Bible Commentaries

Great Dreams

Daniel 2:1-30

Nebuchadnezzar was not content to have an interpretation of his dream; he demanded that the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans should tell him not only the interpretation but the dream itself. The question to them Daniel 2:31-49

The image which King Nebuchadnezzar saw was a remarkable one:—"This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass. His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay" ( Daniel 2:31-33).

A wonderful ministry is this image-reading. We are too frequently content with outsides, geometrical shapes, and colours that can be named; we have not sufficiently entered into the dream region, that wondrous world that lies immediately behind a translucent veil. We do not know how near the angels are. We have contrived, possibly through some temptation of the evil one, to put heaven a long way from us: it is across bleak cemeteries, it is beyond deep black rivers, far away: that may be due to our perverted and vicious imagination. Heaven may be within us, within hand-reach of us, and the angels—who can say where they are? are they not all ministering spirits? and is not the very fact of their ministering a proof of their nearness? Do servants work at an infinite distance? Do they not draw near that they may work easily, sometimes silently, and always effectively? We should gain more if we paid more heed to the dream region, the ministry of image, impression, suggestion, wordless stimulus of the mind. We know there are dangers along that line; but what line is there worth going along that has not danger on the right hand of it and on the left? It draws nearly all its value from the perils which assail or beset its progress. There is the danger of nightmare, there is the peril of our imagining things that should occur for our selfish interests or for our personal consolidation. These dangers are not sentimental, they are substantial, they are living, they are to be overcome only by the strength of God the Holy Ghost; but we are the temples of the Holy Ghost, the Holy Ghost dwelleth in us.

Do we get all our knowledge, do we acquire all our best possession, by hand or eye or other frail sense? Have we not shut out the living God from most of our life, and admitted him only by partial entrances, guarding with a kind of blind vigilance that often mistakes presences that ought not to enter for ministries that should be welcomed with all the enthusiasm of the soul? Daniel knew the dream; it was not the king's nightmare, it was God's revelation. That dream came forth from the Lord of Hosts, and he handed it to the interpreter, that every line of it might be read distinctly, with an enunciation that was itself a commentary with an emphasis which was itself a proof of its royalty.

The image is a picture of all evil—"gold," "silver," "brass,"

"iron," "clay." That is the difficulty of the case. If evil were only evil we could easily get rid of it; it is when evil has a head of gold that we are bewitched or bewildered by it It is true personally. Men are not always instances of black evil, all over, from head to foot, in and out, through and through. Some evil men have heads of gold, tongues of silver, looks that are fascinations, tones that importune the soul with the solicitude of music. If you look more clearly and closely at them you see that they are not all gold. But the very mixture which we find in our own character is itself either a hope or a temptation; everything depends upon the spirit of our reasoning, or the purpose of our inquiry; we start where our imagination says we must begin. If laying hold of our deeper selves, then we can turn the whole character into gold, yea, fine gold; we can pray more simply, more filially, more effectually, great, broad, strong, tender, prevailing prayers, that were answered before they were begun, because the soul out of which they went was a prepared tabernacle, every door flying open that the God of the house might come in and own it, every corner and stone. Starting from our clay selves, or iron, we sometimes lose heart and say what little gold there may be about us is only superficial—it is gilding rather than solid gold, it is a species of gold liquid into which we have been dipped; it will all wear away, and in reality we are nothing but iron or clay, we are some base metal, or some worthless dross; and thus we lose touch of Heaven, thus the light of hope is blown out, and too frequently we sink clear down into the abyss of despair. The same rule holds good in regard to institutions. Sometimes we are told, in a rough-and-ready logic that is pregnant with everything but reasoning, if an institution is good, accept it; if it is bad, reject it. But institutions do not divide themselves thus cleanly and sharply. There is no institution that can be publicly named and honestly advocated that has not in it some gold, some fine metal, some noble and valuable elements; and when we approach institutions of a mixed kind it is with some hope that we may be able to take out all that is base and comparatively worthless, and show how the entire institutional figure may be made from head to foot of gold. If institutions were all bad, we should not discuss them; if ministries, agencies of every kind, were either good or bad, our course in reference to them would be very simple and easy; it is where the mixture is large, yet subtle, that our difficulty begins and ends. We are not going to say that wickedness even has not its attractions. Young people would never run after a beast that was all darkness, a horrible, terrible image that was all fire and all cruelty. The young see in the image some glimpse of gleaming gold, or hear from it some sound of voice well trained, tones aimed at the target of the heart with unfailing precision; and they say they are going after the better parts of the image, they will be able to distinguish between the gold and the brass and the iron and the clay, and they will know which to take and which to refuse, and the image says, Come! and when they get over to the place which he has appointed it will take all Heaven to bring them home again.

How is this image to be handled? It is not to be handled; it is to be thrown down "without hands." That is the emphatic reference in the thirty-fourth verse.

"Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces" ( Daniel 2:34).

There are influences in the universe other than human. That is a fact which Science cannot ignore. Poor, yet self-conscious and partially haughty, yet erewhile humble, Science sometimes drops from a tone of great boasting into a confession of know-nothingism. You never saw a figure more limp, drenched through and through with invisible rain, bedraggled and mendicant-like, than Science (with a very large S) when it has come to certain parts of the mystery of life; no undertaker overwhelmed with a great rain outside a pauper's funeral ever cut a less imposing figure than Science cuts when it sees things done "without hands." It is a coward then; it knows the way home. But we want a judgment, a Daniel 2:43).

There is a law of unity, of brotherhood or consolidation. Mechanical association has nothing to do with true unity. Men may sit side by side in the same church, and yet have a universe between them. Men may handle the same Daniel 2:45). We can solve the world's problem; we can interpret the world's wild dreams. Even if we abstain from going into details, yet here is the interpretation of all:—Say ye to the righteous, it shall be well with him; speak it loudly, clearly: say ye to the wicked, with an emphasis as strong, though divested of all sense of exultation or triumph, that it shall be ill with him; he shall be torn to pieces, he shall go away into eternal punishment. This is the great interpretation, not an interpretation that deals with little details, and puts together accidents and incidents so as to make a mosaic that will please the eye: the great interpretation is that righteousness means heaven, and wickedness means hell. And God himself cannot alter these consequences; they are part of himself; they originate in himself; they are the expression of his godliness.

Then the king answered Daniel and said: I see it, it is right, I know it; every word thou hast spoken unto me confirms itself,—"Of a truth it is that your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a Revealer of secrets, seeing thou couldest reveal this secret." Have we not lost this power of revealing secrets to men? Then I would rather have lived under the Old Testament than under the New. Has inspiration all ceased? Does God give less now than he used to give? Has he caught himself in some act of extravagance, and is he economising by starving succeeding generations? Is this the God who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think? Here we must be reverent, but reverence is consistent with lofty, eager, hungry expectation.

Note

"The wealth, greatness, and general prosperity of Nebuchadnezzar are strikingly placed before us in the book of Daniel. The God of heaven gave him, not a kingdom only, but "power, strength, and glory" ( Daniel 2:37) His wealth is evidenced by the image of gold, sixty cubits in height, which he set up in the plain of Dura (ib. Daniel 3:1). The grandeur and careful organisation of his kingdom appears from the long list of his officers, "princes, governors, captains, Daniel 3:2-3, and Daniel 3:27). We see the existence of a species of hierarchy in the "magicians, astrologers, sorcerers," over whom Daniel was set (ib. Daniel 2:48). The "tree whose height was great, which grew and was strong, and the height thereof reached unto the heavens, and the sight thereof to the end of all the earth; the leaves whereof were fair, and the fruit much, and in which was food for all; under which the beasts of the field had shadow, and the fowls of heaven dwelt in the branches thereof, and all flesh was fed of it" (ib. Daniel 4:10-12), is the fitting type of a kingdom at once so flourishing and so extensive.....

"The moral character of Nebuchadnezzar is not such as entitles him to our approval. Besides the overweening pride which brought upon him so terrible a chastisement, we note a violence and fury (ib. Daniel 2:12; Daniel 3:19) common enough among Oriental monarchs of the weaker kind, but from which the greatest of them have usually been free; while at the same time we observe a cold and relentless cruelty which is particularly revolting. The blinding of Zedekiah may perhaps be justified as an ordinary Eastern practice, though it is the earliest case of the kind on record; but the refinement of cruelty by which he was made to witness his sons" execution before his eyes were put out ( 2 Kings 25:7) is worthier of a Dionysius or a Domitian than of a really great king. Again, the detention of Jehoiachin in prison for thirty-six years for an offence committed at the age of eighteen (ib. 2 Kings 24:8) is a severity surpassing Oriental harshness. Against these grave faults we have nothing to set, unless it be a feeble trait of magnanimity in the pardon accorded to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, when he found that he was without power to punish them ( Daniel 3:26).

"It has been thought remarkable that to a man of this character God should have vouchsafed a revelation of the future by means of visions (ib. Daniel 2:29; Daniel 4:2). But the circumstance, however it may disturb our preconceived notions, is not really at variance with the general laws of God's providence as revealed to us in Scripture. As with his natural, so with his supernatural gifts, they are not confined to the worthy. Even under Christianity, miraculous powers were sometimes possessed by those who made an ill use of them ( 1 Corinthians 14:2-33). And God, it is plain, did not leave the old heathen world without some supernatural aid, but made his presence felt from time to time in visions, through prophets, or even by a voice from heaven. It is only necessary to refer to the histories of Pharaoh ( Genesis 41:1-7 and Genesis 41:28), Abimelech (ib. Genesis 20:3), Job ( Job 4:13, Job 38:1, Job 40:6; comp. Daniel 4:31), and Balaam ( Numbers 22-24), in order to establish the parity of Nebuchadnezzar's visions with other facts recorded in the Bible. He was warned, and the nations over which he ruled were warned through him, God leaving not himself "without witness" even in those dark times. In conclusion, we may notice that a heathen writer (Abydenus), who generally draws his inspirations from Berosus, ascribes to Nebuchadnezzar a miraculous speech just before his death, announcing to the Babylonians the speedy coming of "a Persian mule," who, with the help of the Medes, would enslave Babylon (Abyd. ap. Euseb. Praep. Ev9:41)."—Smith's Dictionary of the Bible.

Prayer

Almighty God, we love to look up to the place where thine honour dwelleth. Thou dost call upon us to look up when we are sad that we may see and try to count the stars. When Jacob said his way was passed over, and Zion thought herself forgotten, thou didst call upon thy people to look up, and behold who hath made these lights, so that by regarding thy wondrous works we may recover our faith and rekindle our hope. All nature talks to us; each season has its own sweet gospel of youth, or energy, or beauty, or fulness, or rest, and all things declare the goodness of God. But our eyes cannot see; our ears are dull of hearing; our hearts do not quickly answer the music of thine appeal. Oh, woe unto us! Having eyes we see not, and ears we hear not, and hearts we do not understand; all we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, but now by thy goodness in Christ Jesus, thy Son , our Saviour, God with us, we have returned unto the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls; now we see, now we hear, now we somewhat understand; we have beheld the descent of the kingdom of God upon the earth, and we are enlarged, and ennobled, and sanctified by the Holy Ghost. This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes: blessed be God for this heart-hunger; thanks unto the eternal God for this thirst of the soul. These are new appetences, new desires; they proclaim our origin, they hint at our destiny, they prepare us to receive the kingdom of the Cross. The Lord be with us; fighting on the battlefield; suffering in quietude and loneliness; wondering much because of the bewildering things that smite our life and make it reel; praying, hoping, despairing; sometimes full of God, and sometimes conscious of an infinite vacancy in the heart. Thou knowest the tumult, the variety, the wonder: come to us, and if thou dost come by way of the Cross thou wilt bring with thee many pardons. Amen.