over, Jesus is described as the rock.

And at his second advent, when he actually comes to earth, he shatters the revived Roman Empire and establishes his kingdom. He is going to ultimately succeed and shatter the world's systems and all of the satanic forces that are arrayed against him.

He shatters all of this and his kingdom takes over the entire earth. So the rock becomes a gigantic mountain and takes over the entire world. And this is what Daniel sees. And this is what Nebuchadnezzar sees.

And so what happens? As would be predicted, Nebuchadnezzar... Now, Nebuchadnezzar is a man of his word. And he has promised that whoever can describe this vision to him accurately will be greatly rewarded, have all kinds of honors heaped upon him.

And he does all of that. He elevates Daniel. And like we said earlier, we get the impression that Daniel stood pretty high in the opinion of the king in the first place. And now he stands even higher in the opinion of the king.

And he puts him way up. He puts him way up. But Daniel does not take account or credit for himself. Daniel has gone out of his way to emphasize all the time that it's God in heaven that has revealed this dream to me.

It is God in heaven that has revealed its meaning, that there is no human being, there's no human agency. None of the wise men, none of the wise guys, whatever you want to call them, can interpret this.