Daniel and the Boys in the Band by Brian E. R. Limmer - HTML preview

Foreword

Not another book on beasts with ten horns! Why do I need it?

The story of Daniel and the boys in the band needs to be retold to remind the atheist that he has some explaining to do. If the cosmos is not running to a plan beyond the control of humans, how could these guys predict half a millennium into the future so accurately? If there is no plan behind the universe, how could they give so much detail? The story of Daniel and the boys needs to be retold to remind the agnostic there is a wealth of history to check out. Creation gives plenty of evidence that there is a design behind nature. The story of Daniel and the boys needs to be retold for the enthusiastic Christian theologian, who, by his brilliant mind, has so organised future events, thinking events must follow his doctrine. The Pharisees tried that and got it wrong. Daniel keeps some things secret and out of reach of logic on purpose. The story of Daniel also needs to be retold to encourage Christian pilgrims through life’s journey. Scripture tells us to expect many strange events in the future. These need to be anchored in the assurance of God’s ability to deliver, by reviewing His record of the past. Probably, out of all the prophets, Daniel’s time is closest to our own. Throughout history, events have come round again and again. ‘As in the days of Noah’, says one. ‘These are the days of Elijah,’ says another. Well, today we are still seeing the days Daniel predicted all those years ago.

Nebuchadnezzar was top dog at the time of Daniel. He believed in the divine right of Kings and ruled a huge chunk of the world, behaving accordingly. His ego was big enough to build a gold-plated statue of himself some 90ft high. His craving for security, significance and self-worth demanded everyone must come and bow to it. Unlike Pharaoh of old who believed he was the top god, Nebuchadnezzar believed he was appointed by agreement of all the gods to be the greatest ever. He probably thought Pharaoh a little naive as he recalled the time Moses said, ‘I will fill the land with frogs.’ Pharaoh asked his wise men to do the same. Surely it would have made more sense to ask his wise-men to take them away. Nebuchadnezzar’s wisdom was greater than that, he asked his wise men to tell him his dream. If they could tell him what he had dreamed, then he could have more confidence when it came to their interpretation. The days of Daniel and the boys of the band are back again. Media-news today does not come without comment from a ‘wise person’. Today we call them experts or consultants but the task of predicting how events will pan out is the same. Times have not moved that far from the days of sages and wise men

When early prophets predicted a future person, nation or prophet, they would not necessarily know his name. In that case, a prophecy has to describe by type. When Isaiah predicted that Elijah would come just before Messiah, for example, he was predicting that one like Elijah would come. He was not saying Elijah would be reincarnated. He was saying a prophet of similar personality, life style, and character would come. That gave his future audience a picture by type. If he had said, ‘Isaiah would come’, then we would rightly look for a well dressed upper class man who spoke with a plum in his mouth, Isaiah lived among aristocracy, and schooled at the academy of kings. He was not brought up in the desert, living on locusts and wild honey. That is not disparaging; it simply gave a picture of what to expect in the prophet that was to come.

In saying the days of Daniel are back, we can also expect the rise of a strong egoist leader who believes he controls the world by his wisdom and his authority. We will not be given his name. But there will be many ‘wise persons’ who will want to allocate one. This tendency is not a unique feature of this time and this period. Many egotistic leaders have come and gone, and many have been labelled as the Antichrist, and I expect many will be so prescribed in the future. I am saying that these times mirror in many ways the days of Daniel, and in that we can take comfort by reading how Daniel handles those days. For sure Daniel did handle them, as Nebuchadnezzar gave Daniel charge of everything except his own egotistic glory.

One thing different stands out about this age. There are any number of people who say there is no God in heaven. They might say human beings have control of their own destiny. Of course they are entitled to their conclusion, but it would make their view much more plausible if they could answer the questions Daniel raises. How could Daniel predict so accurately and in so much detail, to the tune of a period of 490 years. How could one human being know, that other human beings would rise and make decisions, exactly as predicted and written down so many years after their time? Many have tried to answer that in vain. History is witness to the fact that Daniel spoke his prophecy, wrote it down, had it translated into the Greek Septuagint writings under the orders of Alexander in the third centuryBC. We see them play out precisely in the first centuryAD. We have the date when the prophecy was told, and when it was to begin. Daniel declared it. He said a future king would start the timing by announcing the Jews must go back to their own land and rebuild the temple. That decree to go home, was given by Darius. He said, ‘Go Home, build a temple and pray regularly to your god for me’. This edict can be seen, in stone, in the British Museum today.¹

Daniel said four nations would rise, one after the other in the following 434 years, and they did! He said each of the first three would swallow the preceding one as they expanded, and they did! He said the forth would not be defeated but disintegrate, and the Roman empire was never defeated, it just fragmented and scattered over Europe. He said at the end of 490 years, the Messiah would ride into Jerusalem, be taken by the people, and be cut off from the land of the living, and it happened precisely! He said, after this the Jewish nation would once again be scattered around the world to give Gentiles a period of time to come into the kingdom, and they were! He said that their great temple would once again be demolished, and it was, in 70AD! He said, as the time of the Gentiles draws to a close, the Nation of Israel would be reborn and the people gathered again in their homeland. They were in 1926AD. The prophets said the nation would be born in a day, and it was, at the signing of the Belfort Treaty! How then can the future of the world be decided by humans when this has already been declared and recorded in writing before those humans have been born?

Daniel has no intention of giving secrets away before time, so speculating (which is no better than betting) has become rife. Many have tried to read into Daniel what is not there, but God himself has said he did not give prophecy for our speculation; he gave it so that when it comes true, we can know there is a God in heaven who is conducting this world on an unstoppable route, and toward a determined conclusion.

And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does you may believe.²

The LORD said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?³ 

One thing humans cannot do is know the future. They can speculate about the future. They can predict the future on the grounds of probability. That is because creation operates on reliable laws. They can aim at something and use their creative powers to bring it about, but humans are not in charge of creation to determine where or when its destiny should go. For the skeptics, humanist or atheists, there is indisputable evidence within these prophecies that we do not determine world events; Events are determined by a realm of unseen forces that guide us down the passage of time. Of course we are obliged to check these out for ourselves and not just dismiss statements or follow every tangent of thought that enters our head. Checking prophecy against history, archaeology and other scientific disciplines can only conclude that there is a mind, a force and a direction behind this four-dimensional realm, and that it knows where it is going, even if we cannot see it⁴.

Daniel, for example, is one of the boys in the band we call prophets. We know Daniel interpreted the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar in 604BC, because Nebuchadnezzar was a real person and we can state it was in the second year of his reign that he had the dream. Daniel predicted accurately four kingdoms would rise in the world, each consuming the kingdom before. He predicted them in the correct order, describing them by national characteristics recognisable, not only in their time but ours also. Even though some of those kingdoms did not exist at the time, they came, just as Daniel had said. Daniel set them in a framework of time that proved amazingly accurate hundreds of years later. That is a pretty big accumulative bet, so much so, that skeptics have tried hard to discredit it saying it must have been written after the time of fulfilment. But any reasonably historic search shows clearly that not only was the prophecy given in 604BC but it was written into early scriptures and translated into Greek when Alexander set seventy-scholars to seal it in the Septuagint scriptures around 286BC ⁵. One great tactic humans have when we don’t like to admit something is correct, is to build a straw-argument, speculate on it and use the straw argument to discredit the whole. After all, if everybody calls everybody-else ‘fake-news’, nobody knows what the real news is. Daniel, and the other guys in the band, prophesied facts that have since shown true and in detail. But speculating on who ‘little-Horn’ or ‘the Beast’, or ‘The great Antichrist’ might be, simply side tracks the facts of the future. People take the misinterpretation of the prophecy and discount the whole prophecy. No amount of speculation will stop the prophecy coming true but it is not believed because of the wrong interpretation. All this can give us great confidence that Daniel was right when he says:

Daniel answered the king and said, “No wise men, enchanters, magicians, or astrologers can show to the king the mystery that the king has asked,  but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries, and he has made known to King Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days ⁶.

If ‘God is not the author of confusion’, I must logically conclude that confusion for us, as for the king, came in the interpretation of wise men, enchanters, and magicians. According to Daniel chapter-two, the wise men’s method of interpretation was to hear the dream, then apply it to the latest prediction of their science. In modern-day terms, ‘wise men’ would make the latest consensus and speculation fit the news by turning it into a credible narrative. In short, ‘fake news!’ Daniel did not speculate in his interpretation; what he did not know, he did not speak. He did not know who the four kingdoms would be, because they had not yet been born. He stopped short at what God had shown him, and for that, he was acclaimed, the wisest of all wise men. Daniel had not the slightest ambition to become the ‘wise man of Camelot’.

My curiosity behind this book is simply this: to try to understand how the prophets saw time and culture, to try to understand the nature of the spiritual battle behind world conditions, and to try to understand why God declared his intentions ahead of time anyway.