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Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast. Powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the entire Bible in a year. You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan and join the journey. Let's be honest, a lot of us are still treating digital ministry like it's a backup plan from 2020. But discipleship isn't just happening on Sundays anymore. People need gospel centered connection every day of the week. And if you're stuck juggling five different platforms, one for giving, another for sermons, something else for events, it's no wonder engagement feels off. That's not ministry. That's a mess. Subsplash changes that one platform. Everything you need. Media, giving, events, messaging, your app, your website built specifically for churches. No hacks, no workarounds, just clarity and simplicity. Because every day you wait, families scroll past your sermons, new guests click away from clunky sites, and real people miss real moments with Jesus. Don't waste another summer stuck in digital survival mode. Use it to get ahead, simplify, upgrade, get back to what matters. Head to subsplash.combible-dept and schedule a free no pressure demo. And let this be the summer your church gets focused and fully equipped family. Welcome to day 239. I'm super excited because we get to jump into a brand new book of the Bible today. We get to jump into the book of Daniel. What a good book. We're gonna be in the book of Daniel for about four days, I believe. And the book of Daniel is easy to read through. It's a good mix of what we would call narrative or story, but also apocalyptic prophecy. So we got a lot to unpack for the whole book today though, we've got Daniel, Daniel chapters one, two and three. If you haven't done the reading, go do the reading. It's. It's easy reading today. All right. It's not difficult reading. We're. This is nothing like Leviticus or, or some of the really, really hard portions of like Jeremiah. So we got Daniel chapter 1, 2 and 3. If you already have done the reading, you going to have so much context for everything that I'm going to say and I'm really, really excited to dive in always. Like always, I'm going to give you context clues so that you can get oriented. I'll try to give you as many nerdy nuggets as I can. We don't want the episode to get too long. But I'll try to give you as many nerdy nuggets as possible, and I'll always leave off with the timeless truth. And I'm actually really, really excited for our timeless truth today because the message of Daniel is. And the writing of Daniel, the book of Daniel, the message of Daniel is insanely relevant for us today. So let's dive in. Let's dive into some context clues. Daniel 1:1 is gonna start out with these words in the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, okay? If you've been on this journey with us for a long time, you probably remember Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it, okay? So. So we've got a siege, okay? And I'm gonna tell you exactly what date this siege is happening. This is 605 BC. This is one of the really, really, really important dates that we need to know in order to stay oriented in what's going on in the Bible. 605 BC and the Lord delivered Jehoiakim, King of Judah, into his hand. Who's to him? Nebuchadnezzar, along with some of the articles of the temple of God. These he carried off to the temple of his God in Babylon and put them in the treasure house of his God. Okay? So the thing that preempts all the events of the Book of Daniel is the fact that Nebuchadnezzar, he's come to Jerusalem, he's laid siege to it, and he is exerting power and dominion and force over the king of Judah and the subjects of Judah. Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring into the king's service some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility, okay? Young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king's palace. Okay? So now these young men, these royal noblemen, are now going to get carted off into captivity. If you take Daniel chapter one and just go look at 2 Kings, chapter 24, you're gonna realize that 2 Kings, chapter 24 is telling the exact same story. Now, here we go. I'm gonna give you context and some nerdy nuggets all mixed together. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel are all alive at the exact same time. Actually, there's probably a window of time where Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel are all living in Jerusalem together. But as the story's gonna tell us, Daniel is gonna get carted off to Babylon as an exile, and Ezekiel is gonna get carted off into Babylonian exile as well. Okay, so because Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, because their lives all overlap, what's happening, if you're following along this journey in chronological order, is that we keep moving forward in history, and then we have to go back to get the next person's perspective on these same events, and then we get that person's perspective, and then we move forward in the story, and then we gotta go back again. Okay, so I'm sorry, we're going back in time to 605bc because although we have heard about the events of what's gonna happen, we're just hearing them now from Daniel's perspective as opposed to Ezekiel's perspective or Jeremiah's perspective. Okay, so Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, all living at the same time, obviously, all contributing to the canon of scripture with their writings, and they're all going to talk about these exact same events. And we're even going to look at the book of Isaiah, because Isaiah is going to predict what's going to happen to Daniel and his three friends, who we unfortunately know by their slave names instead of by their Hebrew names. But we'll get into that in just a minute. All right, if you open up two kings, chapter 24 says, during Jeb's reign, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, invaded the land. Jehoiakim became his vassal for three years. So, and what did it say in Daniel chapter one, verse one, in the third year of the reign of Jeim. Okay, so we've got Jehoiakim in 2nd Kings 24, Jehoiakim here in Daniel chapter 1. What is Nebuchadnezzar gonna do? He's gonna take some folks captive, and then actually we get a changing of the guard. We get a new king. Verse 8. Jehoiachin is going to begin to reign. And in the eighth year of the reign of the king of Babylon, he took Jehoiachin prisoner. So this is now the son of Jehoiakim. And what's gonna happen? As the Lord had declared, Nebuchadnezzar removed the treasures from from the temple of the Lord, from the royal palace, and cut up the gold article that Solomon, king of Israel had made for the temple of the Lord. He carried all Jerusalem into exile, all the officers and fighting men, skilled workers and artisans, total of 10,000. Only the poorest people of the land were left. Okay, so who's going to get deported? Verse 15. Nebuchadnezzar took Jehoiachin captives To Babylon. He also took from Jerusalem to Babylon the king's mother, his wives, his officials, and the prominent people of the land. Okay, so 605 BC, Daniel and his three friends, who we unfortunately know by their slave names, are all going to get carted off to Babylon. Now, here's what's fascinating, is that Isaiah, here's kind of our first nerdy nugget of the day, is that Daniel and I'm actually going to say. Say their correct names, okay? Because I'm. This is kind of. I'm. I'm. I've got an ax to grind with this one. Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. I'm actually retraining myself to call them by the Hebrew names. Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Okay? You probably know Hananiah as Shadrach. You probably know Mishael as Meshach, and you probably know Azariah as Abednego. But these are the names given to them to humiliate them. These are slave names. These are Babylonian names, okay? Their Hebrew names are Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Daniel's name is gonna get changed to Belteshazzar. Bel is a Babylonian God, and Belteshazzar means may Bel protect his life. Okay, so Nebuchadnezzar is essentially saying, hey, who cares about Yahweh? You are now a subject of Nebuchadnezzar, me, the king, and my God, Bel Hananiah. His name in Hebrew means Yahweh has been gracious, but his name gets changed to Shadrach, which means, I am fearful, Mishael. So we gotta stop calling this guy Shadrach. It's so unfortunate that we know him as a slave name. That means I am fearful when his Hebrew name is Hananiah, which means Yahweh has been gracious. Okay? Mishael is Meshach's Hebrew name. Mishael means who is what God is. But they changed King Nebuchadnezzar change his name to I am of little account. This is so, so humiliating. Okay, so Meshach means I am of little account. Azariah. His Hebrew name is Azariah. It means Yahweh has helped. His name gets changed by Nebuchadnezzar to Abednego, which means servant of the shining one, which is another Babylonian God. So they are given pagan names, Babylonian names, so that Nebuchadnezzar can prove that he is now their king. Okay? You are no longer Jewish. You are fully Babylonian. This is the atrocity of Babylonian captivity. So one of the key messages of the book is that these boys, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah are going to stay loyal and faithful to Yahweh, even as the Babylonian system tries its best to force them to assimilate in the Babylonian culture. They are going to hold true to their Jewish identity and they are going to be loyal to the identity that God has placed on them. That is the key to understanding this entire book. Key word here is identity. That although you are in Babylon, you are not Babylonian. This is why the book is so relevant for Christians, because we are in the world, but not of the world. And it's very unfortunate that we've been calling these guys Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego because the enemy wants us to know them as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, But God wants us to know these boys as Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. So it's odd, though. We know Daniel based on his Hebrew name, not his Babylonian name, but we know Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah based on their Babylonian names as opposed to their Hebrew names. And so, first nerdy nugget of the day. Okay, is that Nebuchadnezzar going to come to Jerusalem? 605 BC that's our context clue. And then what is he going to do? He's going to take some of the prominent people, he's going to take royalty. The Bible's going to say that he's not going to take any poor people, he's going to take people of the royal family, he's going to take nobility, he's going to cut them off to Babylon and he's going to change their names. Not only is he going to change their names, he's most likely. I know, I know. This is a trigger warning here. He's most likely going to castrate them and make turn them into eunuchs because a foreigner cannot serve in a king's palace without being made into a eunuch. Why did foreign powers turn you into a eunuch? First of all, to exercise power and force and dominion over you. That's number one. But also because men who are made into eunuchs and cannot sexually assault the queen, okay? So they cannot R A P E the queen, okay? And also they're less aggressive, which means they're not going to try to overthrow the king. It is a political, physical way to subdue the masculine population of a subjugated people group. And I won't go on a rant about emascul, you know, men being emasculated. Although I could, we could totally make that into a timeless truth. But we are currently living in a generation of spiritual eunuchs. But that's a whole nother problem altogether. Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah are most likely eunuchs. The way that we actually, really, really know this is we gotta go further back into, into time. And we're gonna look at two kings, chapter 20, and we're gonna look at Isaiah, chapter 39. Okay? Second kings, chapter 20. If you remember this, if you've been rocking with us all the way from the book of Isaiah, you definitely remember this. There's a moment where Hezekiah allows this is when the Assyrian empire is still in power and Hezekiah is being disloyal to the Assyrians by kind of flirting with the Babylonians. And Babylonian officials come to see how wealthy Hezekiah really is. And it says this in Isaiah, chapter 39, verse 5. Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, hear the word of the Lord Almighty. The time will surely come when everything in your palace and all that your predecessors have stored up until this day will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord. And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood who will be born of you will be taken away and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the King of Babylon. So Isaiah prophesies that your own descendants are going to become eunuchs. So Daniel, Hananiah, Azariah and Mishael are most likely the eunuchs that Isaiah is prophesying about here, man. Hezekiah's response is really sad. Verse 8, the Word. This is Hezekiah's response. The word of the Lord you have spoken is good. Hezekiah replied. For Hezekiah thought, there will be peace and security in my lifetime. Ooh, that's stings. He doesn't care what's gonna happen five generations later. He's just cool that. He's just happy that his, his lifetime, there'll be peace in his lifetime. Now, to orient you just a little bit. So I just read Isaiah, chapter 39, verse 5 to 8, second kings, chapter 20, verse 16 to 18 says the exact same thing. So you can fact check me if you want, but 2 Kings 20, 16, 18 and Isaiah chapter 39, verse 5 to 8 say the exact same thing. I just want to give you both references. So Isaiah prophesies that Daniel, Azariah, Mishael, and Hananiah. There we go. Training myself to say their Hebrew names, are going to get carted off to Babylon and are going to become eunuchs. Now, just to orient you, between Hezekiah and Jehoiachin, there are five kings who reigned. And I'll give you all the names, okay? Hezekiah and then Manasseh and then Ammon and then Josiah and then Jehoahaz and then Jehoiakim, who Nebuchadnezzar is going to start this whole ordeal with into Jehoiachin, who's gonna get carted off to Babylon. Okay? So Isaiah is gonna prophesy to Hezekiah, and by the time we get to Jehoiachim and then Jehoiachin, that prophecy is gonna come to pass and there are gonna be eunuchs now in Hezekiah's bloodline. All right, That's a lot. Okay, I know you're drinking from a fire hose. We're gonna keep it moving. Okay? All right, so let's talk about language. Okay, last big picture. Just big picture idea. Daniel is one of the only books of the Bible written in multiple languages. Okay? So Daniel, chapter one to Daniel, chapter two, verse four is written in Hebrew, okay? Just like the rest of the Old Covenant or the Old Testament or the First Testament. Okay, Written in Hebrew then. This is interesting. Daniel, chapter 2, verse 4, to Daniel chapter 7, verse 28 is all written in Aramaic, Okay? Written in a foreign language. And then the Hebrew comes back. So Daniel 8, 1, 12, 13 is written in Hebrew again. Okay? So the book starts in Hebrew. The whole middle is in Aramaic, and then the last chunk is in Hebrew. Hebrew, Aramaic, Hebrew. If you are sitting in Babylonian captivity and you're encountering a book that starts in Hebrew, but then it goes to Aramaic. Now, let me help you. Aramaic is the language of the foreigner. Aramaic would be like a trade language, but it was the lingua franca of the day. Everybody kind of could speak Aramaic as a trading language. It was a language that people would use to conduct business. So the book switches to Aramaic, which immediately communicates to someone who's a Hebrew that we are losing our identity. The Hebrew language is a part of the identity. So the same way that the names of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah are changed to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the language of the book is also communicating the idea that Babylon is trying to rob the Hebrew people of their culture, not just of their bodies, not just of their physical existence, but of their culture, of their language. A language that the Lord has given them, a language that their holy scriptures are written in. And then what happens? Chapter 8 hits and the book switches back to Hebrew, which anyone reading these texts in their original context would go, oh, hope. Hope is on the horizon. Restoration is going to come in the same way that the text returns to the Hebrew language. The underlying theme of the book is that the people of God who, who are currently in exile in Babylon are gonna return to the land of Israel. They're gonna return to their homeland. You see how subtle that is? Just by using two different languages, the author of the book begins to communicate that although the Babylons have robbed you of your names and your language and your culture and your identity, or at least have tried to rob you of those things, God is going to restore. And not only is God going to restore, but you have to remain faithful and loyal in the middle of an empire that is trying to steal your language, your name, and your identity from. You see, this gets down to the crux of the message of the book. That the world that we live in as Christians is constantly trying to rob us of our names, of our identity, of our culture, of who we are. But we have to go in the same way that Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah are faithful to Yahweh and reject Nebuchadnezzar as their king. We have to declare we reject the world's systems as the way that we're going to act. This is not the culture. We don't live in a culture of. We're not going to operate in a culture of pride and backbiting and selfishness. Oh, no. We have a countercultural ethic and we have a king named Jesus, and we're loyal to that king family. The wait is over. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos, is out now and available everywhere. Books are sold, literally. Today I walked into a Barnes and Noble and I signed a bunch of copies at a physical location. So you can grab this book at a physical Barnes and Noble or you can go to a Books A Million or Amazon or anywhere books are sold and grab a copy. If you enjoy reading the Bible from an ancient perspective, if you understand that the beauty of Scripture is actually knowing it in context, then you'll love this book. And if there's any chaos in your personal life, I think that reading the Bible from an ancient perspective can actually help to crush the chaos in your life. I think this, this book is going to be a New York Times bestseller. I really do. I think we wrote a good One. I think you should get a copy today. All right, back to the episode. Hey, are you looking for a really cool gift or just solid tools to support your faith in daily Life? Check out Mr. Pen. They've got no bleed Bible pens and highlighters that actually work on faith. Thin Bible pages, journaling Bibles, Bible tabs and faith based journals. Even school supplies for parents, teachers and students. Mr. Penn was started by Christian teachers in Louisiana on a mission to serve the schools in their local community. And now They've got over 100,000 five star reviews on Amazon. I'm a huge fan of their Bible highlighters and and pens. Super smooth and gentle enough to write notes in the margin of your Bible. Whether you're digging into scripture or stocking up for back to school. Mr. Pen has you covered. Shop the best Bible journaling supplies on the market and fantastic gifts for the ladies in your life@misterpenn.com that's M R. Pen. And guess what? Our audience here at the Bible department gets a special discount. Use code DEPARTMENT10 at checkout to get 10% off your entire order. Let's kind of break down the chapters a little bit. I'll give you kind of a, a nugget on chapter one, two and three and then we'll switch to our timeless truth and we'll be done for the day. I hope. All this context. I'm kind of bleeding together some context clues and some nerdy nuggets all at once here at the top of the book of Daniel. And so Daniel, chapter one. We're going to get Daniel in some kosher food laws. Okay? This is the first, we're going to call it a hero story. The first hero story is all about food. Okay? And Daniel is of course reluctant to eat the food that's been provided by Nebuchadnezzar. And he makes a bargain with the chief eunuch for he and his fellow Jews to just eat kosher food to see if they are healthier or not. They were healthier, so they were allowed to eat what they wanted. The simple story strikes at the heart of what the book is teaching. I want you to hear this. Daniel was a Jew in a foreign land, exiled from home, living among pagans. Their customs and their food. It would have been easy and even understandable for Daniel to compromise or to simply submit to his new reality. But he refuses. He may no longer be in Israel, but he was Israel. Oh, that's good. He wasn't in Israel, but he represented Israel and now Israel was in him. And therefore Israel was In Babylon, so many of us, we make so many excuses. Well, no, I can't. I can't live for Christ. I'm around heathens, I'm around pagans. You know, people cuss at my job. That don't mean you got to cuss at your job. People do this, people do that. Hey, are you influenced or are you the influencer? Because if God's called you to his kingdom, he's called you to be a leader. He's called you to be a kingdom ambassador. And it's your job to represent the king and be loyal to the king everywhere you go, no matter where you go. It would have been understandable, it would have been easy. It would have been quite convenient for Daniel to simply submit to his new king and new rules and new realities. But you can't always be a rule follower. At some point, you got to protest against a culture that wants to rob you of your name, your identity, and your language. You got to stick up for godly values and declare, nope, I am definitely. It doesn't matter. You can cancel me if you want to. I am going to stand up for godly values. That's. That is what the book of Daniel is really getting at. Daniel number two. Let's go on to Daniel number two. There's a dream. And I actually just want to give you three views of how this dream is going to get interpreted. There's what's called the Maccabean view. There's a Messianic view, and then a dispensational view. You've been rocking with us for a while. You already know I'm steering clear of anything that sounds dispensational. So the Maccabean view is going to see the head of gold as Babylon, the chest and the arms of silver as media, or that's the Median Empire. They're going to see the middle or the thighs of bronze as Persia and the legs of iron as Macedonia, and the feet of iron and clay as Ptolemy and Seleucids, and then the Stone Kingdom as the Maccabean Kingdom. That's a Maccabean view. Okay. The Messianic view is going to see the head of gold as Babylon, the chest and the arms of silver as the Medo Persian Empire. That's our first change. The middle thighs of. Of bronze as Macedonia, the legs of iron as Rome, and the feet of iron and clay as the Rome. The emperors of Rome, the individual emperors of Rome. And they're gonna see the Stone Kingdom as the kingdom of Christ. Dispensational view is gonna see the head of gold as Babylon, the chest and the arms as the Medo Persian empire, the middle thighs of bronze as Macedonia, the legs of iron as Rome, the feet of ironic clay, the fe as the kingdom of the Antichrist, and the stone kingdom as the millennial kingdom. So there's three different ways to interpret Daniel chapter two. I'm just going to give you all three, and I'm not going to tell you which one I believe in, but it's the second one that was funny. Okay. Anyway. All right, so the dream is about a series of future empires that will rise and fall, and in the establishment of God's kingdom that will last forever. But which part equals which empire is where the different views disagree. Okay, and then we are going to have Daniel chapter three. We move out of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and we are going to get the image, okay, that Daniel's friends refused to bow down to. Now, the image, I want us to think of this. Yes, yes, foreign kings demanded that they be worshiped, but this idea of image is actually very, very normal. It's why our currencies have money on them, because kings, emperors believe that their image should be everywhere. Okay? So not only are they not wanting to worship Nebuchadnezzar, they are saying, we don't even agree with your image being anywhere. Which is why they are. They're going to. They're gonna. They're gonna be threatened with death. And again, this story mimics the first. Even in Babylon, we are faithful. Even when it's inconvenient, we are loyal. Loyal to who? Loyal to our real king, Nebuchadnezzar. Doesn't matter what you say. You're never gonna really be our king. Yahweh is our king. Which leads us to our timeless truth, our Thomas truth is really, really simple. As I spent a decade in youth ministry, I can tell you right now, the American America, American culture at large, and Western culture in general are no longer Christian cultures. These are post Christian. We're living in a post Christian era, which means we're no longer discipling people for Jerusalem, where everybody lives the same way and everybody understands Godly values and everybody understands, you know, what the Bible is, and everybody's memorized the Ten Commandments. No, we're discipling people from Babylon. And if our Daniels, Hananias, Azariah and Michaels are going to withstand the. The. The current of culture in our cultures today, then we better be discipling them not for Jerusalem, but For Babylon, the test of whether or not you're really a Christian is not can you be a Christian in a. Essentially in the most safest environment ever? No, it's can you be a Christian in the middle of an empire that is anti Christian? Okay. Can you stand up for what you believe in, even though everybody says that it's crazy? Can you go against the current? Can you swim upstream? That is actually the real question. And these guys, these four guys, Daniel, Hananiah, Azariah and Mishael, were discipled not just to survive in Jerusalem, but to survive behind enemy lines in enemy territory. And we gotta get back to the place where we're discipling people, we're discipling young people so they can actually survive in the real world, not just in the Christian bubbles that we create for them. And so that's my timeless truth for the day. You gotta disciple if you're a pastor, if you're a leader, you gotta disciple people. Not for Jerusalem, but for Babylon. Because guess what, baby, we are in exile. That is the reality. All right, tomorrow we got day 240. We're going to be tackling Daniel chapters four, five, and six. We're going to talk about chiasms. It's going to be so much fun. I know you just dying to just rip apart a chiasm if you're on a streak. I'm so proud of you. I'll see you right here tomorrow for day 240 as we continue our trek, the Book of Daniel. Love you guys. Peace. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. You can find us online and learn more about the show@thebibledepartment.com and on Instagram at the Bible Department. If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the Bible, you can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.