Notes and Questions for April 19, 2009

Notes and Questions for April 19, 2009

This week David will be teaching on chapter 4. I have included the below notes and questions for your use this week.

Please read Daniel 4:28-37 in its entirety
1. What happened to Neb during this passage?
2. Based on what we have discussed thus far in Daniel WHY do you think this has happened?

Please re-read Daniel 28-30
3. What is happening in these verses? (refer to last week’s lesson if necessary on prior verses)
4. What is the significance of verse 28?
5. What is the timeline between verse 27 and verse 29?
6. What did Neb exclaim in verse 30? Why is it important?
7. What is the last relationship or accomplishment you took pride in that you built?
8. What is the last thing, possession, or act that you gave all credit for it to God? Discuss with your spouse.

The sin at the root of Neb’s tyranny was not touched by his attempts to amend his ways. Though eager to avoid judgement, he still retained his pride, taking to himself all the credit for the remarkable achievements he really owed to God’s grace (v 30). Perhaps he refrained from boasting during his preprieve (v. 29), but he never realized his indebtedness to God for all his blessings and his dependence on Him for all his power. He retained a profound admiration for what he had done in beautifying his capital. In fact, his works there were most impressive. The celebrated Ishtart Gate (excavated by Robbert Koldewey and the Deautsche Orientgestellschaft c. 1900) seems to have been erected by him, along with the enameled-brick facing, displaying a procession of dragons and bulls. The East India House Inscription, now in London, refers to about twenty temples he rebuilt or refurbished in Babylon and Borisippa, and also to a vast system of fortifications and large shipping docks.
On one of his inscriptions, Neb boasted, “The fortifications of Esagila [the temple of Marduk] and Babylon I strengthened, and established the name of my reign forever:. To this inscription he appended a prayer to Marduk: “O Marduk, lord of the gods, my divine creator, may my deeds find favor before thee…Thou are indeed my deliverer and my help, O Marduk; by thy faithful word which does not change, may my weapons advance, be sharp and be stronger than the weapons of the foe!” There are many more items including a hymn to Marduk and other inscriptions. Nevertheless this official expression of deference to the patron of deity of Babylon had in it a large measure of the pride of one who by his own achievements deserved the special favor of Heaven. Moreover it was devoid of any appreciation of Yahweh, the one true God, who had so marvelously revealed Himself to Neb in previous chapters.

Read Verses 31-32

9. What has God been saying to you lately?
10. What is the sin or sins He has been impressing in your life? Take a moment to pray to God and ask Him, if He hasn’t already, to reveal to you what you must give up to follow Him?
11. What is it that you are holding on to that is YOURS?

After boasting that he has built Babylon the Great as a residence for himself by his own power (v 30), Neb heard an unexpected word from Yahweh. Because of his gratitude he was going to experience the weight of God’s wrath and the fulfillment of the punishment threatened in his fateful dream as in verses 31 and 32. Then followed the prediction that this degredation would last seven years (iddanin), at the end of which he would recognize the truth that god alone is Sovereign over heaven and earth and bestows power on whomever he chooses. What he should have learned from his vision of the great image and from the deliverance of the three Hebrews from the firery furnance would be indelibly impressed on him.

Read verse 33

12. What was your life like before you accepted Christ as your savior? Really…

This verse describes the wretchedness of Neb’s condition – abhorred and despised even by his lowliest subjects, reduced to the state of a grazing beast in a field. Physically he became like the brute beast he imagined himself to be, as his skin toughened into hide through constant exposure to outdoor weather at all seasons. (The temperature in modern Iraq ranges from a high of 110 or 120 degrees in summer- usually with high humidity- to a low of well below freezing in winter.) Most particularly the hair of his head and his body, becoming matted and coarse, looked like eagle feathers; his fingernails and toenails, never cut, became like claws. So the boasting king, a victim of what is known as baonthropy, sank to a subhuman level.

Read verses 34-35

13. When is the last time you felt utterly helpless before God?
14. What did you do about it (what was your response)?
15. What did Neb do in response to God? Be specific…
16. When is the last time you did these things?

Finally, at the end of the seven years of dementia, the Lord fulfilled His promise to restore the reason of the humiliated king. By a miracle of divine grace, his brain was suddenly healed and his reason returned. He remembered what had happened to him and remembered God’s warning through Daniel’s interpretation and prediction. Honestly, and without resentment toward God, Neb faced the meaning of his chastisement and realized that everything Daniel had told him about the Lord was true. Overwhelmed by this demonstration of Yahweh’s limitless power, Neb prostrated himself before the Ruler of the earth and Heaven (again). For at last he knew his powerlessness before the Almighty and his dependence on him for everything.
Neb’s first response to God for restoring his sanity was to praise, honor, and glorify Him as the eternal, omnipotent Sovereign over the whole universe. He was now ready to give God all the glory for everything he has achieved as king of the Chaldeans and the rebuilder of Babylon.
Neb next exalted God. First of all, he acknowledged God’s unending existence and everlasting power as the ruler of the universe in contrast to man in his creaturely frailty. He also honored God as the ruler whose kingdom, unlike all the human empires, would never end. As the dream image in chapter 2 had taught him, even the mightiest and strongest realms would have their day and then perish.
Third, Neb acknowledged that despite all his boasted progress, man is as nothing before God (v 35). Apart from god, humanity is devoid of value or meaning and “regarded as nothing” (kelahasibin). At last Neb had learned the utter dependence of the creature on the creator.
Fourth, Neb saw that in His absolute Soverignty God is beyond the control of any of His creature and accountable to none of them for anything He chooses to do. The pot cannot ask the Potter, “what have you done” (ref Rom 9:20). The wisdom and holiness of the Almighty so far surpass the comprehension of mankind as to render presumptuous any criticism of God’s providences in managing His world.

Read verses 36-37

17. What has God done for you? Look around and make a list of what has been done for you. (Don’t forget items like relationships, air, your body, shelter, or your church).
18. How do you give credit to God? Who would know that you give credit to God? Do your kids know? Does your spouse, family, friends? WHEN AND HOW do you explicitly give credit to God?

Now that he had, in at least some basic form, begun the fear the Lord, Neb had found the clue to wisdom – an inestimable benefit of his seven-year chastisement. It qualified him for renewed leadership. The patience of his loyal subjects in care for their demented and tortured monarch was at last rewarded. No other leader had qualified to succeed him during the long interval. None could command the loyalty of the troops he had so often led to victory.
The tremendously important principle had to be established in the minds of the captive Jews, serving out their years of bondage in Babylonia. They might have well wondered whether the God of Abraham, Moses, and Elijah was truly alive and able to stand before the triumphant Gentile nations that had reduced His hold city, Jerusalem, to rubble and His holy temple to ashes. It would have been easy for them to conclude, as all the pagan observers assumed, that the Hebrew nation had been so completely crushed and uprooted from their native land because their God was too weak to defend them from the might of the gods of Babylon: Marduk, Nebo, and Bel. True, the warnings in Lev 26 and Deut 28 back in Moses’ day had been very clear that Yahweh would cast his people out of the Land of Promise should they ever prove unfaithful. But now they needed some definite demonstration that their Lord was the true and living God and that all the gods of the pagans were only idols. They needed a series of striking miracles to sustain their flagging faith and renew their waning courage a they waited for their deliverance from exile. The captive Jews needed to know that even the apparently limitless power of Neb was under the control of the Lord God Almighty, who still cared for them and had a great future for them in their land. Therefore, each episode recorded in the first six chapters concludes with a triumphant demonstration of God’s soverieignty and faithfulness and His ability to crush the pride of unconverted mankind.

19. When do you feel like God is not in control?