With the lions

After Daniel 6:10-23 

The lions pace as he sits

on the rock in their den.

They come close and sniff;

He flinches a bit when

they roar their hunger

in his ear. But it is 

a muffled roar, as if it

seeks to escape a closed

mouth. The lions pace;

one comes close and 

pushed against him, 

seeking weakness and 

fear and finding only

surprise and wonder.

The lions rest and then

stand in their hunger

and pace. The man grows

sleepy and dozes until

nudged again. He leans

against a wall and

sleeps, believing

the promise 

of deliverance. 

 

Photograph by Bisakha Datta via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Legally trapped

After Daniel 6:10-23 

A law, an injunction,

to prevent a prayer,

any prayer, by any one,

to any god, most of all,

to the One.

 

He prayed anyway,

as if the law were null

and nothing had 

changed to make him

change his mind or

convince him to do

anything other than 

what he did, daily.

 

Seized and chained, he’s

thrown into the den of lions 

to receive the full penalty 

of an unjust law, watched

by a king trapped by his own

words, a king anguished

in almost physical pain.

 

The lions roam their den.

Morning breaks. The king

hurries to find the man

he trusted and revered, 

expecting to find bones.

Instead, he finds the man,

unharmed.

 

Photograph by Karsten Winegeart via Unsplash. Used with permission.

On the wall

After Daniel 5:22-31 

The words appear

on the wall of the room

of the feast, a celebration.

Words seen but meaning

disguised, understanding

having fled to exile.

No one understands

the meaning, until 

the man was called. He 

sees the words; he turns

to the king; he speaks.

 

Mene: Numbered, 

your kingdom’s days,

 

Mene: Numbered, 

your kingdom’s end.

 

Tekel: Weighed, 

found wanting.

 

Parsin: Divided, 

your kingdom.

 

Mene, Mene, 

Tekel, Parsin:

words confirmed 

that very night.

 

Photograph by Randy Tarampi via Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

The lesson of the grass

After Daniel 4:34-37 

After seven years

of eating grass have

passed, the man

turned beast turned

man again, foretold

by the dream, turned

king again, restored,

his pride humbled,

his pride removed,

his understanding 

restored, and he 

knows the answer 

to the question:

what have you created,

what have you wrought?

The answer is nothing;

it is all a gift, a blessing

conferred through

no effort of accomplishment

of his own. Insanity has been

translated into a severe mercy.

 

Photograph by John Thomas via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The king's insanity

After Daniel 4:28-33 

A pinnacle moment,

a survey of a kingdom

built, a great city and

a great capital, spectacular.

At the apex of the pinnacle,

a king is struck down

in his pride, struck down

and made insane, sent

to live among the beasts,

crawling on the ground,

tasting dust, eating grass,

an ox in human form.

The lesson foretold

by the dream lasts 

seven years, seven years

of uncut hair, nails

like claws, grass-stained

lips wet from groveling

in the morning dew.

 

Photograph by Ani Kolleshi via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Golden image

After Daniel 3:13-25 

Placed there, huge

and extravagant, 

the statue of gold

looms over all,

created from fear

and its twin power,

demanding worship,

obeisance, surrender,

and bending the knee

in adoration. Refusal

is death.

 

Its demand is met 

by almost all, except

the three, the young men

who refused to bend 

the knee, the three who

followed their hearts

in conflict with the law

demanding all obey.

 

The penalty is fire,

instant incineration,

designed to provoke

fear and to inspire

compliance. The three

accept their sentence.

 

The degrees of the furnace:

warm: ridicule, disregard,

exclusion;

hot: mugging, beating,

thuggery;

fiery: imprisoned, torture,

execution, incineration,

oblivion.

 

Sentenced to die 

in the fire, the three

are tossed into the furnace,

the expectation being

incineration and

destruction, forgotten

as ash. The three walk

within the furnace, 

joined by a fourth,

a fourth man who saves

them from death, 

a fourth man who looks

like a son of the gods.

 

Photograph by K8 via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The lesson of the dream

After Daniel 2 

Troubled by his dream,

a king asks the help

pf the best and brightest,

who fail.

 

Facing certain death,

one man, only one,

asks for prayer, and

prays himself.

 

A king turns to counselors

and magicians, who read

the tea leaves and extend 

a wet finer into the wind.

A wise man turns to God.

 

Photograph by Leonardo Yip via Unsplash. Used with permission.

To describe a dream

After Daniel 2 

Asked (or ordered)

to describe the dream

of another, they ask

the obvious: tell us

what it was.

 

Asked to describe

the dream of another, 

only one didn’t ask

the obvious. Instead,

he prayed, knowing

any guess would be

wrong, knowing tricks

or stratagems would be

useless.

 

Instead, he prayed.

He asked for what 

he could not do

within himself. And

he was given the vision

of the dream.

 

Photograph by Josh Hild via Unsplash. Used with permission.

The king's dream

After Daniel 2 

The king, more than 

troubled by a dream;

the king, frightened.

scared, terrified

by a dream. Wise men

summoned, not only

to interpret and explain,

but to describe the dream

(the king knew his servants,

his magicians, his sorcerers, 

his enchanters). Wise men 

fail, and wise men die.

 

One man, renamed

Belteshazzar, prayed.

The dream revealed,

the man praised

the revealer.

 

Photograph by Armand Khoury via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Exotic, toxic city

After Daniel 1 

An exotic, toxic city,

a city alien to belief

and faith, a city

treasuring gods

of stone, gods of clay,

gods of metal.

 

An exotic, toxic city,

welcoming new citizens

who bend the knee,

rewarding those who

reject their own 

for the dazzling array

of wealth and power.

 

Yet even here, here

in this citadel of destruction,

and false worship, four

decline to eat what the city

offers, the king’s food, 

to show where life and

sustenance are born.

 

And it’s not from 

this exotic, toxic, city.

 

Photograph by Jisun Han via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Culture shock

After Daniel 1

To have everything,

family, wealth, position,

youth, privilege, and

in a moment all is

lost, wiped away,

taken to exile, 

the life before erased.

 

Given a new name,

a pagan name, implying

protection by a god

of clay and stone, 

identity stripped away

to be remade with

a new reality, worldly

cosmopolitan, sophisticated,

empire-oriented, internationalist,

globalist.

 

Four resist, with respect.

Four resist, faithful not

to a nostalgic idea or

a memory of what was

lost, but to what they

knew in their heads and 

what they knew in their hearts

to be true.

 

Photograph by Jose Lopez Franco via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Against the Flow: How Daniel Speaks to Us Today

The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament is filled with prophecies: the kingdoms which followed Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar; the desecration of the temple in Jerusalem by Antiochus IV Epiphanes; the rise of Rome. The book also included prophecies of the end-times, dovetailing with the Book of Revelation in the New Testament.

In the last three chapters of Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, author John Lennox describes the fourth and final vision, a kind of survey of the times that would follow Daniel. The information is detailed and in-depth, once again emphasizing the accuracy of what Daniel saw – and what the angel told him would happen.

Prophecy is an important study, and I’ve read the prophetic Old Testament books, read the Book of Revelation, and studied the Book of Revelation. I’m no expert, however, and if someone asked me what my favorite part of the Bible was, I would have to say it’s not prophecy and the study of end-times.  (If you want to know, my favorite books are the Gospels of John and Luke and the Book of Acts.)

So while I’m interested and intrigued with what Lennox writes about in these concluding chapters, I’m not completely riveted. What interests me most is what he had to say in the earlier chapters.

Despite some 2500 years, Christians today have a number of things in common with Daniel and his times.

Here in the United States, the last 50 to 60 years have seen a phenomenal shift in culture and values. It’s not so much a shift “away from the church,” although that’s certainly part of it. Instead, what more describes what has happened is an enormously significant shift in how we understand individual freedom. That freedom has become our Holy Grail, our expectation, our entitlement, what we demand. And that freedom has come largely through the impetus of the federal government, and especially through the federal court system.

What the Supreme Court says and decides has become so important, so wrapped up in this cultural concept of individual freedom at all costs, that we don’t mind the baggage these decisions brings with them as long as “our side” is vindicated and “wins.” (This also says something about the political polarization happening in the United States as well.)

Some of that baggage includes the court having to make up stuff in order to write the decision the majority wants. Harry Blackmun searched the Constitution long and hard in writing his opinion in Roe v. Wade and finally gave up using the Constitution to justify abortion. Instead, he turned to Roman law. Justice John Roberts was only able to uphold the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act by declaring it to be exactly what the Obama Administration and the Congress that passed it said it wasn’t – a tax. In fact, it was such a badly written law (which even most of its supporters didn’t read) that then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was right – they had to pass the law to find out what was in it. And the administration has had to rewrite key provisions of the law, not once but several times, to make its programs actually function.

What has happened with these court decisions and laws is that gradually, almost without notice, our society has been dismantling anything that could potentially stand between us and the federal government. All of the mediating institutions – the states and state legislatures, cultural and social organizations, even Congress – are becoming increasing superfluous.

I’ve heard many people compare these times to the end of the Roman Empire. If you read Roman history, you’ll find these people are wrong. Our times are not like the end of the Roman Empire; they do, however, resemble the end of the Roman Republic.

And the times of Daniel. Daniel lived under a succession of autocracies, where the king was essentially considered an absolute god. Because of his skill, competence and intelligence, he rose in position under both the Babylonians and the Medo-Persians.

More importantly, he had to learn how to navigate those autocracies and still remain faithful to God. He managed, through his own skill and wits as well as more than a little supernatural help. He had to make choices and decisions, hard ones, facing problems that could have been solved so easily – just bend the knee to the king; just worship the king for 30 days – that’s all, just 30 days.

Daniel couldn’t, and didn’t. He understood the consequences. He decided that being thrown into the lion’s den was less onerous than worshipping a false god.

He was a man of conviction and courage. He accepted God at His word. And he knew that God could save him, or not, but that regardless, he would still remain faithful and accept God’s plan.

In the times that are coming, that are now just arriving, we Christians will need the conviction and courage of a Daniel. That, to me, is the significant lesson of the Book of Daniel.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing Against the Flow. This concludes the discussion. But the lessons learned go on.

And we do have another example, one closer to our times, that's worth considering. In February of 1974, a man was arrested by his country's secret police and then expelled from the country. This is what he was writing the day he was arrested: Live Not by Lies. 

He was blessed in that he lived long enough to see the downfall of the regime that arrested him. That, however, is not always the promise, as Daniel well knew.

Photograph by Xoan Seoane via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Against the Flow: Ideas Matter

My wife and I were both trained in journalism. In fact, that’s how we met – in the newsroom of the student newspaper at LSU. We would both tell you that we had good teachers and not-so-good teachers.

A required course for a journalism degree was “History of Journalism.” And one of the things I remember most from that course was the man who shaped 20^th century journalism, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974).

If you’re not familiar with Lippmann, you should know that he was the man who coined the term “Cold War,” gave us the concept of “stereotype” that we understand today, and articulated the modernist view of what journalism was about – the idea of objective, fact-based reporting.

Walter Lippman

While most journalists today would say their reporting is fact-based, fewer would claim “objectivity” as a guiding principle. The influence of post-modernist thinking laid siege to and largely obliterated the idea of objectivity.

This is why you get news stories today that read more like editorials and opinion columns than news. With the possible exceptions of business and sports news, my hometown newspaper, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is a good example. And even the sports and business stories sometimes are more opinion-based.

Ideas matter. And ideas can linger, often for a very long time.

In Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, John Lennox describes in great detail the vision the prophet Daniel received as described in chapter nine of the Old Testament book. It was a vision about the future of Jerusalem, so close to Daniel’s heart, and it was a vision about the future.

It’s not a simple vision to explain. Daniel reads in the Book of Jeremiah that the desolation of Jerusalem will last 70 years. The angel Gabriel tells Daniel that the “70 years” is actually 70 sevens – 70 weeks of years, or 490 years. At the end of 62 sevens, or 434 years, an anointed one will be put to death. And in the 70^th and final week, a ruler will implement an “abomination of desolation” that will lead to the end-time.

The end of the “62 sevens” happens to coincide with the time of Christ. After that, for those last seven “weeks,” interpretation is not clear-cut. The story picks up again in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, and that last week becomes the seven years of tribulation under the Antichrist.

There is this thing called history that has played out between the time of Daniel and our own time. Lennox does a good job of arguing the case for the interpretation of Daniel’s vision that coincides with the one (largely the evangelical understanding) that I’ve been taught and accept. But there are others. And we laymen along with our theologians can get easily caught up in discussing (and arguing) the details as well as the overarching theme.

Lennox’s point about all this, however, isn’t to prove himself or his position right. But to point out that many ideas have been around for a long time – thousands of years – and still have consequences today.

“Those future events,” he writes, “are but the harvest of seeds sown by the ideas, attitudes, movements of thought and ideologies that have permeated society throughout history, even from ancient times. In our own time secularist naturalism in particular, with its marginalization of God and devaluation of human life and dignity, is no innocent thing. We need to recognize it for what it is, and spell out its implications for everyone who is prepared to listen.”

Ideas matter; they have consequences, good and bad. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels articulated a view of history, economics and philosophy that eventually gave birth to Soviet communism. Nietzsche influenced Adolf Hitler’s thinking. Lippmann shaped 20^th century American journalism. John Dewey’s thinking shaped what we know today as public education.

And ideas can last for a very long time.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing Against the Flow, in which Lennox argues (rather successfully, I think), that there is much we can learn from the Book of Daniel and apply to many issues we face today. This post is taken from chapters 18-20: “Jerusalem and the Future,” “The Seventy Weeks,” and “The Seventieth Week.”

Top photograph by Ave Lainesaar via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Against the Flow: A Dark Vision of Relativism

The prophet Daniel had two visions that terrified him. One was of four beasts (Daniel 7). The other was of a ram and a goat (Daniel 8). Both were connected to the idea of a ruler who would terrorize the faithful (the faithful Jews, in this case).

Theologians and Biblical historians see the point of these visions in the person of Antiochus Epiphanes, the descendant of one of Alexander the Great’s generals who ruled what today is Israel, Syria, and part of Iraq, and who almost conquered Egypt. Antiochus believed he was a god, or perhaps “the” god, and everything was to reflect his deity: coins, building inscriptions, buildings, culture, religion – including the Jewish temple at Jerusalem. He was determined to Hellenize his empire, including Israel.

When the Jews resisted, he struck back, and hard. The temple was turned into a temple of Zeus. Faithful Jews were imprisoned and killed. Circumcised babies were killed, hung around their mothers’ necks, and thrown from the walls of Jerusalem.

Antiochus overreached (a gross understatement). He inspired the successful Maccabean revolt. He lost Palestine. His legacy is cited in the New Testament as “the abomination of desolation.” What is also clear is that the story of Antiochus Epiphanes is not over; both the account in Daniel and references in the New Testament suggest more is to come, at some point in the future.

In Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism, John Lennox discusses what happened, and what could happen, in great and fascinating detail. As he’s been doing previously in the book, Lennox draws the parallel with the multi-god worship practices on Daniel’s time with the relativism that dominates so much thinking today. And this he explains why this is important.

“Relativism weakens intellectual and moral resistance to totalitarianism,” he says, “and opens us up to manipulation and deceit; so that in the end the ‘truth’ we believe is dictated by those who hold the power.”

Earlier this month, a very small example of what can happen was noted.

Edward Schlosser is the pseudonym of a college professor. He writes for Vox, the online news and commentary site. In early June, he published an article that has gained a fair amount of notice: “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me.” What he described is the growing fear of professors, even and perhaps especially liberal ones, of offending their students in the normal course of teaching.

As in, “Your reading of that quotation by Mark Twain offends me.” Or, “You are not taking my opposing view seriously enough.” Professors have been reported and disciplined for less. Yes, in America. I wish I was making this up.

As Rod Dreher at American Conservative says, “Welcome to the Maoist Cultural Revolution.”

I have to admit it’s difficult for me to feel sympathy for a self-acknowledged liberal college professor. This is what post-modern thinking comes to – so far – and what “progressive” professors may well have brought on themselves.

It’s the ultimate challenge of relativism, boomeranged back on the very people whose thinking and beliefs enshrined relativism as the new religion. If everything is relative, your truth is no better than my truth, your “facts” no better than mine, and if you offend me or cause me anguish, I will report you, because I have the power to do so.

The implications reach far beyond the college classroom. Imagine a U.S. Internal Revenue Service punishing groups because they adhere to the “wrong” political philosophy. If they have that power, they can use it.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been discussing Against the Flow and how the book of Daniel in the Old Testament has meaning application for us today. This post is based on Chapter 16, “The Four Beasts and the Son of Man,” and Chapter 17, “The Vision of the Ram and the Goat.”

Painting: The Triumph of Judas Maccabeus by Rubens, circa 1630.