Pastor David gives part 2 in the series of messages entitled, “Lessons from the Life of Daniel.” 

<p>Pastor David gives part 2 in the series of messages entitled, “Lessons from the Life of Daniel.” </p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Hillside O’Malley SDA Church

Lessons from the Life of Daniel

David Shin

Lessons from the Life of Daniel - Part 1

Father in heaven, we thank you for Jesus and this opportunity that we have to, from the craziness and the stresses of life, to pause on this Sabbath day and to bask in your glory, to celebrate your goodness and your love, and to reflect on your word.

And we pray that the Holy Spirit would guide our thoughts this morning, speak to our hearts, and you know the message that you can apply to each 1 of us individually this morning.

For we ask these things in the precious name of Jesus.

And Jesus, in a previous presentation I gave a couple weeks ago, it was on Daniel and the lions, Dan, you remember that presentation?

We had the endorsement by Jesus in Matthew chapter 24.

I love books and when someone gives me a book endorsement, I'm like, oh wow, another book I can read and ask my wife if I can purchase.

And here we have a book endorsement from Jesus Christ.

And this is a endorsement from not just anyone, but from the Son of God himself.

And it's from that great end time chapter in Matthew chapter 24 verse 15 therefore when you see the abomination of Desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet standing in the holy place Whoever reads let him understand Jesus is giving a book endorsement and to my knowledge.

This is the only book endorsement that Jesus ever gave.

This is not saying that we should not read the other books in the Old Testament, but here Jesus is saying, living the end of time, you need to read, study, and understand the book of Daniel.

Leslie Harding Gives a few reflections on what Jesus is giving here in Matthew chapter 24 and 5 different ideas embedded by the endorsement given by Jesus Christ, ideas embedded within the endorsement by Jesus.

Number 1, Jesus took for granted that Daniel was a prophet who had written an inspired book.

Notice that Jesus says, Daniel the prophet.

There's scholars today that say that the book of Daniel is not really written by Daniel.

It was written hundreds of years after Babylon.

But Jesus says the book of Daniel can be trustworthy.

It's inspired by God, and Daniel is a messenger of the Lord.

Number 2, the book of Daniel should be studied.

Jesus said that the book of Daniel should be read, should be studied.

Number 3, Jesus promised that the book of Daniel would be understood.

This is not a book that's going to be some sort of mysterious and unintelligible beast and symbols.

This is a book that should be and can be understood by the Holy Spirit.

And number 4, the book Daniel's predictions reveal end-time world conditions that will be fulfilled.

In other words, the book of Daniel gives predictions that Jesus says, these things will come to pass.

Number 5, the book of Daniel's messages are, what does it say?

They're not pie in the sky, by and by propositions and ideas that have no bearing on practical daily life.

He says it is practical and those who grasp them must do their part in escaping the dangers which will face them." So, Jesus says, study the book of Daniel.

So, based on this divine endorsement given by Jesus Christ himself, we're going to take him up on that, amen?

And say, we're going to study the book of Daniel.

Jesus said, look, study the book of Daniel, especially if you're living at the very final moments of his history.

This book should be read, can be understood, and it's a book that is trustworthy and inspired by God.

When the books of Daniel and Revelation are better understood, believers will have an entirely different religious experience.

They will be given such glimpses of the open gates of heaven that heart and mind will be impressed with the character that all must develop in order to realize the blessedness which is to be the reward of the pure in heart.

Very quickly, some background on the book of Daniel.

Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.

He knows my intentions, even though I'm messing up all externally.

The last day church, Laodicea, means a people judged.

So scholars believe that Daniel in his life is a type, a demonstration of God's last day people living right before the second coming of Jesus.

Daniel and the lion's den, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, these are real stories that will be played out thematically in the end of time before Jesus comes.

Jacques Ducan, who's professor of Old Testament at Andrew Theological Seminary, He says that the Book of Daniel is a literary genius depiction of poetic beauty.

You can see that it's what we call a chiastic structure.

It's the introduction to the book of Daniel because it begins with the Babylonian captivity and ends with Cyrus and the end of the captivity.

It's an introduction to the whole book of Daniel.

And then you see the lines that go there.

Chapter 3, Daniel, his 3 friends on the plain of Dura, the fiery furnace.

They are parallel because the same issue, worship, the same penalty for not worshiping, death.

So Those are parallel, chapter 3 and chapter 6.

Belshazzar and Nebuchadnezzar, those 2 are examples of characteristics that we are to avoid as the final events are taking place.

And then you can see the other ones there.

And then the second example is another way of looking at the chiastic structure.

Daniel chapter 1 is a summary of the entire book of Daniel.

It begins with the captivity and finishes with the conquering of Babylon by Cyrus the Mede, thus ending the captivity.

The rest of the book of Daniel does not take place if Daniel chapter 1 does not take place.

Daniel chapter 1 verse 1, let's go there in our Bibles, and it sets the stage for what is taking place here.

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it.

Verse 2, And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the articles of the house of God, which he carried into the land of Shinar, to the house of his God.

And he brought the articles into the treasure house of his God.

In your study guide, you'll see a few references there on the Babylonian captivity.

I'm not going to have you turn there, but you can read it on a Sabbath afternoon that you have some time.

The Babylonian captivity was actually predicted first during the time of Hezekiah.

Hezekiah was told by the prophet Isaiah that he would die, and Hezekiah said, Lord, I want to live longer.

So Isaiah, right after giving the message, comes back into the courtroom and says, the Lord has just shown me that you will live longer, 15 more years.

You know, sometimes when it's time to go, it's time to go.

Those next 15 years were not spent in the best way.

And The people of God suffered because of Hezekiah's mistakes and Hezekiah said I want a sign I want proof that I'm gonna live longer.

So God gave him proof God moved the Sun backwards Remember that story?

There's a few scientists and astronomers that are looking up at heaven during that time and to their amazement they witness the sun going backwards.

And they inquire around and ask how could this be and they find out that Hezekiah's God made the sun go backwards.

So they get on their camels and go off to Jerusalem to find out more about Hezekiah's God.

He tells them about his 401k and his stock portfolio and his gold room and his diamonds and his jewels and that's all he did and sends the Babylonians back on their way and Isaiah comes back into the court of the king and says, Because you have done this, your descendants will be taken off to Babylon.

Lessons from the Life of Daniel - Part 2

Father in heaven, we thank You for this opportunity that we have to come apart from the cares of this life and to open Your Word.

We ask for the Holy Spirit to guide our thoughts this morning.

Remove every distraction as we focus on You, as revealed through Your Word.

Speak to us, we pray, for we ask these things in the precious name of Jesus.

Well, we're continuing in our eight-part series of messages that we've entitled, Lessons from the Life of Daniel, and we referred to this statement from Jesus in Matthew 24 verse 15 when he says, Therefore, when you see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place, whoever reads, let him understand.

Jesus references the book of Daniel, and we said in our presentation last Sabbath that there are 4 ideas that are embedded within Jesus' endorsement of the book of Daniel.

In other words, the book of Daniel is trustworthy, it is reliable, because Jesus said, Daniel the prophet.

Some people wonder, why do we study the book of Daniel?

Well, because Jesus said we need to look at it, we need to study it, especially if we're living in the end of time.

He's reliable, He's accurate, and He's a book that we should be looking at.

The book of Daniel is not a book that we should avoid, like the plague.

It also implies that the book of Daniel can be understood.

Some people are like, oh, all these beasts and symbols, I just can't study that.

But Jesus says, look, we should look at this book, especially as we approach the final moments of earth's history.

And number 3, Jesus promised that the book of Daniel would be understood.

This is not a book that's shrouded in mystery, that is unintelligible, that no 1 can understand.

And number 4, I guess there's 5, I said there were 4, but the book of Daniel's predictions reveal end-time world conditions that would be fulfilled.

We can know that they will be fulfilled because Jesus said so.

And number 5, the book of Daniel's messages are practical, and those who grasp them must do their part in escaping the dangers which will face them." In other words, the book of Daniel is not a pie in the sky, by and by.

It's not some concept that's not relevant to day-to-day living.

But what Jesus points out is that the Book of Daniel is relevant to our day-to-day experience.

We stated that the Book of Daniel is a beautiful work of poetry, and it's structured, according to Dr.

There's only 12 chapters in the book of Daniel.

The first chapter is a summary of the entire book.

And then chapter 2, you can see according to the diagram I have on the screen, chapter 2 parallels chapter 7.

Chapter 3, the fiery furnace parallels chapter 6, Daniel in the lion's den, same issue of worship, and the death penalty, chapter 4, mirrors chapter 5, and then so on and so on.

There's 2 ways of looking at the chiastic structure, very beautiful structure that we see in the book of Daniel.

Few texts that we can look at, and there is a study guide in your bulletin that you can reference as we go through our presentation.

Not everything is going to be there, and there are some spaces that you can write notes, because I did not want to give you a book in your bulletin of every quotation that I use today, but the the gist of it is here and this was a reference that I wanted to include in your study guide and it's Isaiah chapter 46 verse 9 and 10.

Isaiah chapter 46 verse 9 and 10, remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other.

I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done." God says, I am unique.

And God's claim to uniqueness is his ability to predict the future.

God's ability to foreknow the future and foretell the future sets him apart from every other claim of every other deity.

Now this foreknowledge does not mean that God impinges on human free will, but God has the ability to know the decisions that we're going to make in the future and world events.

This is Jesus indicating the purpose of His predictive ability in John 14, verse 29, "'And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place, you may do what?

So Jesus indicates that the purpose of his predictive ability is so that when it does take place, we can say, ah, God's Word is reliable, it's trustworthy, and it builds our faith.

We'll be talking more about that in our presentation today but 1 of the reasons why I believe that the Bible is trustworthy and reliable is specifically because of Prophecy.

So here are the 4 essentials of Bible prophecy.

So, number 1, before we get to that part, to set the God of the Bible apart from the other gods as the true God.

As we illustrated in Isaiah 46, verse 9 and 10, he says, I have the ability to predict the future, and because of this ability, I am unique.

So that's proposition number 1 that we can derive from the scriptures that we just read, and number 2, to accurately reveal the future and thus create faith in the heart of the hearer.

So when we look at Bible prophecy, it increases our faith, because we know that the predictions of the past have been fulfilled.

We can also know that the predictions of the future will be fulfilled as well.

And to me, this establishes the veracity and the reliability of Scripture.

Some people are like, how can you trust the Bible?

Specifically, and 1 of them is the prophecy that we're going to be studying today.

Number 3, to reveal to the hearer the thoughts and the priorities of his heart.

To reveal to the hearer the thoughts and the priorities of his heart.

In other words, prophecy not only reveals the heart of God, how we react to prophecy reveals our own heart, our own motivations, and our own aspirations.

Number 4, to introduce the hearer to Jesus and his heart's need of Him.

The purpose of prophecy is to lead us to Jesus.

Every prophecy's intention is to introduce us to Jesus Christ, and we'll find that in our story today.

I invite you to turn with me in your Bibles to Daniel chapter 2, the focus of our study today, and it was read during our Scripture reading, the book of Daniel chapter 2, as we come to the focus of today's study.

Daniel 2 verse 1, now in the second year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams.

Now, the Bible seems to indicate that this was not 1 dream, but multiple dreams, and I believe it was multiple dreams of the same dream.

So he's having this dream evidently, repeatedly, and then he forgets what he has dreamed as we illustrated in our children's story today.

And this happens to us all the time, but this was not because he had too much pizza, pickles, and peanut butter the night before.

He gets up the next morning the Bible says, and his spirit was so troubled that his sleep left him.

Then the king gave the command to call the magicians, the astrologers, the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans to tell the king his dream.

So they came and stood before the king, and the king said to him, I have had a dream, and my spirit is anxious to know the dream." So Nebuchadnezzar has this dream, he forgets the dream, and then he calls in his wise men and the Bible lists these wise men as magicians Astrologers and sorcerers and this is from dr.

Leslie Harding He points out the nature of the individuals that he called into his court the magicians the translation for this word comes from the word stylus.

They were skilled in mystical Babylonian literature and the occult.

The astrologers were stargazers that looked into the heavens for zodiac signs.

We have zodiac astrologers today, so this is nothing new.

These persons were in contact with the spirits of the dead as well as other spirits known as mediums.

And last but not least, we had the Chaldeans, the most influential scholars in the sciences, mathematics, history, and medicine.

So you had the intellectual elites, the guys with the PhDs, and then you had all of the mystics from all of their very Various forms and flavors and they come in before the king according to daniel chapter 2 And the king says tell me what I dreamed in my bed last night And they say Tell us the dream And we'll give you the interpretation And this goes round and round 3 times, and finally the king, he's like, I'm no dummy, I know what you're gonna do.

Tell me the dream, and I know you can tell the interpretation and finally the king says, look, I've had enough of you.

Now, Daniel was of junior status, so he was not allowed into this first meeting.

He goes into the king, and he says, king, give me some time.

Lessons from the Life of Daniel - Part 3

Let us bow our heads as we seek the Lord this morning.

Father in heaven, just as I am, all to Jesus we surrender, All to Him we freely give.

Lord, we ask that as we pause for a few moments to reflect on the life of Daniel's 3 friends, that You would bless us, speak to us, we pray.

Well, today, we are continuing in our series of messages that we've entitled, Lessons from the Life of Daniel.

And I invite you to take out your study guide, which is in your bulletin.

And so far in our lesson, or in our series, we've taken account of these 2 basic sections in the book of Daniel.

The first section that we talked about is that the stories in Daniel are individuals as they came face to face with life and death decisions.

These stories give us examples for living at the end of time.

Daniel and his 3 friends are types of the last generation living right before the second coming of Jesus.

They are a type of God's people, and the characteristics that Daniel had, we can possess by the grace of God.

Daniel's 3 friends in today's story is not an anomaly.

They are a type of what God will do for anyone who stands for him.

And the second section in the book of Daniel are the prophecies, the prophecies accurately predicting the rise and fall of empires from Daniel's time to the end of time.

And we talked briefly last Sabbath about 1 of those prophecies in Daniel chapter 2, the image of gold, silver, bronze, iron, feet partly of iron, partly of clay, representing the different kingdoms, and then the second coming of Jesus will be the culmination that is a kingdom that will never be replaced and will last forever and ever.

Now this is an important image to take into consideration, especially in today's story.

So I invite you to open your Bibles to Daniel 3, verse 1, and we'll pick up in our Scripture reading for today that Tamara read.

Remember in Daniel 2, there was an image, a multi-type of image of different types of metals.

But in Daniel 3, we see that Nebuchadnezzar goes out of his way to make a statement.

Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold whose height was 60 cubits and it's width 6 cubits.

He set it up on the plain of Dura in the province of Babylon.

Nebuchadnezzar wants to indicate that this head of gold is not just a head of gold, it is a statue of gold.

So this image that we've just seen prior here of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, Nebuchadnezzar gets a bright idea and says, I'm gonna make it a statue entirely of gold, indicating that his kingdom would last forever.

What Nebuchadnezzar did was he took a very plain teaching of Scripture, a very plain prophecy, and he reinterpreted the prophecy.

There are Christians today that are taking prophecy and reinterpreting it as well, and you can see them in your study guide.

There are 3 views of prophecy held by Christians today, and just like Nebuchadnezzar, they are taking the plainest prophecies of Scripture and using a different lens to interpret them.

And the first 1, you'll see that in your study guide, is preterism.

Preterism is that prophecy is for the what is for the past this false view denies the supernatural nature of prophecy to predict the future, it is presented mostly by agnostics and atheists.

Skeptics believe that the book of Daniel was written hundreds of years later, during the time of the divided kingdom.

They say that there's no way that Daniel 2 was written beforehand, so the skeptics come up with a way of saying that Daniel is not really an inspired book, it's not prophecy, it's actually just history.

But remember in our earlier presentations, we said that Jesus said that Daniel was a prophet.

The Preterist view says that prophecy is not predictive.

The other view is futurism, and this is held by many of our evangelical friends today, and futurism says that prophecy is only for the distant future.

This is a false view of prophecy as well.

It portrays a God who is disinterested with the pain and suffering of his people in history.

Many Protestants believe that the Antichrist is not living right now.

The Antichrist is sometime in the future.

So prophecy doesn't have a practical relevance to day-to-day living because it's just sometime in the nebulous future after the secret rapture, during the time of tribulation, and many Christians are saying, look, we don't have to worry about prophecy because as soon as the secret rapture happens, I'll be gone, or if I don't make it in the secret rapture, I'll get a second chance.

Now, what is the right way of interpreting prophecy?

And historicism is that prophecy outlines the span of world history as the history relates to God's people.

All the way down to the end of time, this view is both moral and true.

God is portrayed as a being who is interested in and who comforts and protects his people at all times.

This is best illustrated by Daniel 2, because it goes from Babylon all the way to the second coming.

It goes from the past to the present and extends on down to the future.

Which means that the prophecy of the past gives us faith that the prophecies of the future will be fulfilled and because right now we're living during the time of the divided kingdom, in the toenails, I believe, of this image, it has relevance for us in our day-to-day living.

This is the historical view, or historicism, as we have seen.

Now, you'll notice from our scripture reading today that the image had a particular number that was used in its dimensions.

The dimensions of the image, according to Daniel chapter 3, the gold statue is 60 cubits by 6 cubits.

6 is the base number, and 6 is the number of man.

7 is known as the number of perfection or completeness, the seventh day Sabbath.

But we have the number 6 and it's interesting because the number 6 is the base number of the Babylonian number system.

You find it in pagan religions all over the world.

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Series

Lessons from the Life of Daniel

Lessons from the Life of Daniel - Part 2

Transcript

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