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Fall Asleep to Daniel _ The Man Who Kept Opening the Window _ COMPLETE · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Close your eyes, let the wait of the day find
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: somewhere to rest. You have been carrying it since you
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: woke up, through everything that happened and everything that didn't,
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: through every moment that asked something of you, and every
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: moment that gave you less than you needed. You can
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: put it down now, just for to night, just for
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: the next few hours. Maybe you are tired in a
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: way that goes deeper than sleep, the kind of tired
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: that comes from trying to hold things together for too long,
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: from showing up in a life that sometimes feels like
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: it is happening to you more than for you, From
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: the particular exhaustion of a person who has been faithful
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: to something without knowing for certain whether the faithfulness is
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: going anywhere at all. If that is where you are
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: to night, I want you to know something before we begin.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: You are not the first person to feel that way.
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: The man whose story we are about to walk through
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: felt it too. He felt it for seventy years, and
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: what he did with it, one quiet morning at a time,
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: became one of the most remarkable lives ever recorded. His
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: name was Daniel to Night. We are not going to
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: study him. We are going to walk beside him, from
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: the morning everything was taken to the last words ever
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: spoken over him, at the edge of a river, at
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: the end of a very long life, and before this
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: night is over, I think you will find something in
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: his story that belongs to you. Breathe, Let your body settle,
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Let the room grow quiet around you. Let us begin
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: chapter one, everything taken in a single day. Before we
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: talk about what was taken, let us talk about what
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: he had. This is the part of Daniel's story that
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: almost never gets told, not the visions, not the lions,
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: not the fire. Before all of that, there was a
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: boy with a life that fit him, a family he recognized,
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: a tea he loved, a future with shape and color
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: and the particular warmth of something you can reach out
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: and touch. He had been born into a noble family
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: in Jerusalem. He had grown up in the shadow of
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: the Temple, where on clear mornings, the smoke of the
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: daily offering rose into the sky like a conversation between
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Earth and Heaven. He had been raised on the law
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: of Moses, on the stories of Abraham and David, and
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: the God who had walked with his people through every wilderness.
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: He had memorized scripture he had plans. He was perhaps
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: fifteen years old. And then the morning came, when the
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: horizon changed. It began as a sound, a low vibration
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: in the ground, before the eyes could confirm what the
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: body already understood. And then the shape of it appeared
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: on the hills outside the city, Banners, chariots, the dust
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: of an army that did not lose. Neibukad Nazzar of
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Babylon had come. He was the most powerful ruler alive
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: on the earth at that moment in history. His empire
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: stretched from the Persian Gulf to the borders of Egypt.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: His armies were not an army, they were a machine,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: and he had not come to negotiate. The prophet Jeremiah
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: had warned Jerusalem for years, if you do not return
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: to God, this will happen. He had stood in the
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: streets and said it plainly, again and again, with the
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: specific exhaustion of a man who keeps telling people the
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: truth they keep choosing not to hear. They had not listened.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: The gates opened, not by force by surrender. King Jehoiakim
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: walked out and handed over the temple treasures, gold and silver,
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: sacred vessels that had stood in the house of the
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Lord since the days of Solomon, objects so holy that
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: only priests were permitted to touch them. All of it
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: loaded on to carts and carried away to Babylon. Play
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: in the treasury of a foreign god who had no ears.
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: But nebucud Neza was not finished. He was a strategist.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: And the most strategic thing you can do to a
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: conquered nation is not to destroy its army. It is
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: to take its future. His officers moved through Jerusalem with
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: the practiced efficiency of men who had done this before.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: They were not cruel about it. They did not have
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: to be. They moved from house to house, and when
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: they found what they were looking for, they simply took it.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: They came to the house where Daniel lived. He would
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: have heard them before the knock on the door. Would
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: have heard them on the street, the sound of boots
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: on stone, the particular silence that had replaced the usual
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: morning noise of the neighborhood. He had been raised on scripture.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: He knew what captivity looked like. Reading about a thing
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: and standing inside it are not the same. His mother,
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: his father, the room where he had slept every night
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: of his life, the window that looked west toward the temple,
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  Speaker 1: the smell of olive oil and old stone, and the
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: city he knew better than any other place on earth.
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: He would not see any of it again. They bound
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: his hands and walked him into the street, where a
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: line of young men was already forming, sons of priests
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: and scholars and officials. Boys he had grown up alongside,
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  Speaker 1: studied with, eaten with at festival tables. Now they walked
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: together in the particular silence of people who are still
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: processing something too large and too sudden to have found
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: its proper feeling yet. The march to Babylon was over
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: eight hundred miles through the hills of Judea, across the Jordan,
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: into the Syrian desert, along the great rivers of Mesopotamia.
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: Weeks of walking, weeks of dust and cold nights and
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: feet that never fully stopped aching, and a grief that
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: did not yet have a name because it was still
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: too new and too enormous to fit inside one. On
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: one of those nights, deep in the middle of the journey,
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: Daniel lay on the ground and could not sleep. The
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: other boys breathed in the rhythms of exhaustion around him.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: The guards sat at their posts indifferent. The desert was
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: cold and very quiet. He looked up at the stars.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: He had looked at these same stars from his window
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: in Jerusalem. They were the same stars. They did not
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  Speaker 1: belong to Babylon or to Judah. They hung over everything,
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  Speaker 1: equally made by a God who was not limited bography,
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: not confused by borders, not left behind in a city
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  Speaker 1: that was now eight hundred miles in the wrong direction,
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: which meant he was here too, in this desert, on
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  Speaker 1: this road, looking at this specific boy, on this specific night.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: That thought did not fix anything. It did not shorten
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: the road or stop the grief, or give him his
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: home back. But it was true, and he held it
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: the way you hold on to something in the dark,
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: not because it solves the problem, but because it is
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: the one solid thing your fingers confined. He held it
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: all the way to Babylon, and then Babylon appeared on
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: the horizon, and even grief had to pause. Nothing in
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: Judea had prepared him for this. Jerusalem was a city
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: of stone and faith, of narrow streets and the smell
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: of incense, and the quiet dignity of a place built
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: by people who believed they were building it for God.
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: It was ancient and intimate and human in scale. Babylon
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: was built to make you feel small. The walls were
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: so thick that chariots could race along the top of
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: them four abreast. The Ishtar gate rose above the entrance
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  Speaker 1: like a declaration, covered in brilliant blue glazed tile decorated
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: with golden lions and dragons that caught the midday sun
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: and threw it back at you. The Euphrates ran through
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: the center of the city. Bridges arched over it, Gardens
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: hung from terraces above the rooftops, green and impossible and serene,
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: as if someone had decided that gravity was simply a
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: suggestion for those with sufficient ambition. And everywhere, on every
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: corner and in every public square, statues of gods Marduk,
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: chief God of Babylon, Ishtar, Goddess of war and Love,
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Nabu shamash Sin, each one receiving daily offerings. The air
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: of the city thick with incense and the smoke of
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: a thousand fires burning in honor of things made by
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: human hands that could not see or hear or answer.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: Daniel stood in the palace courtyard, still dusty from eight
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: hundred miles of road and felt the full weight of
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: where he was. This was not his home, These were
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: not his gods. The chief official of the king, a
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: man named Ashpanaz, moved through the group of captives with
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: the practiced eye of someone evaluating what he had been given.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: He was looking for intelligence, composure, the capacity to become
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: something different from what you were born. He stopped in
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: front of Daniel. He studied him, the clarity of his eyes,
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: the stillness of his posture, the way this boy, after
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: weeks of captivity, was still holding himself like someone who
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: knew who he was. This one, Ashpannas, said he will
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: do well. Daniel and three of his closest friends were chosen, Hannanaiah, Michael, Azariah.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: They were brought to a special quarter of the palace
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: and given an education three years of the language and
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: literature of Babylon, the science of the stars, the art
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: of interpretation. Everything the greatest civilization on earth knew laid
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: before them like a gift. And then the official came
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: with new names. Daniel became Belta Shazar, meaning bell protects
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: his life. After the chief god of Babylon, Hannanaiah became Shadrak.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Michael became mishak Asararah became a Bednigo, each new name
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: a small erasure, each one carrying a Babylonian god inside it,
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: planted like a seed in soil that was not supposed
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: to receive it. This was the point of the whole enterprise,
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: not cruelty strategy. If you want to turn some one
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: into something new, the first thing you take is the name.
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: They had already taken the city, the home, the family,
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: the future. Now they wanted the last thing, the story
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: a person tells about who they are and whose they are.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: The food arrived the next morning, rich food from the
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  Speaker 1: king's own table, meat offered to idols before it reached
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  Speaker 1: the plate, wine poured in honor of Marduk, the finest
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: meal in the most powerfull city on earth. It was
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: on its surface generosity, but Daniel understood what it was.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: It was the next small surrender in a sequence designed
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: to end somewhere specific. He went to the guard, quietly,
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  Speaker 1: without drama, without a speech. He said, please give us
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: vegetables and water for ten days. Look at us at
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  Speaker 1: the end, compare us to the others, then decide. The
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: guard looked at him for a long moment. There was
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: something in the way Daniel asked that was hard to name,
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Not arrogance, not stubbornness, something quieter and more settled than either.
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  Speaker 1: A person who had decided in a room no one
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: else could see inside, that there was one thing in
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  Speaker 1: him that was not available for surrender. Ten days, the
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: guard said, For ten days. While the other young men
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: ate from plates piled high, Daniel and his three friends
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: ate lentils and cucumbers and bread, and drank water from
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: the well every morning, a plain plate, not impressive, not dramatic,
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: just a quiet, daily, unwitnessed choice that said in the
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: only language still available to him, this is still who
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  Speaker 1: I am. Be still for a moment here, Let the
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: night settle around you, Let your body grow a little heavier,
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: your breathing a little slower. This is the center of
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: chapter one, and it is worth resting in. A boy
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: had lost his city, his name, his future, and everything
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: he had planned, And in the middle of all that
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: loss he found the one thing that could not be
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: taken unless he gave it. One choice made every morning
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: in a room with no audience. That is the whole
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: of it. Not the lions, not the visions, this. At
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: the end of ten days, the guard came to look.
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  Speaker 1: He stood there in silence, looking at Daniel and his
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: three friends, and then at the others who had been
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: eating from the king's table. He looked back at Daniel.
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  Speaker 1: They were healthier, clearer, stronger in presents, and sharper in
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: bearing than any of the young men eating royal food.
• 13:18
  Speaker 1: The guard shook his head slowly. He had no framework
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: for explaining it. He let them meet as they wished
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  Speaker 1: and said nothing more about it. Three years passed. Daniel
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: and his friends studied. They learned the language so thoroughly
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: they dreamed in it. They mastered the literature, the astronomy,
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: the complete systems of knowledge that the greatest civilization on
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: Earth had accumulated over centuries. They learned faster than any
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: one else. They remembered more. When the time came to
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: stand before nebucad Nezza himself, the king questioned them personally,
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: and the book records the result. Simply, in every matter
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: of wisdom and understanding, he found them ten times better
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom,
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: ten times not from three years of education from the
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: god who had traveled eight hundred miles of desert road
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: with a boy who looked up at the stars one
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: night and decided, without evidence and without guarantee, that the
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: same God who made those stars was still watching him.
• 14:25
  Speaker 1: Every evening after that, Daniel opened the window of his room.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: He turned to face west, toward a city he could
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: not see, toward a temple that stood in rubble, eight
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: hundred miles away, And he prayed three times a day,
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: every day. He did not know yet how long this
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: would go on. He did not know that he would
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: never go home. He did not know that God was
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: not merely preserving him in Babylon, but preparing him there
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: in the ordinary faithfulness of a plain plate and an
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: open window. He only knew that Jerusale was west, that
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: the window was there, that God was listening to night.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: Wherever your particular exile has taken you, the window is
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: still there too. Whatever was taken from you, in whatever
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: single day or slow accumulation of days, your own losses arrived,
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: there is still one thing they cannot take. The turning,
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: the direction you choose to face, the daily quiet, unspectacular
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: decision to keep believing He is here in whatever foreign
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: city your life has put you in He has not
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: lost track of your name. Let your body rest now,
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: Let the road you have been walking to day go quiet.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: The plain plate and the open window and the God
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: who was in Babylon are enough for to night sleep
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: well beloved. The window is still worth opening. Chapter two,
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: The night He stood between life and Death. There is
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: a kind of faith that lives comfortably inside ordinary days,
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: the faith that prays when prayer feels natural, that trusts
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: when trusting costs nothing, that believes when the evidence makes
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: believing the easier choice. Most of us live inside that
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: kind of faith for most of our lives, and it
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: is real and it matters. But there is another kind,
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: the kind that only gets tested when everything goes wrong
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: at once, when the night arrives with no warning and
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: the morning is not guaranteed, and the only thing left
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: is the unpolished, desperate reaching of a person who has
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: run out of everything except the instinct to turn toward God.
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: That kind of faith cannot be manufactured in a crisis.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: It is built in the ordinary days before the crisis arrives,
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: in the plain plates and the open windows and the
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: ten day Tests. This is the chapter where Daniel finds
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: out what he has been building. It came for him
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: in the middle of what should have been an ordinary day.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: Several years had passed since the plain food and the
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: ten days. He had graduated into something more settled, a
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: junior member of the advisory class, known and respected within
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: the palace system. The kind of stability that a displaced
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: person builds slowly and carefully, the kind that makes the
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: difference between a life that functions and one that merely survives.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: And then a knock on the door, a soldier in
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: the doorway, not the arrival of a guest, the arrival
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: of news. His name was Arioc, captain of the King's Guard,
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: a man who had learned to keep his face from
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: showing what his voice could not fully hide. He said
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: it plainly. The King had ordered the execution of all
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: the wise men in Babylon. Daniel had been enrolled among
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: the wise men as part of his training in the
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: eyes of the Empire. He was one of them, and
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the order covered all of them, no exceptions. He heard
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: this and went very still, not frozen still, the particular
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: stillness of someone whose mind is moving fast, behind a
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: face that is holding quiet before emotion, before panic. He
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: reached for understanding, he asked why Arioc told him everything.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: The night before, Nebuchadnezza had dreamed, Not the soft, fading
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: kind that dissolves with mourning. The other kind, the kind
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: that grabs you out of sleep with your heart pounding,
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: certain that what you just experienced was more real than
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: the room you woke up in. He had sat up
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: in the dark, gasping, trembling, reaching for the images that
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: were already slipping through his fingers. He had called his
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: wise men, every astrologer, magician, enchanter, diviner in Babylon, the
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: finest minds of the greatest empire on earth, assembled in
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: the throne room in the early hours before dawn, and
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: he had said, tell me what I dreamed, not interpret it,
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: tell me what it was. The wise men had done
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: what wise men do. When asked the impossible, They explained
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: carefully and logically why it could not be done. No
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: one can tell a man his own dream without being
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: told at first, this is not unreasonable, it is simply true.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Nebuchadnezzar did not accept it. He decided that their inability
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: to do the impossible was evidence of their fraudulence. He
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: wanted the dream. If they could not provide it. Everything
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: they had ever told him was a lie. The decree
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: went out before the city was fully awake. Daniel listened
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: to all of this. Then he looked at Ariok and said,
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: give me time. I will go to the king and
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: I will tell him the dream and its meaning. Arioch
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: stared at him. The thing about Daniel's words was not
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: their confidence, It was the quality beneath the confidence. He
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: was not bluffing. He was not pretending to already know
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: the dream. He was saying, quietly and without theater, that
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: he knew who to ask, and that the one he
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: was going to ask was reliable. That is a different
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: kind of courage than bravado. It is the courage of
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: a person who has been building something in the ordinary days,
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: who knows from experience, not theory, that the god he
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: serves does not abandon him when the stakes are highest.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: Arioc felt something in it. He agreed to speak to
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: the king. He bought Daniel the hours he needed. Daniel
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: went home. He did not sit down to review his
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: notes on dream interpretation. He went straight to the room
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: where his three friends were sleeping and woke them up.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: Hanna and Aiah, Michael Asarrea, the three who had walked
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: in chains out of Jerusalem with him, the three who
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: understood without explanation what was happening inside him. He told
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: them plainly, we may all be dead in the morning
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: unless God shows me what the King dreamed. We need
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: to pray right now to night, no discussion of alternatives.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: They knelt together on the floor of a small room
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: in the city of Babylon, four young men from a
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: conquered nation with no political protection and a death sentence
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: still technically in effect, and they prayed. The room was dark,
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: the city outside was quiet. They prayed for hours, not
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: polished prayers, not the ceremonial language of the temple, the
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: prayers of people who are genuinely frightened, who have genuinely
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: run out of options, who have nowhere to go except
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: toward the one they have been going toward every day
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: of their captivity. Let the room go quiet here for
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: a moment. Let the image settle four people in the
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: dark with nothing left except the turning, no guarantee, no sign,
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: just the reaching in the honest place where all genuine
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: prayer lives, toward the God whom they had been told
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: and had chosen to believe was listening. This is what
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: those years of plain food and open windows had been
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: building toward. Not a technique, not a method, a relationship
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: deep enough to hold the weight of a night like this.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: Somewhere before dawn, Daniel slept, and in that sleep God
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: gave him the dream, the whole thing, the exact images
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: Nebuchadnezzar had seen, clear and complete, along with the meaning
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: of every detail, the whole time line of human history
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: laid out before him like an open scroll. Daniel woke
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: with his heart pounding. He stayed on his knees and
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: in the dark, before he did anything else, Before he
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: went to Ariok Or prepared what he would say to
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: the king. He worshiped. Praise be to the name of
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: God for ever and ever, he said, quietly, his voice
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: low in the room. Wisdom and power are his. He
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: changes times and seasons. He sets up kings and deposes them.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: He reveals deep and hidden things. He knows what lies
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: in darkness, and light dwells with him. He said this
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: not as the opening of a speech, not as preparation
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: for what came next. He said it because it was
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: the truest thing he knew, and before he walked into
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: whatever the morning held. He needed to say it out
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: loud in a room with no audience except the one
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: who already knew everything. Then he went to Ariok, do
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: not execute the wise men. Take me to the king.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: I will tell him what he needs to know. Ariok
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: moved quickly the throne room. Nebucad Nezar, hollow eyed from
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: a night of no sleep and mounting fury, looking at
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: this young man from Judah with a mixture of suspicion
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: and desperate hope. Are you able to tell me what
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: I saw in my dream? Daniel stood in the center
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: of the throne room of the most powerful empire on earth,
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: no crown and no weapons, and no political standing, and
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: spoke with a steadiness that the room noticed. No wise man,
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: no enchanter, no astrologer, no diviner can explain what the
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: king has asked. That is true, But there is a
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: god in heaven who reveals mysteries, and he has shown
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: the king what will take place in the days ahead.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: He paused, this mystery has not been revealed to me
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: because I have greater wisdom than any one else. It
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: was revealed so that the king might know the interpretation,
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: so that you might understand. Then Daniel described the dream.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: He watched the king's face as the words came out,
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: the eyes widening, the jaw tightening, the slow, unavoidable recognition
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: of a man hearing his own private vision described in
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: precise detail by someone who was not there. The enormous statue,
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: the head of pure gold, chest and arms of silver,
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, feet of
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: iron and clay, And the rock cut without human hands,
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: that shattered the whole thing and became a mountain, filling
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: the entire earth. Then Daniel explained it. Four kingdoms, each
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: one enormous, each one seeming permanent. Babylon, the head of gold,
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: the greatest on earth right now, after it, another silver
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: and strong, but lesser. Then bronze, spreading across the whole earth.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: Then iron, crushing and terrible, the most powerful of all,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: but mixed with clay, unable to hold together forever. And
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: then the rock, the kingdom, not built by human ambition
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: or maintained by military force, the kingdom arriving from completely
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: out side the systems of human power, coming to shatter
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: every structure that human achievement had ever built. And then
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: filling the whole earth, never to end. Nebucat Nazza heard
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: all of this, and then the most powerful man on
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: earth rose from his throne, crossed the floor, and knelt
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: in front of Daniel. Surely your God is the God
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: of gods, he said, his voice holding something it had
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: not held before, the lord of kings, a revealer of mysteries.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: He gave Daniel gifts. He made him ruler over the
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: whole province of Babylon. He placed him in charge of
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: all the wise men, the very men who had spent
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: the night marked for death. And at Daniel's request, he
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: elevated Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego alongside him. Daniel went home
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: that evening. He sat in the quiet for a long time.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: He thought about the statue, four kingdoms, all of them enormous,
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: all of them swept away like schaff before, something that
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: could not be built by any human hand. He thought
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: about the rock. He did not know yet what face
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: it would wear. He did not know the name. He
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: only knew that God was moving through history the way
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: a river moves through stone. Not with speed you can
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: see from day to day, but with a certainty that
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: nothing could permanently resist, and somewhere in that certainty there
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: was room for a captive boy from Jerusalem and the
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: three people who had knelt beside him in the dark.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: Maybe to night you have run out of options. Maybe
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: the morning feels like something you are not sure you
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: can handle. Maybe you have already tried everything you know
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: how to try, and the only thing left is the
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: thing Daniel did in that room before the sky grew light,
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: the turning, the reaching, the prayer that is not polished
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: but is honest. Bring it, because the moment you begin,
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: something is already in motion that you did not cause
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: and cannot stop. The answer was given before the prayer
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: was finished. It always is. Let your body grow heavy. Now,
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Let the things you could not solve to day rest
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: in hands larger than yours. Let to night be the
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: room in the dark before the morning comes. He heard
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: you the moment you turned. Sleep well, beloved, the window
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: is still worth opening. Chapter three, Three Men and a Fire.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: Daniel is not in this chapter. That is the first
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: thing to understand, and it matters more than it might seem.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: Chapter three of the Book of Daniel is the only
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: chapter in the entire book where Daniel himself does not appear.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: He is somewhere else in the palace, attending to the
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: administration of the empire, while the three closest people in
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: his life face the worst moment of theirs without him.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: We do not know if he heard about it while
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: it was happening. We do not know what he felt
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: when he found out. The book does not tell us.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: But what the book does tell us is this, when
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: the moment came, when the music played and the whole
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: world knelt, and the furnace was hot, and the stakes
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: were as absolute as stakes can be, those three men
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: did not become something they had not already been. They
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: simply revealed what the ordinary days had been building inside them.
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: You cannot manufacture in a crisis what you have not
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: been practicing in the ordinary days that precede it. Some
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: time had passed since the morning of the dream. Nebukuld
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: Nezza had seen in that single night that the god
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: of these young men from Judah was real in a
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: way that none of his own gods had ever managed
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: to be. He had knelt on the floor of his
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: own throne room and said the words, but kings are
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: complicated people. Power has a long memory, and a short
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: attention span, and whatever had moved in Nebucadnezza the morning
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: he knelt before Daniel, it had not yet done the
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: deep work that real transformation requires, because a few years
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: later he built the statue on the Plane of Dura
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: in the province of Babylon, a golden image, not small,
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: not ornamental, ninety feet tall and nine feet wide, covered
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: entirely in gold, visible for miles in every direction. Not
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: a statue of a god, a statue of Nebuchadnezza himself.
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: When it was finished, messengers went to every province, every official,
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: every governor, every leader of every territory under Babylonian rule
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: received the same summons. Come to the Plane of Dura
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: for the dedication ceremony. You did not decline. On the
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: appointed day, the plane was filled with people. Think about
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: what that looked like. Thousands of the most powerful and
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: accomplished people in the world's most powerful empire gathered on
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: a flat, open plane under an enormous sky, all of
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: them standing in the shadow of this golden figure, blazing
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: in the midday sun. Military commanders, provincial governors, judges and treasurers,
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: and royal advisers all assembled, all waiting. A herald delivered
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: the announcement in a voice built for announcements. When the
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: music plays, everyone falls down and worships the golden image,
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: everyone without exception. The furnace burning at the edge of
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: the plane was not there for decoration. The musicians raised
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: their instruments, the signal was given, sound filled the plane
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: enormous and inescapable, and the crowd moved like water, finding
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: its level, thousands dropping to their knees in a single
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: flowing motion, faces pressed to the ground. Every person except
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: three Shadrak, Mishak and a bed Noo stood upright. Pause here,
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: not on the drama of it, on the loneliness of it.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: Standing still while thousands of people kneel around you is
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: not a feeling most of us have experienced. The pressure
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: of unanimous human consensus is not a metaphor. It is
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: a physical force. The mere fact that everyone else is
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: doing something creates its own gravity, and every second that
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: passes makes the standing more visible, more conspicuous, more costly.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: They stood anyway, not with raised fists, not with a
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: speech prepared. They simply did not kneel. Their bodies remained
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: upright in a sea of bowed heads. Quiet, still present.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: It did not take long for someone to notice there
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: were men in that crowd who had been waiting for
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: exactly this moment, Men who had watched these foreigners from
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: Judah rise in the palace year after year, who had
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: been calculating there resentment. Looking for an angle, they went
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: to the king. The three men were brought before nebucud
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: Nezzar on the plain in front of the assembled crowd,
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: with the golden statue behind them and the furnace clearly visible.
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: The king kept his voice low, the particular low of
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: a man who is most dangerous when he is not shouting.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: Is it true that you do not serve my gods
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: or worship the image I have set up? He offered
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: them one more chance, when the music plays again. If
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: you are ready to bow, then all is well. But
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: if you refuse, you will be thrown immediately into the
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: blazing furnace. And then the king added the question that
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: was the real point of everything. What God will be
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: able to rescue you from my hand? It was a
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: genuine challenge. Name the force that can counter my authority. Shadrak,
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: Mishak and Abednego looked at each other. Then they turned
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: back to the King, O nebuchad Nezar, we do not
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. That
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: first sentence alone required a quality that most people will
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: spend their entire lives searching for. We do not need
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: to defend ourselves. The deciding was already done. This moment
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: was not a decision point. It was simply the public
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: expression of a decision that had been made in a
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: hundred private, ordinary, unobserved moments, across years of daily faithfulness.
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: They continued, if we are thrown into the blazing furnace,
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: the God we serve is able to save us from it,
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: and he will rescue us from your hand, O King,
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: And then five words. But even if he does not
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: stay with those five words, do not rush past them.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: They were not claiming a guarantee. They were not invoking
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: a promise or trying to strike a deal with Heaven.
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: They were saying something more radical and more honest than
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: any of that. They were saying that their faithfulness to
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: God was not conditional on his protection, that what God
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: chose to do or not do in the next several
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: minutes was not the reason they served him. They served
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: him because he was God, because he was worthy because
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: in the worst possible outcome, he was still God and
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: they were still his, and no fire on earth could
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: change that foundational fact. Nebucudn's restraint broke. He ordered the
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: furnace heated seven times beyond normal. The soldiers obeyed. They
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: stoked it until the heat rippled the air invisible waves,
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: until the ground near the entrance was too hot to
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: stand on. The soldiers who threw the three men in
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: were overcome by the heat. Before they could step back.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: The three were bound and thrown inside. Nebucudnezzar stood at
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: the edge and watched. He was expecting three seconds and ash. Instead,
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: he leaped to his feet. He turned to his advisers,
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: his voice strange, didn't we throw three men into the fire? Certainly?
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: O king? Look, he pointed into the furnace. I see
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: four men walking around in the fire, unbound, unharmed, and
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: the fourth looks like a son of the gods. Let
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: the room go quiet here, oh, four, not three bodies consumed,
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: Four figures upright, moving through the flames, as if the
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: fire were simply air. The ropes burned away, their bodies intact,
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: their clothes intact, and beside them. A fourth, a presence
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: so different from anything human that even a pagan king
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: looking at it through walls of flame could tell it
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: was not of this world. Within the Christian tradition, many
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: understand this presence as the Son of God, appearing before
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: the incarnation, already present in the place of the worst
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: of it before the three men arrived. Others understand it
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: as a mighty angel sent by God. Both readings agree
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: on this. God did not watch from a distance. Something
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: of the divine entered the furnace with them, so that
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: the worst of it was not a place they had
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: to be alone. Nebucadnezza walked as close to the entrance
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: as the heat would allow, and called into the fire Shadrak, Mishak,
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: and Abdnigo, servants of the Most High God, come out,
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: and they walked out. The crowd crowded close, governors and
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: advisers and military commanders, reaching out to touch the hair
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: and the robes, looking for burns that were not there,
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: confirming with their own hands that the fire had not
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: touched them, not even the smell of smoke. The king spoke,
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: and his voice held something it had not held before.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: Praise be to the God of Shadrak, Mishak and Abdnigo,
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: who sent his angel and rescued his servants. They trusted
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: in him. They defied the king's command, and they were
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: willing to give up their lives rather than serve or
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: worship any god except their own god. He issued a
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: new decree. No one in any nation or language was
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: to say anything against this God, because no other god,
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: the king said himself, can save. In this way, the
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: three friends returned to their duties. They did not build
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: monuments to themselves. They went back to the work they
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: had been doing with the same quiet faithfulness that had
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: produced the moment on the plain. The promise was not
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: that they would not be thrown in. They were thrown in.
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: The promise was not that the furnace would not be hot.
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: It was hotter than it had ever been. The promise
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: was not even that they would survive, because they did
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: not know they would survive when they refused to kneel.
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: The promise was the fourth figure, the one who did
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: not wait outside the furnace and call in encouragement from
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: a safe distance, the one who entered the worst of
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: it alongside them, who was already there when they arrived.
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: There are furnaces in every life, real situations of real heat,
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: the kind where you cannot see the other side of it,
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: and the people who put you there are watching from
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: the outside with no idea of what it actually feels
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: like inside. In those moments, the promise is not that
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: you will be spared. The promise is that you will
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: not be alone in it. He was in the furnace
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: before they got there. He is already in yours. Be
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: still for a moment. Now, let your body settle into
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: the mattress, Let your breath come slow, and even let
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: the warmth around you be the warmth of some one
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: who entered every furnace first. You do not walk into
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: anything alone. Sleep well, beloved. The fourth figure is already there,
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: and the window is still worth opening Chapter four, The
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: King who had to learn to look up. There is
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: a man in this chapter who does not get talked
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: about enough, not for his power, not for his vision,
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: not for any of the qualities we usually celebrate. He
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: gets credit for something harder and quieter than all of
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: those things. He tells a powerful man the truth he
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: does not want to hear, and he does it with
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: genuine reluctance, with a wish recorded in the text that
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: the truth were different. That man is Daniel, and what
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: he does in this chapter is not a prophecy or
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: a miracle. It is something more ordinary and more difficult
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: than either of those things. It is care. Several years
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: had passed since the morning of the dream. A kind
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: of settled rhythm had established itself in the palace. Daniel
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: was older, now more seasoned, carrying his positions with the
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: quiet competence of some one who has learned that excellence
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: in a place you did not choose is still excellence.
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: He had been watching Nebuchadnezzer. This is a strange thing
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: to sit with the full history between these two men.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: Nebucud Nezar had ordered the destruction of Jerusalem, he had
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: walked away with the temple vessels in his carts. He
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: had taken Daniel from his family at fifteen and sent
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: him on an eight hundred mile road in chains toward
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: a city that never felt like home. By every ordinary
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: measure of human emotion, Daniel had every reason to keep
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: this king at arm's length for the rest of his days.
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: And yet over the years something had grown between them.
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: Not friendship exactly, something more complicated and more real, the
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: kind of bond that forms when two people who should
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: not understand each other somehow do when something genuine passes
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: between them through the daily business of working alongside each other.
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: For years, nebucud Nezza had seen in Daniel the quality
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: he could not find anywhere else in his empire. Not
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: just the wisdom, though the wisdom was real. Something beneath
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: the wisdom, a groundedness, an incapacity for flattery, a willingness
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: to look at things honestly that the people around a
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: powerful man almost never maintain. Daniel had seen in Nebuchadnezza
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: the particular loneliness of a man too powerful to be
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: told the truth by any one around him. So when
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: the King came to Daniel with another dream, Daniel listened,
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: and when he understood what the dream meant, he went quiet.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: The text records this with a detail that almost never
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: gets highlighted. Daniel was alarmed, and his thoughts troubled him.
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: He sat in silence for about an hour. An hour
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: in a meeting with the most powerful man on earth,
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: waiting for an answer. Daniel sat quietly for an hour.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: The King noticed, and he said something that tells you
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: everything about how far the relationship had come. He said
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: to Daniel, do not let the dream or its meaning alarm.
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: The King was giving his interpreter permission to deliver unwelcome news.
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: He could see in Daniel's face that what was coming
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: was not good, and his response was not impatience, it
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: was gentleness. In one sentence, across the distance of rank
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: and history, something human passed between them. Daniel spoke. The
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: dream was a tree at the center of the earth,
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: growing until its top reached the sky, visible to the
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: ends of the whole world, beautiful leaves, abundant fruit, animals
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: sheltering under it, birds nesting in its branches, everything alive
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: being fed from it. Everyone in the room understood immediately
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: who the tree was. And then a holy one descended
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: from heaven and gave an order. Cut down the tree,
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: strip its branches, scatter its fruit, drive away everything sheltering
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: under it, but leave the stump, bound with iron and bronze,
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: in the grass of the field. And then the disturbing part.
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: Let his mind be changed from that of a man
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: and given the mind of an animal. For seven years,
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: Daniel understood the dream instantly. He spent an hour not
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: saying so. When he finally spoke. He began with the
• 44:22
  Speaker 1: sentence that only some one who genuinely cared about the
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: person in front of them would think to include my lord,
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: if only the dream applied to your enemies and its
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: meaning to your adversaries. That is not caught protocol, that
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: is not diplomatic preamble, that is a person wishing out
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: loud before they say the hard thing, that the hard
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: thing were not true. Then he told the king the
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: tree was Nebuchadnezzar, his greatness, his reach, his power that
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: sheltered the nations, and the decree from heaven was real
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: and coming soon his his mind would be taken from him.
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: He would be driven from the palace. He would live
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: in the open fields like an animal, eat grass, be
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: drenched by the dew of heaven, his hair growing like feathers,
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: his nails like claws. For seven years, but the stump
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: would remain the roots in the ground, and after the
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: appointed time his mind would return and he would be restored.
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: Daniel gave him counsel. At the end, renounce your sins,
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: be kind to the oppressed. It may be that your
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: prosperity will continue. Twelve months passed, nothing happened in the
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: quiet of twelve months without consequence, the mind does its
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: comfortable work of revision. Maybe it was only a dream.
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: Maybe the condition had been quietly met, the way that
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: time without crisis lulls you back toward the assumption that
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: crisis is not actually coming. Then one afternoon, Nebucadnza stood
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: on the roof of the royroyal Palace and looked out
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: over everything he had built, the canals, the gardens, the temples,
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: the walls, that nothing had ever breached. All of it
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: spread before him in the afternoon light. And he said
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: the thing that Daniel had warned him not to say,
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: is not this the great Babylon I have built as
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: the royal residence by my mighty power and for the
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: glory of my majesty. The words were still in his mouth,
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: and a voice came from heaven. That is how the
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: book records it. The sentence was not yet finished, and
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: the decree was already executing, no delay, no warning. The
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: pride and the consequence were simultaneous. What followed is one
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: of the strangest passages in ancient literature. The most powerful
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: king in the world lost his mind. He was driven
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: from the palace. He lived in the open fields. He
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: ate grass like cattle. He was drenched with dew. His
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: hair grew long and matted. His nails grew like claws.
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: Seven years seven years is long enough for the world
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: to absorb your absence, long enough for the systems you
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: built to stabilize without you, long enough for the empire
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: to discover that it does not, in fact require you
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: to function. And during those seven years, Daniel was somewhere
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: in the palace. The text does not tell us what
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: he did. It is one of the silences of this book,
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: and silences in this book tend to matter. We know
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: he kept his window, We know he prayed three times
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: a day, facing west. We know he continued to serve faithfully.
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: We suspect he prayed for the man in the field,
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: because this is who Daniel was. Not a person who
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: kept careful score, not a person who waited with quiet
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: satisfaction for the punishment of his oppressor. He had wished
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: out loud that the dream had applied to someone else.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: He had spent an hour in troubled silence before delivering
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: news he did not want to deliver. People who live
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: that way do not stop caring about someone simply because
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: they have been proven right. And then one day something
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: changed in the field. After seven years of looking at
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: nothing but the ground in front of him, after seven
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: years of grass and rain and the slow, meaningless cycling
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: of days without history, nebucud Nezza raised his eyes toward Heaven.
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: That was all It took, one small voluntary motion, the
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: deliberate turning of the face upward, and his sanity returned.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: He wrote down what happened next in his own words,
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: and those words were preserved because they are among the
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: most unexpected things a man like nebucud Nezza was ever
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: likely to say. I, nebucud Nezza, praise and exalt and
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: glorify the King of Heaven, because everything he does is right,
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: and all his ways are just, and those who walk
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: in pride he is able to humble. He did not
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: say this bitterly, not like a man reciting a lesson
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: he was forced to memorize. He said it with the
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: particular authority of a man who had stood inside the
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: truth of it for seven years, who had eaten it,
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: who had felt the dew on his skin in the
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: dark of the field, who had looked up and the
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: first thing his restored mind saw was the sky. He
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: was restored, his honor returned, Greater greatness than before was
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: added to him. And Daniel, somewhere in the palace, received
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: this news. We do not have his words. We have
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: something better. We have the hour of troubled silence, the
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: wish said out loud, before the hard truth. The decades
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: of daily prayers through a window facing a city this
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: man had destroyed. That is what genuine care looks like,
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: not the performance of it, the actual thing practiced in private,
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: sustained through years when there was no visible result, maintained
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: not because it was comfortable or strategic, but because it
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: was simply who Daniel was. The king who leveled Jerusalem
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: eventually knelt before the God of Jerusalem, not because he
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: was forced to, because the part of him that could
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: not be stripped away by seven years in a field
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: finally recognized what it had always needed. There are seasons
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: in every life that feel like the field stripped down, reduced,
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: without the usual scaffolding of achievement or identity or the
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: things that made you feel like yourself. In those seasons,
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: there is one thing that Nebuchadnezza did that worked. He
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: looked up, not because the restoration was immediate, not because
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: the morning arrived the moment he did it, but because
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: that one small voluntary motion, the turning of the face
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: toward heaven, is where every restoration in the story begins.
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: The roots are still in the ground to night. Let
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: your body grow still. Now, let the field quiet down
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: around you, Let the dew settle, and the stars come out.
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: And the one who numbers every hair on your head
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: keep watch over these hours. He has not forgotten the
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: shape of you. Sleep well, beloved. The stump holds, and
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: the window is still worth opening Chapter five, The Last
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: Night of Babylon. By the time this chapter begins, Daniel
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: was old, not the dramatic frailty of someone at the
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: very edge, but old in the way that decades of
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: a difficult life make a person old, the kind of
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: old that shows in a face that has not been
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: protected from difficult things, that has seemed too much to
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: be surprised by much, that carries in the particular lines
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: around the eyes, the specific weight of someone who has
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: watched things end before and knows the signs. He knew
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: the signs. Many years had passed since Nebuchadnazar, the Great
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: king had died, as all kings die, and the empire
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: had moved through several pairs of hands. Since then, Babylon
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: was still Babylon. The walls still stood, the Ishtar Gate
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: still gleamed, the Euphrates still ran through the center of
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: the city with the same indifference it had always had
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: to the particular human dramas playing out on its banks.
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: But something had shifted in the quality of the air,
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: the way air shifts before weather that has been building
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: for days finally arrives to the east. The armies of
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: Cyrus the Persian had been moving through nation after nation
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: with a systematic patience that the ancient world had not
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: quite seen before. One kingdom after another had yielded, not
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: always by force, but by the sheer weight of inevitability.
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: And now Cyrus had arrived outside the walls of Babylon itself.
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: His army had made camp, his zeger had begun inside
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: the walls. The arithmetic felt reassuring. The grain stores were full,
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: the water supply was independent. The walls had never been
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: breached in the entire history of the city. Let Cyrus
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: wait as long as he liked. Babylon would not fall.
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: This was the atmosphere in which Belchazzar decided to throw
• 53:26
  Speaker 1: a party. There is a particular kind of person who
• 53:29
  Speaker 1: responds to the proximity of danger by insisting louder and
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: louder that the danger is not real. Who fills the
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: space between themselves and what is coming with enough noise
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: and spectacle and celebration that the approaching thing can almost
• 53:45
  Speaker 1: almost not be heard. Belchaza was that kind of person.
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: He was young, and he had inherited an empire he
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: had not built. And he had never stood in a
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: room with someone like Nebucadnezza and felt from the inside
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: what it actually costs to hold a kingdom together through
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: decades of consequence. He had grown up in the stories
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: of his grandfather, the way children grow up in stories
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: of the famous and distant. He knew the facts of them,
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: he had never felt the weight. He invited a thousand
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: nobles to his feast. The great hall of the palace
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: was filled, tables heavy with food, wine, flowing, musicians playing
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: the organized spectacle of imperial celebration, designed to say to
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: everyone present and to the army outside the walls, we
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: are permanent, we are powerful. What you see outside our
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: gates is a minor inconvenience. The evening deepened, the wine accumulated,
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: and somewhere in the long arc of the feast, drunk
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: and loose and feeling the particular recklessness that comes from
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: wine and walls, and an inherited confidence in one's own invulnerability.
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: Belschazar had an idea, Bring me the gold and silver
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: goblets from the temple in Jerusalem. Let us drink from them.
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: Let the weight of that settle for a moment. Those
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: vessels had been in the treasury of Babylon for decades.
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: They had been carried out of Jerusalem in the year
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: six hundred and five before Christ, the same year Daniel
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: was taken on the same morning when the world, as
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: the people of Judah knew it ended. They were sacred
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: objects from the House of the God of Israel, objects
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: so specifically holy that in the original Temple only consecrated
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: priests were permitted to touch them. To bring them out
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: now was not an accident. It was not ignorance. Belschazar
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: knew what they were. Everyone in that room knew what
• 55:43
  Speaker 1: they were. He was reaching for them precisely because of
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: what they were, the most sacred objects of the God
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: his grandfather had acknowledged on his knees, and drinking from
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: them in honor of Babylon's gods was the most direct
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: statement possible about whose god man adhere. The servants hesitated,
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: the servants obeyed. The vessels appeared on the tables, the
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: nobles grabbed them with the casual enthusiasm of people past
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: caring about significance. Belshazar lifted one high to Marduk, to Ishtar,
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: to all the gods of Babylon. The crowd roared, and
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: then the laughter stopped, not gradually, all at once, the
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: way sound stops when something happens that none of the
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: ordinary rules of the world can explain, the way a
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: roomful of people can become completely silent in the space
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: of a single breath. On the wall of the banquet hall,
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: in the light of the torches, where a moment before
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: there had been only white plaster, a hand appeared, not
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: a whole figure, just a hand visible from the wrist,
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: with fingers that moved with a deliberateness. That was the
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: most frightening thing about it, not rushed, not frantic, the
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: unhurried movement of something that had all the time in
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: the world, because time itself was its instrument. It wrote.
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: The sound of it carried through the silence, a steady
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: patient scratching, each stroke placed exactly where it belonged, the
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: whole hall watching, and no one breathing. Belshazzar's wine cup
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: dropped from his fingers. The book describes what happened to
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: his body with clinical precision. His face went pale, his
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: thoughts terrified him. His knees knocked together, his legs gave
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: way beneath him. This was what happens to a human
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: body when the architecture of its assumptions collapses all at once,
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: when the certainty that you are protected, that the walls
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: will hold, that the rules you have been playing by
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: are the real rules, is suddenly and completely gone. The
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: hand finished writing and disappeared. Four words on the wall
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: mina mana tekel Parsin. Belshazzar found his voice and used
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: it to summon every wise man in Babylon. They filed in,
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: studied the words, consulted their systems of knowledge, and said
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: nothing useful. The knowledge that would make those words readable
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: was not in their library. None of them could read it.
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: Then the Queen Mother entered the hall, old calm, the
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: composed stillness of some one who has outlasted enough crises
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: to know there is usually a path through them, if
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: you stay steady enough to find it. She looked at
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: the king's face and said quietly, there is a man
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: in your kingdom. Send for him. His name is Daniel.
• 58:48
  Speaker 1: Daniel came. He did not hurry. He walked into that
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: enormous hall with its thousand frightened nobles, and its overturned cups,
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: and the four words still visible on the wall in
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: the torchlight, And he looked at the king with the
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: steadiness of a man who has already lived through several
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: endings and knows what they look like from the inside.
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: Belchazar offered him purple and gold and the third highest
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: position in the kingdom if he could read the writing.
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: Daniel looked at the king, then at the wall, then
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: back at the king. Keep your gifts, he said, give
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: your rewards to someone else. But I will read the
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: writing and tell you what it means. Then, before he
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: touched the writing on the wall at all, he turned
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: to history. He told Belshazar about his grandfather, not as
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: a lecture, as a mirror. He described Nebuchadnezzar's greatness, his pride,
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: the seven years in the field, the single morning the
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: king looked up and everything was restored. He told it
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: in the voice of someone who had been inside that
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: story for every day of it. He was handing Belshazzar
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: the map that would explain where he was about to
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: find himself. And then the sentence that no one else
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: in that room had the standing or the courage to say,
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: But you, his grandson, have not humbled yourself. Though you
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: knew all this. You knew your grandfather did not know.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 1: He had to learn through seven years of grass and dew.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: But you had the story, You had the record. Daniel
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: himself was standing in your court, a living witness of
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 1: everything God had done in Babylon across fifty years. And
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: you knew, and you lifted the cup anyway. You set
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: yourself up against the Lord of heaven. You brought out
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: his vessels and drank from them in honor of gods
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: of silver and gold and wood and stone, which cannot
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: see or hear or understand. But you did not honor
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: the God who holds in his hand your life and
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: all your ways. The room was completely silent. Then Daniel
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: read the wall Mahna numbered. God has numbers the days
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: of your reign and brought it to an end. Mene
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: again confirmed the numbering is done. There is no appeal
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: tekel Weed. You have been weighed on the scales and
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: found wanting pars in divided. Your kingdom is divided and
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: given to the Medes and Persians. The silence that followed
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: was different from any silence the hall had held before,
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: the silence of something final, the silence of a room
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: full of people who understood in their bodies, before their
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: minds caught up that they had just heard something that
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: could not be undone. Belshazzar gave Daniel the purple robe
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: and the gold chain, a king keeping a promise in
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: the last hours of his kingdom, perhaps the only thing
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: left that felt like agency over anything. That same night,
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: outside the walls that had never been breached, Cyrus's engineers
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: had diverted the euphrates up stream the water level inside them.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: The city dropped the iron grates that covered the river's
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: passage beneath the walls, lifted out of the water. The
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: river bed became passable in the dark of the night,
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: while the feast continued, and the wine flowed, and the
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: sacred cups of Jerusalem passed from hand to hand. The
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: Persian army walked through the river bed, under the walls
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: of Babylon, into the heart of the city. The guards
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: were at the feast. The soldiers moved through the streets
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: without opposition. They reached the palace, they broke through the doors,
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: and before the night was over, Belshazar was dead. The
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: Empire of Babylon, the head of Gold, fell in a
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: single night. Daniel received this news from wherever he was.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: We do not know the details of that moment. We
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: know only that he had seen it coming, that he
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: had read the words himself and translated them plainly, and
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: walked out of the hall with the gold chain around
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: his neck, and the knowledge of what the night would bring.
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: He had been a witness to the ending of a world,
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: and not a satisfied witness. He had lived in this
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: city for decades. Some part of it had become, in
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: the complicated and unwonted and entirely real way that exile
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: makes a home out of whatever it gives you his home.
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: The language he thought in the streets, he knew, the
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: river he could hear from his window at night. All
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 1: of it dissolving. There is a grief that has no
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: simple name, the grief of watching something end that you
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: never loved but had learned to inhabit. The grief of
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: the familiar becoming unfamiliar, of the world reorganizing itself around
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: you into a shape you do not yet recognize. It
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: is not the same as losing something precious, but it
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: is real. Daniel had been fifteen when Babylon took Jerusalem
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: from him. He was in his late sixties, perhaps older,
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: when Babylon itself was taken. He had outlasted the empire.
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: Every era ends, Every wall that seemed permanent eventually comes
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: down by a river running beneath it, or by some
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: other means that no one inside the walls was watching for.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: The question has never been whether the ending will come.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: The question has always been who you are when it arrives.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: What you carried faithfully through the era that ended, What
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: the ending found intact in you that the era could
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: not touch. Daniel had kept the window open through all
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: of it. He had prayed west, through Nebucadnezzar and Belshazzar,
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: and now through the night Babylon fell. He had given
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: his best to a place that was not his own
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: without surrendering the deepest thing that made him who he was.
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: And when the empire ended, that thing was still there,
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: still intact, still his, still worth the faithfulness it had cost.
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: The same will be true for you. Whatever era you
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: are in tonight, whatever chapter of your life feels like
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: it is ending or beginning or suspended, somewhere uncertain in between,
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: there is something in you that the era cannot touch.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: The part that turns toward God, the direction you choose
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: to face, the window you keep opening, that will still
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: be there on the morning after every ending. Let the
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: night be quiet now, Let whatever is changing in your
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: life rest in the hands of the one who has
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: overseen every empire and every ending since history began. He
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: was not surprised by what happened to Babylon. He is
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: not surprised by what is happening in your life. He
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: holds it all. Sleep well, beloved. Every ending has a
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: morning after it, and the window is still worth opening.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: Chapter six. The old man at the window. He was
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: past seventy years old. Let that number settle before anything
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: else happened in this chapter. Seventy years of waking up
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: in a city that was not his Seventy years of
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: going to work for kings who did not share his god,
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: his language, his memory of what home smelled like in
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: the early morning, seventy years of being the foreigner in
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: the room who somehow kept getting promoted. Seventy years of
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: a life that had been given to him by circumstance
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: rather than chosen. And every single day of those seventy years,
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: three times a day he opened the window, turned west
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: and prayed. Not because it was required, not because anyone
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: was watching, not because he had calculated that the practice
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: was producing visible results, because Jerusalem was west, because the
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 1: God he served was listening, Because after seven decades of
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: this single daily act, the practice had become inseparable from
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: who he was. The window did not remind him to prey.
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: The window was simply what he opened. The direction was
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: simply the direction he faced, like a tree that has
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: grown toward light for so long that it no longer
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: chooses to lean. Darius the Mead had taken the throne
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: after Cyrus conquered Babylon. He reorganized the empire into one
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: hundred and twenty provinces, appointed governors over each of them,
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: and placed three senior administrators above the governors to keep
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: the whole system accountable. He made Daniel one of the three.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: This was not sentiment. Darius was not being kind to
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: an old man who had served previous regimes. He looked
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: at Daniel and saw what every ruler who had ever
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: worked alongside him eventually saw. A mind that did not
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: cut corners, a character that did not bend under pressure,
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: A man who would not steal from him, would not
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: lie to protect himself, would not use his position to
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: quietly benefit at the empire's expense. He intended to put
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: Daniel over the entire kingdom, and this is where the
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: problem began. The other administrators and governors had been watching
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: Daniel for years. They had watched him survive Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar,
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: and the fall of Babylon, and emerge under Darius as
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: if the transition had been arranged specifically for his benefit.
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: They had watched this foreigner from Judah accumulate influence through
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: every regime change, landing on his feet with a consistency
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: that felt less like luck and more like something they
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: could not name and therefore resented. They decided to act.
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 1: They investigated his work. They searched his accounts, his decisions,
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: his records from every year of every position he had
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: ever held. They looked for the error, the small corruption,
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: the moment where personal interest had quietly overridden professional integrity.
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: Every official who has ever held power has such a moment.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: It is in the cynical wisdom of career bureaucrats, simply
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: the nature of things. They found nothing. The book records
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: this with a plainness that carries its own weight. They
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: could find no corruption in him, because he was trustworthy
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: and neither corrupt nor negligent, not one thing. So they
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: took the only angle that remained. They would not attack
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: his work, They would attack his God. They went to
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: Darius together, a co ordinated group, radiating the air of
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: men who had arrived at a consensus through independent and
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: careful deliberation. They proposed a new decree. For thirty days,
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: no petition was to be made to any God or
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: any man except Darius himself. Violation meant the lions. Darius
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: signed it, perhaps out of vanity, perhaps because a room
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: full of advisers nodding together creates a momentum that is
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: difficult to refuse without seeming suspicious of your own court.
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: Perhaps simply because it seemed uncomplicated and flattering, and he
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: did not read the thing carefully enough to understand what
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: he was actually signing. Whatever his reason, his pen touched
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: the scroll, and in the law of the Meads and Persians,
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: what was signed could not be revoked, not by any one,
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: not even by the king who signed it. The men
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: knew exactly what they had constructed, a cage built from
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: law itself, baited with the one habit in Daniel's life
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: that was known to everyone in the palace. Because his
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: prayer window was not a secret, it had never been
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: a secret. For seventy years. Three times a day, the
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: window opened and the old man from Judah faced west
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: and prayed. Every servant knew it, every guard knew it.
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: Everyone who had ever worked in that palace knew it.
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: They had built the trap around the most visible thing
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: in his life. Daniel learned about the decree the same
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: day it was signed. He went home. He went to
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: his room, opened the window, turned toward Jerusalem, and knelt
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: exactly as he had always done, same time, same posture,
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: same window, open to the street below, visible from exactly
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: the angle the men had positioned themselves to see it.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: Stay with this for a moment, because this is the
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: heart of everything in this chapter. He did not close
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: the window. He did not move to the center of
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: the room away from the view of the street. He
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: did not quietly pray internally without the outward posture. He
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: did not take a thirty day sabbatical from the public habit.
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: He opened the window, not as defiance. Defiance is still
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: oriented toward the thing you are defying. Daniel was not
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: oriented toward the decree. He was oriented toward Jerusalem. The
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: decree was simply a thing that existed in the world.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: That and he continued doing what he had always done,
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: the way a river does not defy the rocks it
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: flows past. It simply keeps moving in its direction. After
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: seventy years of opening that window, closing it would not
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: have been prudence. It would have been the surrender of
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: something that had no price. He was not willing to
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: pay that price. The men saw him, they hurried to
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: the king. Darius heard the accusation, and the text says
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: he was greatly distressed. He spent the entire day trying
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: to find a way around the law. He had signed
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: every legal mechanism, every written precedent, every angle that might
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: allow him to spare the man he valued most in
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: his administration. He consulted, he searched, He turned the problem
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: over from every direction. There was no way out. At sunset,
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: the men returned, They said, with the satisfaction of people
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: who have planned carefully and execute it perfectly. Remember o
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: King that no decree can be changed. Darius looked at Daniel.
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: He had valued this man. He had watched him work
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: alongside him through every crisis of the new administration. He
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: had found in Daniel a quality he could not find
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: anywhere else in the entire empire. And now the law
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: he had carelessly signed required him to destroy the person
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: he most respected. The law was doing exactly what his
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: enemies had designed it to do, and he had helped
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: them by not reading carefully enough. He gave the order,
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: but before the stone was sealed over the entrance to
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 1: the den, Darius said something directly to Daniel, in front
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: of every one present, in his own voice, May your God,
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: whom you serve, continually rescue you, not your gods, Your
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: God singular, the specific god that Dorius had watched this
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: old man serve without interruption through every mtre and every
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: crisis across every year they had worked together. The god
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: Darius did not worship, but had come through nothing more
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: than watching one faithful person open one window three times
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: a day for years to believe was real in a
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 1: way that none of the gods of his own tradition
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: had ever quite managed to be. The stone was sealed,
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: Darius went back to the palace. He refused food, he
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: refused entertainment. He paced alone, the most powerful man on earth,
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: unable to sleep because he genuinely cared about what was
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: happening at the bottom of a pit he had helped
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: to create. There is something deeply and simply human about
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: Darius in this moment. He is not a villain. He
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: is not a hero. He is a man awake in
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: the dark because a decision made carelessly is now costing
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: someone he valued his life. That kind of night is
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: recognizable to most people, the long hours of lying awake
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: in the full weight of something you cannot undo, waiting
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: for a morning that might bring news you cannot bear
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: to receive. Be still here for a moment, Let the
• 1:15:10
  Speaker 1: night settle around you. Let your own long hours of
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: lying awake find some company in Darius pacing in his palace,
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: genuinely distressed, genuinely powerless. You have had nights like that too,
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: perhaps when the thing you were helpless about was real
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: and the waiting was real, and the morning felt far away.
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: At the first light of dawn, Darius ran. The text
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 1: says he hurried. He went quickly before any one had assembled,
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: before the official day had begun, to the sealed entrance
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: of the den. He called out, Daniel, servant of the
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: Living God, has your God, whom you serve continually been
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: able to rescue you from the lions. The silence after
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: that question held everything the night had cost. And then
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: from inside the sealed darkness a voice, O King live forever.
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: of the lions. They have not hurt me because I
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: was found innocent in his sight, Nor have I ever
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: done any wrong before you, O King. Darius was overjoyed.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: He ordered Daniel lifted out immediately. No wound was found
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: on him. The lions had been fully capable. The den
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: was real, the night was real. The trust that had
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: sustained seventy years of open windows had sustained one night
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 1: in a sealed darkness. The men who had set the
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 1: trap were brought and thrown in. The lions overpowered them immediately.
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: The text includes this detail to make clear that the
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: animals had not been gentle or tame. Their restraint with
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: Daniel had been something other than natural. Darius wrote a
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: new decree and sent it to every part of the empireire,
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: in every part of my kingdom. People must fear and
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: reverence the God of Daniel, for he is the living God,
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: and he endures forever. His kingdom will not be destroyed,
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: His dominion will never end. He rescues and he saves.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions,
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: a pagan king writing about the living God in an
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: imperial decree distributed through the most powerful administrative system on
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: earth at that moment, reaching nations and languages and people
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: Daniel never met and would never know. This is what
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: seventy years of faithfulness at a window produced, not just survival,
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: not just continued employment, a royal declaration, carried by the
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: machinery of the Persian Empire to every corner of the
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: known world. Daniel had not planned for this. He had
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: not opened the window because he had calculated it would
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: produce a decree He had opened the window because not
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: opening it was not something he was willing to do.
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: And God turned that one daily, stubborn, unspectacular act into
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: something that reached farther than Daniel could have imagined. On
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: the morning the trap was signed, your faithfulness in private matters,
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: the prayers. Nobody sees, the integrity maintained in conversations that
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: are not recorded, The choice to open the window again
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: this morning, even when yesterday's window produced no visible evidence
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: that any one was on the other side. Those things
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: are not invisible. They are not wasted. They are being built,
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: in the slow and patient economy of God, into something
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: whose reach you cannot currently calculate. Daniel did not know
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: the night he was lowered into the den that a
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: decree was coming. He only knew the window was worth opening.
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: It always is. Let your body settle, now, let the
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: night grow quiet. Whatever you cannot fix to night, whatever
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: you are powerless about, whatever morning you are waiting for,
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: the same God who sent an angel into a sealed
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: den is awake and present in this room. He has
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: not lost track of you in the dark. Sleep well, beloved.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: The window is still worth opening. Chapter seven, The Night
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: the Heavens opened. Before this chapter, Daniel interpreted other people's visions.
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: He explained Nebuchadnezzar's statue, He read the writing on Belshazzar's wall.
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: He stood at the edge of other people's encounters with
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: the divine and translated what they had seen into language
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: the waking world could use. But during the reign of Belshazar,
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 1: something shifted. The visions stopped coming to other people and
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: started coming to Daniel himself. He stopped being the interpreter
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: and became the one who needed interpreting. This transition matters
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: more than it might seem, because what Daniel received in
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: his own visions was different in scale from anything he
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: had been asked to explain before. When nebuchadnezza dreamed, he
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: received a message about his own empire. When Daniel dreamed,
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 1: he received the shape of history itself. And The Book
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: of Daniel is careful in this chapter to record not
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: just what Daniel saw, but what it did to him.
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: He tells us his spirit was troubled, his face turned pale,
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 1: He was deeply disturbed. He kept the matter to himself
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: for a long time. This is not the profile of
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: a man who received a comforting message and went peacefully
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: to sleep. It was night. He was in bed. He
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: had not been fasting or seeking anything special. He simply
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: fell asleep, and the vision came. He saw the great sea,
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: dark and churning, four winds, driving the water into a
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: violence that was beyond all weather. The world was unsettled,
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: nothing was at rest. And from that sea, one after another,
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: the beasts emerged. The first was like a lion, but
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: with the wings of an eagle, powerful, fast, kingly. But
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: in the vision the wings were torn away, and the
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: creature was made to stand on two feet like a man,
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: and a human heart was given to it. An empire
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: stripped of its soaring glory, made ordinary. Daniel recognized Babylon
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: in this, the Empire of Gold, humbled and grounded, given
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: the heart of a man in place of the heart
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: of a conqueror. The second rose like a bear, asymmetric,
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: leaning to one side, with three ribs clenched between its teeth,
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: relentless and hungry, a voice commanding it to devour Persia,
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: already consuming nations. The third was a leopard with four
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: wings and four heads, move moving with impossible speed across
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: vast territory. Alexander's grease sweeping the known world in a decade,
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: fracturing into four. On the day its one extraordinary driver
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: died at thirty two, and then the fourth. Daniel could
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: find no animal to compare it to. He simply described
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: what he saw terrifying, dreadful, exceedingly strong, with great iron
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: teeth that crushed and devoured and trampled everything before them,
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: ten horns on its head, different from all the others
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: in equality, that was not just greater power, but a
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: different kind of power altogether. Rome, the empire that would
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: crucify rebels on roadsides as a message to the living,
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: that would reduce Jerusalem to rubble within a generation of
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: its greatest teacher's death. While Daniel watched the fourth beast,
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: a small horn grew among the ten, pushing three aside.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: It had eyes like a man's eyes, and a mouth
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: speaking great, boastful words upward, aimed at the throne of
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: Heaven itself. Daniel felt the weight of what he was
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: seeing pressing down on him. He had lived inside empires
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: his whole life. He knew in his body what iron
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: teeth meant for real people in real cities. He had
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: watched Babylon take Jerusalem at fifteen, he understood what conquest
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: cost in human terms, and now he was being shown
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: four of them, each more terrible than the last, and
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: this voice, small and cunning and contemptuous, speaking against the
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: very throne above all thrones. Then the scene changed without transition.
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: The darkness and roaring gave way the way one reality
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: in a dream can simply become another. And what replaced
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: it was so completely different in quality and texture that
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: Daniel's mind had to reset entirely to receive it. Thrones
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: were set in place, many thrones, not one. A ra
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: ringed as in a court of judgment, and the ancient
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: of days took his seat. Let the room grow quiet here,
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: let your body grow still, because what comes next in
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: this vision is the image that Daniel carried for the
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: rest of his life, the image that the whole book
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: has been building toward. His clothing was white as snow,
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: not the white of washed fabric, the white of something
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: that has never been stained, a white that came from within,
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: purity so complete it had become luminous. His hair like wool,
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: not the white of aging, the white of eternity, something
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: that existed before the concept of beginning, that had no
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: first moment, because it had always been. The throne was fire,
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: not a throne decorated with fire, made of fire, burning
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: with the holiness that is not warmth, but truth, the
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: kind of fire that does not consume what is precious,
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: but burns away everything that is not. Rivers of fire
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: flowing outward from before it, thousands upon thousands attending it,
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: ten thousand times ten thousand, standing before it. And the
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: books were opened. Daniel saw them the vast records everything
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 1: that had ever been done in the world, that God
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: had made, every act of kindness in rooms no one
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 1: had witnessed, every act of cruelty in rooms every one
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: had pretended not to see. All of it, recorded, nothing missing.
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: The beasts were judged, the fourth was destroyed, the others
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: stripped of their authority, their seasons ended, their empires concluded.
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: And then the air in the vision changed again from
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: the direction of the clouds of heaven. A figure approached
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: the throne, one like a son of man, not a beast,
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: not a monster, someone who looked human, who had the
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: appearance of some one who had walked the earth, who
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: knew what dust felt like beneath the feet, and what
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: sorrow felt like inside the chest, and he came wrapped
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: in the specific atmosphere of the divine, the clouds that
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: in the Hebrew scriptures from Sinai to the Temple had
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: always marked the presence of God moving through the world.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: his presence, and what was given to him was the
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: direct opposite of everything Daniel had watched happen to the beasts, authority, glory,
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: sovereign power, all peoples, all nations, all languages not taken
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: by conquest. Given the Ancient of Days placed it in
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: his hands the way a father places something irreplaceable in
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: the hands of a son. His dominion is an everlasting
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: one that will never be destroyed. Many within the Christian tree, addition,
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: understand this figure as the Messiah, the one whom Jesus
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: himself pointed to when he stood before the High Priest
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: and said, you will see the Son of Man coming
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: on the clouds of heaven. Many scholars across different backgrounds
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: have noted the direct connection between the language of Daniel's
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: vision and the language Jesus used of himself. Whatever one
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: makes of the full interpretation. What the text is describing
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: is a kingdom that arrives from entirely outside the system
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: of human power, a kingdom that cannot be built by
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: ambition or maintained by force. A kingdom that outlasts every beast,
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: every boasting voice, every iron tooth, A kingdom that will
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: never end. Daniel asked a heavenly being in the vision
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: for the meaning. The answer was this, The four beasts
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: are four kingdoms, but the saints of the Most High
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: will receive the kingdom and possess it forever. The beasts
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: had their time, the iron teeth had their season, every
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: boasting voice was given its measured span. And then the
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: court sat and the books were opened, and everything changed.
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: Daniel lay down that night, with his face pale and
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: his spirit troubled. He kept the vision to himself. He
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: did not rush to explain it to any one. He
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: turned it over in his mind, the way you turn
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: over something that is too large to fully hold, too
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 1: important to get wrong, too real to dismiss with easy summary.
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: He wrote it down eventually, carefully, for the people who
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: would come after him, for the people living inside the
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: fourth Kingdom, who would need to know that iron teeth
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: are not the last word for the people who would
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: read these words on quiet nights, tired carrying the weight
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: of a world that often feels exactly like the churning
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: dark sea. The vision began with. The throne is still there,
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: above the churning, above the beasts, above every voice that
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: speaks against heaven, above every empire that calls itself permanent.
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: The ancient of days has not moved from it. Whatever
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: this night contains, whatever beast feels like it is prevailing
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: right now, whatever is loud in the world. Right now.
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: You are not living in the final frame of this story.
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: A court has been seated, the books are open, The
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: kingdom has been given. Let your body grow heavy now,
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: let your mind grow still. Let the throne that Daniel
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: saw be the last image in your thoughts before sleep arrives.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: The one seated there is not anxious, He is not improvising.
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: He is not surprised by anything happening in the world.
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: Right now. He is seated, and the kingdom that was
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: given is everlasting. Sleep well, beloved. The throne is occupied,
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: and the window is still worth opening. Chapter eight, the
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: weight of knowing. Two years had passed since the Night
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: of the beasts and the throne. Two years of carrying it,
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: every morning Daniel woke and the vision was still there,
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: not fading the way ordinary dreams fade, present, pressed against
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: the inside of his chest, like a truth still being unpacked,
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: one quiet layer at a time. He had gone about
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: the work of the empire. He had attended to his duties,
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: he had served faithfully as he always served faithfully. And
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: every day the vision was there in the background, too
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: large to fully hold, too important to put down. Then
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: a second vision came. This one arrived while he was awake,
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: standing beside a canal in Sousa, the water moving quietly
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: at his feet, the sky clear above him, the ordinary
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 1: world visible on all sides. And then as he stood there,
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: the vision began. He saw a ram at the bank
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: of the canal, two long horns, one growing up later
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: than the other and becoming the taller one. The ram
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: charged in every direction west, north, south. Nothing could stand
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: against it. It did as it pleased and became great,
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: And then from the west a goat. It crossed the
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 1: whole earth without its feet touching the ground, moving with
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: a speed that belonged to no natural animal. Between its eyes,
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: one prominent horn, large and powerful, and it came toward
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: the ram with a fury that was not just territorial
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: but personal, driven by something beyond ordinary ambition. The goat
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: struck the ram. Both horns shattered. The ram fell and
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: was trampled. There was no one to rescue it. The
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: goat became very great, and then, at the height of
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: its power, the large horn was suddenly broken off. Four
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: horns grew in its place, one pointing in each direction
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: of the compass, and from one of the four a
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: small horn, starting small, growing toward the south and the east,
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: and toward what the vision called the beautiful land Jerusalem.
• 1:32:20
  Speaker 1: Daniel felt the weight settle on him like stone. He
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: had grown up in Jerusalem. He had stood in the
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: temple court as a boy and heard the morning sacrifice
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: begin as the sun came over the eastern hills. The
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: daily sacrifice was not a theological concept to him. It
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: was the sound of home, the smell of the first
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: morning he could remember. And now he was watching something
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: move toward it, something small and cunning that grew until
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: it reached the host of heaven and throw some of
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: the stars to the earth, and set itself up against
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: the Prince of Heaven's armies and took away the daily
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: sacrifice and cast truth to the ground. Heard a voice
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: ask how long, and the answer came two thousand, three
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: hundred evenings and mornings. Then the sanctuary would be reconsecrated
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: a limit, a measured time, which meant it was not permanent.
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: That was the mercy inside, the terrible specificity of what
• 1:33:19
  Speaker 1: was being shown. And then Gabriel appeared. A voice called
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: from across the canal, Gabriel tell this man the meaning
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: of the vision. As Gabriel came near, Daniel felt what
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: he had felt before in the presence of heavenly things,
• 1:33:35
  Speaker 1: not the fear of a threat, but the fear of
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: something from a different order of reality. He fell face down.
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: He fell into a deep sleep on the ground. A
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 1: hand touched him, raised him to his feet. Understand, son
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: of man, that the vision concerns the time of the end,
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: Gabriel explained. The ram with two horns was the meadow
• 1:33:59
  Speaker 1: Persian Empire. The two horns the Meads and Persians. The
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: longer horn, growing up later, was Persia, which became the
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: dominant partner. Together they had swept the ancient world, charging
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: in every direction, unstoppable the goat from the west was Greece.
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: The large horn was the first king History would give
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: that king a name. Alexander of Macedon born in three
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: hundred fifty six before Christ. By his mid twenties, he
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: was dismantling the Persian Empire with a speed that defied
• 1:34:33
  Speaker 1: every previous understanding of how armies could move. He crossed
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: into Asia, fought at the Granicus at Issus at Gaugamela,
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: moved through Persia and Egypt, and on into lands as
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: far east as what is now Afghanistan and India, moving
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: so fast that his feet seemed not to touch the ground,
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: exactly as the vision had shown. And then the horn
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: was broken. Alexander died in Babylon in three hundred twenty five,
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: three before Christ. He was thirty two years old. The
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: largest empire the world had yet seen, built in a
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: decade by the speed and genius of one person. Suddenly
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: without the one person who had held it together by
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: sheer force of will and personality, his generals divided it.
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: Cassander Lisimachus Selecus Ptolemy four horns pointing in four directions,
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: History written in advance, in exact detail by someone who
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: was not guessing. Be still for a moment here before,
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: Gabriel continues, just let this rest in you. The vision
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: had been given centuries before Alexander was born, and it
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: described not just that an empire from the west would
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: overthrow Persia, but that the leader of that empire would
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: die at the height of his power, and the empire
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: would split into exactly. For this is not the pattern
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 1: of a general prophecy that could fit many situations. This
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 1: is the precision of someone who wrote history before it happened.
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: Let that truth settle in you, like something solid, before
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: the weight of what comes next arrives. Gabriel came to
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: the most troubling part of the vision, the small Horn.
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: He described it plainly. A stern faced king, a master
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: of intrigue, strong but not by his own power, destructive, successful,
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: set against the prince of princes, but he would be destroyed,
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: not by human hands. This was Antiochus Epiphanes, ruler of
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: the Seleucid kingdom from one hundred seventy five to one
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: hundred sixty four before Christ. He named himself Epiphanies, meaning
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: God manifest. He considered himself divine. He acted accordingly. In
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: one hundred sixty seven before Christ he entered Jerusalem, he
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: stopped the daily sacrifice in the temple. He set up
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: an altar to the Greek god Zeus in the Holy
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: of Holies, the most sacred room in the most sacred
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 1: building in the world, and sacrificed a pig on it.
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: For Daniel, this was not merely a political event. The
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: daily sacrifice, the holy place, the altar, where the conversation
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 1: between Heaven and Earth was maintained by the hands of
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: the priests, all of it stopped by a man who
• 1:37:23
  Speaker 1: called himself a god. He who had grown up with
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: the sound of the morning sacrifice was now being shown
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: that it would be silenced. The Vision gave the number
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: two thousand, three hundred days, roughly six and a half years,
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: and then the sanctuary would be reconsecrated. What the vision
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: promised history fulfilled. In one hundred sixty four before Christ,
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: Antiochus died far from home while retreating from a failed
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: military campaign. He was despised even by his own people,
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: not by human power, exactly as the Vision had said,
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: and a family called the Maccabees, faithful Jews who had
• 1:38:03
  Speaker 1: refused to bow, reclaimed the temple cleansed it and rededicated
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: it to the Lord. The daily sacrifice resumed every year
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: since then, the Jewish people have lit candles to remember
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: this Hanukah, the feast of dedication, a celebration of the
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: faithfulness of a God who numbered the days of the
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: defilement before they began. Many scholars who study this vision
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: across different traditions have observed that Antiochus may also serve
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: as a pattern, a foreshadowing of a figure at the
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: end of the age who will make the same defiance
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: at a larger scale. Others see the prophecy as entirely
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: fulfilled in the historical Antiochus. Both readings take the text seriously.
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: What all agree on is this The God who gave
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: Daniel these words knew every detail of what was coming.
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: He was not surprised by Antiochus. He counted the days
• 1:38:58
  Speaker 1: before the defilement began. Gabriel finished speaking, Daniel was exhausted,
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: the specific exhaustion of having received more than a person
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 1: can hold comfortably. He fell ill for several days. When
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: he recovered, he went back to the king's business, but
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: his heart, the text says, was troubled. He sealed the
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: vision as Gabriel instructed. He wrote it down for later,
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: for the people who would need it when the appointed
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: time came, and he went back to the window. Let
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: the room grow quiet here because this chapter, more than
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: any other, is about a very specific human experience that
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: does not get named very often, the experience of carrying
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: something true that you cannot fully share, the grief too
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 1: specific or too large to explain to the people around you,
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: the understanding arrived at through your particular journey that lives
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: inside you, real and present and sometimes very heavy, with
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: nowhere to put it down, and no one who quite
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: gets the full weight of it. Daniel spent years carrying
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: sealed visions. He knew things about the future that he
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: could not use yet. He had been given truths the
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: world was not ready to receive, and he went about
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: his daily work with all of it pressing against the
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: inside of his chest, unknown to every one around him,
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: known fully only to the one who had given it.
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 1: You are not carrying whatever you carry alone to night.
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 1: The God who gave Daniel things too large for the
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: world around him to receive, and who sustained him through
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 1: decades of carrying them, sees exactly what you are holding.
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: Right now. You do not have to understand it fully.
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: You do not have to explain it to someone who
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: will understand.
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 2: You.
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: Only have to bring it to the one who gave
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: it to you, and trust that he holds what you cannot.
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: Let the canal flow quietly beside you, Let the night
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: be still. He knows what you are carrying, every detail,
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: every weight of it. Sleep well, beloved. He has not
• 1:41:04
  Speaker 1: forgotten what he placed in your hands, and the window
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: is still worth opening Chapter nine, The Prayer that Split
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 1: the Sky. There is a moment in every long life
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: when you pick up something you have read many times
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 1: before and find it reading differently, not because the words changed,
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: because you did. Daniel was somewhere in his late sixties
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: when he sat down with the scroll of the prophet Jeremiah.
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: He had read these words before many times. He had
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: carried them in his memory through decades of exile as
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: a kind of distant lamp, something that said this will
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: end eventually. But this time reading them something opened. Jeremiah
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: had written, when seventy years are completed for Babylon, I
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: will come to you and fulfill my good promise to
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: bring you back seventy years. Daniel counted he had been
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 1: taken from Jerusalem in the year six hundred and five
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: before Christ. He was now in the first year of
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: Darius the Mead, the year after Babylon fell. Nearly seventy
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: years had passed. His heart lifted. Then he looked up
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: from the scroll. Jerusalem was still in ruins, The temple
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: was still rubble. The people of Judah were still scattered
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: across the Empire, assimilated into foreign cities, their grandchildren perhaps
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: not knowing the songs their grandparents had sung on the
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: way to the morning sacrifice. What was God waiting for?
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 1: And then slowly an understanding arrived that was sobering in
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 1: its simplicity. The return would not happen because the clock
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: had run out. It would happen because God was merciful,
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: and the people had not yet done the thing that
• 1:42:56
  Speaker 1: opened the door to that mercy. They had not turned,
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: and not really, not in the deep, honest, corporate way
• 1:43:05
  Speaker 1: that acknowledged the full reality of what they had done
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: and the full justice of what had happened to them
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: because of it. Daniel understood this, and he understood something else.
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: He was the only person positioned to do anything about it.
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: He could not organize a movement. He had no political
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: authority over the scattered Jewish communities across the empire. He
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: could not build something that would repair the situation from
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: the outside. But he could stand before God on behalf
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: of his people and say everything that needed to be said.
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: He set the scroll down, He took off his robe,
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: He put on sackcloth. He covered his head with ashes,
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: not performance, not theater, the physical expression of an interior
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 1: state that was entirely real. And he began to pray.
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: He began with who God was, not with the request, est,
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: not with the problem. He stood before the face of
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: the one he was addressing and said, what was actually
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: true about him, O, Lord, the great and awesome God,
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: who keeps his covenant of love with all who love
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 1: him and obey his commands. He said this not as flattery,
• 1:44:19
  Speaker 1: as orientation, as the honest acknowledgment that before you can
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: ask anything truly, you have to stand truly in front
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: of the one you are asking. Then he said, who
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: his people were? We have sinned and done wrong. We
• 1:44:35
  Speaker 1: have been wicked and have rebelled. We have turned away
• 1:44:38
  Speaker 1: from your commands and laws. We have not listened noticed
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: the word. We not They not the ancestors who made
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: the decisions that led here, not the bad kings or
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 1: the spiritually negligent generations. We he included himself. He belonged
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: to these people. Their failure was his failure to carry.
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 1: Their need for mercy was his to seek. He moved
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 1: through the prayer without hurry. He confessed the shame, He
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: acknowledged the justice of the exile. He did not argue
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: with the verdict. From inside that acceptance, he began to ask, O, Lord,
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 1: in keeping with all your righteous acts, turn away your
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: anger and your wrath from Jerusalem. He grounded the request
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: not in what the people deserved, but in who God was.
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: The city bore his name as long as it lay
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: in rubble. The name it bore was in rubble too.
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: If God was who he had always claimed to be,
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: then Jerusalem's restoration was his concern as much as theirs.
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: We do not make requests of you because we are righteous,
• 1:45:49
  Speaker 1: but because of your great mercy. The prayer built from
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: confession into intercession, from acknowledgment into desperation, until at the
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: end it arrived at its most honest and most urgent place.
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: O Lord, listen, O Lord, forgive O Lord, hear and
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: act for your sake. O, my God, do not delay
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: for your sake, not for hours, for yours, because you
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: are the kind of God who keeps covenant, because your
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: character is the ground of this request, Because we have
• 1:46:26
  Speaker 1: nothing to offer except the turning itself. He was still
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: speaking still in the middle of the sentence, and the
• 1:46:34
  Speaker 1: air changed. A warmth arrived that had not been there,
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 1: a light that was not the lamp or the sun,
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: and from within it a figure Gabriel, the same messenger
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: who had appeared twice before, the same angel who would
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: centuries later appear to a young woman in a small
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 1: Galilean town and change the course of history. Gabriel spoke gently, Daniel,
• 1:47:00
  Speaker 1: I have come to give you insight and understanding. As
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: soon as you began to pray, an answer was given.
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: And I have come to tell you, for you are
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 1: highly esteemed. Stop as soon as you began to pray,
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: not when you finished, not when you had prayed well
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: enough or long enough. The moment the prayer began, the
• 1:47:21
  Speaker 1: answer was already in motion. Gabriel had left before Daniel's
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: first sentence was complete. The journey had taken the entire
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: length of the prayer, and now they were in the
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: same room, the old man still on his knees, and
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: the Angel arriving at the end of a journey that
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: had started at the beginning. The Answer was already traveling
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: before the prayer was finished. Let that be true for
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: a moment. Let it do what it does to every
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: time you have prayed and heard nothing, Every time the
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: ceiling felt low and the words felt like they were
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: going nowhere, The Answer left before you finished the first sentence.
• 1:47:59
  Speaker 1: Gabriel did delivered what he had come to say. Seventy
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: weeks are decreed for your people and your holy city,
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: not weeks of days, weeks of years, seventy times seven,
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: four hundred and ninety years. And within those years, six
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: things would be accomplished, to finish transgression, to put an
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in
• 1:48:26
  Speaker 1: everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, to anoint
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: the most Holy. Daniel had prayed about the return from exile,
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: God answered about the redemption of the world. He had
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: asked about Jerusalem. God answered from the altitude of eternity itself.
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: Gabriel gave the specific numbers from the decree to restore
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 1: and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One comes, there would
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: be sixty nine weeks of years. The decree to restore
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: and rebuild Jerusalem was issued by King Artaxerxes of Persia
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: in the year four hundred and fifty seven before Christ.
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 1: It is recorded in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah.
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: The command was explicit go back rebuild the city. Many
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: scholars who study this prophecy within the Christian tradition, using
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: the prophetic calendar of three hundred sixty days per year
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: that was common in ancient Near Eastern reckoning, have calculated
• 1:49:25
  Speaker 1: that sixty nine prophetic weeks of years from the decree
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: of art Exerxes points toward the era of the first century,
• 1:49:32
  Speaker 1: the era in which Jesus of Nazareth began his public ministry.
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: This calculation is held by many careful scholars who take
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: both the text and history seriously. It is worth saying
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: plainly that these timelines involve interpretation, and thoughtful people who
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: approach this passage with equal seriousness have arrived at different
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: conclusions about the precise details. What is beyond dispute is
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: this Gabriel was describing the an Anointed One, the Messiah
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: arriving in history at an appointed time, according to a
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: plan that had been in motion for centuries before any
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 1: one was born. And then Gabriel said something that passed
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: through Daniel like a blade. After the sixty two weeks,
• 1:50:15
  Speaker 1: the anointed one will be cut off and will have
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: nothing cut off the Hebrew word means removed, executed. The
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: Messiah would come, and the Messiah would be killed, not
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: as accident, not as tragedy that might have been avoided,
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: as the appointed event at the center of the four
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: hundred and ninety years. Gabriel continued, the city and the
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: sanctuary would be destroyed again. In the year seventy after Christ,
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: the Roman army under the general Titus, surrounded Jerusalem, broke
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: through the walls, burned the temple, and left not one
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: stone standing on another, exactly as the vision had said.
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: The final week of the seventy has been understood differently
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: by different scholars across many centuries and traditions. Some see
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: it as completed in the first century. Others see it
• 1:51:08
  Speaker 1: pointing toward events still ahead. What all agree on is this,
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: every word Gabriel spoke that night has been moving toward
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: its fulfillment with the same patient precision as every word
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: that has already come to pass. Daniel sat in the aftermath.
• 1:51:25
  Speaker 1: He had prayed for the return from exile. God answered
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: with the plan that all of history had been moving
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 1: toward since before Daniel was born. He had asked about
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem's restoration. God answered with the coming of the one
• 1:51:39
  Speaker 1: who would make all things new. He had brought God
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: a small and honest prayer, and God answered from the
• 1:51:46
  Speaker 1: full height of eternity. Gabriel was gone, the warmth was gone,
• 1:51:51
  Speaker 1: the room was quiet. Daniel sat alone for a long time.
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: He did not understand everything. He was not expected to.
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: He was expected to receive faithfully and to trust completely,
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: and to write it down for the people who would
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: need it later. He was right that they would need it.
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 1: You are reading it to night, maybe to night. You
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 1: are bringing God something small, a specific ache, a practical concern,
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: something that feels modest in the scale of things, something
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 1: you are almost apologetic about bringing to the attention of
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: the one who holds all of history. Bring it. The
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: answer is already leaving before you finish the first sentence.
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: He is not waiting for sufficient eloquence. He is not
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 1: waiting for the right spiritual posture or the correct theological precision.
• 1:52:42
  Speaker 1: The turning itself, the first honest movement toward God is enough.
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: You are highly esteemed, not because you earned it, because
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: you turned. Let the room grow quiet. Now, let your
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 1: body settle, Let your thoughts find somewhere to rest. Let
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: to night be what it is, a few hours of
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: stillness in the presence of the one who holds four
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 1: hundred and ninety years and holds you at the same
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 1: time he heard you the moment you began. Sleep Well, beloved,
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 1: he is not far and the window is still worth
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 1: opening Chapter ten, standing at the river's edge, he was
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: very old. Now. The book places this final vision in
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 1: the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia. Daniel had
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: been taken from Jerusalem at fifteen, in the year six
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: hundred and five before Christ. By the time of this
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: last encounter, he was somewhere past eighty years old, perhaps
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: closer to ninety. He had outlasted three empires. His hair
• 1:53:50
  Speaker 1: was white, his body was frail. But the book, which
• 1:53:54
  Speaker 1: has been precise and honest about Daniel throughout, says this clearly,
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: his spirit was still strong, his faith was still steady,
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: and his heart was still turned toward Jerusalem. Three weeks
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: before this chapter begins, something had troubled him. A vision
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 1: had come concerning a great conflict, something that would happen
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 1: to his people, And for three weeks after receiving it,
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: he mourned. He ate no choice food, no meat or wine,
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: no oil on his skin. He simply prayed and fasted,
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: seeking understanding from the God who had been speaking to
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: him since he was a teenager in Chains on an
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: eight hundred mile road. Three weeks twifty one days, on
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: the twenty fourth day of the first month, he was
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: standing on the bank of the Great Tigris River. Other
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: men were with him, ordinary human company, on an ordinary mourning,
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: and then Daniel looked up. The other men did not
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: see what he saw, but something reached them anyway, some
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: disturbance in the quality of the moment, some change in
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 1: the air that had no visible cause. Such terror overwhelmed
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 1: them that they fled and hid themselves. Daniel was left alone,
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: and alone, he saw the figure. He tried to describe it,
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: as he always tried to describe what he saw. He
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: reached for every image available. A man dressed in linen,
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: a belt of the finest gold, his body like chrysolite,
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: a gem that catches light from within and refracts it
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 1: until it seems to glow. His face like lightning, his
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like burnished
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 1: bronze fresh from the fire. And his voice when he spoke,
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: like the sound of a multitude, not one voice, the
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: gathering of all voices into one, the way a great
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: river contains every tributary that has ever flowed into it.
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: Daniel stood alone in front of this, and the strength
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: left his body. He had faced lions, He had delivered
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: unwelcome truths to the most powerful kings in the ancient world.
• 1:56:07
  Speaker 1: He had stood before furnaces and writing on walls, and
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: the sealed dark of a den with no certainty of mourning.
• 1:56:14
  Speaker 1: He had lived inside every form of human intimidation an
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: empire could produce, and had not broken. But this was different.
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: This was not the fear of a threat. This was
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 1: the honest collapse of a finite body standing in front
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: of something infinite, not a failure of courage physics, the
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: human frame cannot maintain its ordinary posture in that presence.
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 1: It was not weakness, it was accuracy. His face went pale,
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: he was helpless. He heard the voice begin to speak,
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: and as he listened, he fell face down on the
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: ground into a deep sleep. A hand touched him. He
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: was trembling on his hands and knees when the voice came. Daniel,
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: you who are highly esteemed, Not you who interpreted correctly,
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: not you who served faithfully, Not you who survived the lions,
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: or read the wall or prayed three times a day
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 1: without exception for seventy years, You who are highly esteemed
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: a name given, not earned, a quality that had been
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: true about Daniel in the eyes of the one speaking
• 1:57:22
  Speaker 1: from before Daniel had done anything, simply because Daniel had
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: turned toward God and kept turning, one morning at a
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: time across the whole span of his very long life.
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: Consider carefully the words I am about to speak to
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: you and stand up for I have now been sent
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 1: to you. Daniel stood, trembling, but standing. Do not be afraid, Daniel.
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: Three words that changed the temperature of the entire moment.
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 1: Not a command, an act of mercy, permission to remain
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: upright in the presence of something that had just knocked
• 1:57:57
  Speaker 1: him off his feet. Since the first day that you
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: before your God. Your words were heard, and I have
• 1:58:06
  Speaker 1: come in response to them. Since the first day, not
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 1: the day you proved yourself, not the day you finally
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: prayed enough or well enough, the first day you turned
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 1: your mind toward understanding and your heart toward humility. The
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 1: response was already set in motion. And then came something
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 1: Daniel had not expected. But the Prince of the Persian
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: kingdom resisted me twenty one days. Then Michael, one of
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: the chief princes, came to help me, because I was
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 1: detained there with the King of Persia twenty one days.
• 1:58:40
  Speaker 1: Daniel had mourned and fasted for exactly twenty one days,
• 1:58:44
  Speaker 1: and for exactly those twenty one days, the messenger sent
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: on the first day had been delayed, not by indifference,
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 1: not by distance, by a conflict in a realm. Daniel
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: could not see a battle between spiritual forces happening simultaneously
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 1: with his fasting, invisible above the surface of the visible world.
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: The Prince of Persia, a spiritual power associated with that kingdom,
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 1: contending against the Messenger of God. It had taken Michael,
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: the Great Archangel, to break through and allow the messenger
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: to reach Daniel let this settle slowly twenty one days
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: of seeking and hearing nothing, not because nothing was happening,
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 1: because the something that was happening was invisible. The answer
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 1: was in transit the entire time, a battle was being
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: fought on his behalf. In the space between the first
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 1: day he turned and the morning the messenger arrived. He
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: could not see any of it. He only felt the silence.
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 1: And the silence was not absence. It was a battlefield.
• 1:59:49
  Speaker 1: The silence is not always absence. Sometimes the silence is
• 1:59:53
  Speaker 1: where the battle you cannot see is being fought on
• 1:59:57
  Speaker 1: your behalf by forces you did not summon and cannot stop.
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: The messenger began to speak. What followed is the most
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: detailed prophecy in all of Scripture. The Angel moved through
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 1: history with a precision that scholars in later centuries would
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: compare point by point with the historical records of Polybius
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 1: and Livy and Josephus and find that the match held
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: at every point. Kings of Persia one after another, the
• 2:00:23
  Speaker 1: Fourth stirring up conflict with Greece. Then the mighty king
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: from the West, Alexander, rising and falling at the height
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: of his power, his kingdom fractured to the four winds.
• 2:00:34
  Speaker 1: Then the long grinding conflict between the kingdoms of the
• 2:00:38
  Speaker 1: North and South Egypt and Syria, with Israel as the
• 2:00:41
  Speaker 1: corridor between them, that every army crossed, alliances arranged and broken,
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 1: daughters given in marriage for political gain, and betrayed, armies
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 1: crossing and recrossing the same hills. The specific history of
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: Antiochus Epiphanes, who had appeared in Daniel's visions being before
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: here described in further devastating detail, his campaigns, his humiliation
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 1: by Rome, his rage turned against Jerusalem, the abomination in
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 1: the Holy of Holies, the faithful who resisted, the Maccabies,
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 1: who fought and won. The Dead Sea scrolls discovered in
• 2:01:21
  Speaker 1: caves near the Jordan River in the twentieth century contained
• 2:01:24
  Speaker 1: fragments of the Book of Daniel that ancient manuscript scholars
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: have dated to the second century before Christ. The prophecy
• 2:01:32
  Speaker 1: was in written form before the events it describes occurred.
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: Scholars who approached this text expecting to find a document
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 1: written after the fact, found instead a text that accurately
• 2:01:42
  Speaker 1: described events that had not yet happened when it was written.
• 2:01:46
  Speaker 1: Daniel listened to all of it. His body, still weak
• 2:01:49
  Speaker 1: from three weeks of fasting and one morning that had
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: knocked him face down on the ground. He was hearing
• 2:01:56
  Speaker 1: centuries of suffering, of faithful people being ground between the
• 2:02:00
  Speaker 1: ambitions of empires, of the people he belonged to, enduring
• 2:02:04
  Speaker 1: trial after trial across generations. At the end, he asked
• 2:02:08
  Speaker 1: what the outcome would be. The Angel pointed beyond the
• 2:02:11
  Speaker 1: historical conflicts, toward a time of distress unlike anything the
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 1: world had seen. But everyone whose name was written in
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 1: the book would be delivered, and then the resurrection. Multitudes
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 1: who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake,
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 1: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: Death is not the final condition of the human person.
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: Every person who has ever lived will stand again, inner body,
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 1: in full presence, before the one who saw them. Those
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 1: who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens,
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars forever
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: and ever. Not the powerful, not the famous, not the
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: ones whose names were cut into stone walls. The wise,
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 1: the ones who knew God and walked in that knowledge
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 1: and turned other faces toward the light. They would shine,
• 2:03:10
  Speaker 1: not for a season like stars that carry their own
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: light forever. Daniel asked again for more explanation. The answer was,
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: seal it up. The words are closed until the time
• 2:03:24
  Speaker 1: of the end. Many will be purified. The wicked will
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 1: continue to be wicked, but those who are wise will understand.
• 2:03:33
  Speaker 1: He received specific numbers one thousand, two hundred and ninety days,
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 1: one thousand, three hundred and thirty five days, exact measurements
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: of time that careful scholars across many centuries have studied
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 1: and interpreted in different ways, each taking the numbers seriously,
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 1: because the God who gave them does not waste words.
• 2:03:55
  Speaker 1: Daniel did not understand the numbers, he said, so he
• 2:03:59
  Speaker 1: was not expected to understand everything. He was expected to
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: receive faithfully, trust completely, and write it down. And then
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: the last thing, the last words spoken directly to Daniel
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 1: in all of scripture, After the dreams and the lions,
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: and the furnace, and the beasts, and the throne, and
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 1: the prayer, and the twenty one days of silence, and
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 1: the figure whose face was like lightning, after all of it,
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 1: these were the last words, as for you go your
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: way till the end you will rest, and then at
• 2:04:32
  Speaker 1: the end of the days you will rise to receive
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 1: your allotted inheritance. Go your way till the end. You
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 1: will rest, and then you will rise, and you will
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 1: receive your allotted inheritance. The word allotted means measured out
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: in advance, set aside, specifically, reserved under a specific name.
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 1: The inheritance was not general. It was prepared for the
• 2:04:59
  Speaker 1: one It was prepared for before that one existed, waiting
• 2:05:04
  Speaker 1: at the end of the road, for the person who
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: had walked every mile of the road faithfully. Daniel took
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: the words in. He stood for a long moment at
• 2:05:12
  Speaker 1: the edge of the Tigris. The water moved past him
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: the way it had always moved, indifferent to the weight
• 2:05:19
  Speaker 1: of what had just been placed in the room. The
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 1: sky was the same sky it had always been. He
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: put down the pen. Eventually he went home. He opened
• 2:05:29
  Speaker 1: the window, He turned toward Jerusalem. He prayed, and then
• 2:05:34
  Speaker 1: one morning, at the end of his days, he rested.
• 2:05:38
  Speaker 1: He closed his eyes in the city he had been
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 1: brought to at fifteen in chains, in the city that
• 2:05:44
  Speaker 1: had never been home and had become home in the long,
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 1: complicated way that exile makes something out of whatever it
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 1: gives you. In the city where he had opened the
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 1: window every day for seventy years, and he trusted the
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 1: last words, you will rentest and you will rise. He rested,
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 1: and somewhere in the future that he had spent his
• 2:06:06
  Speaker 1: whole life helping to write, he will rise, as will
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 1: every one whose name is written in the book. May
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 1: be to night that feels very far away. Maybe the
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 1: end of the days feels like a phrase in a
• 2:06:18
  Speaker 1: prophecy that has no particular connection to the weight you
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 1: are carrying into sleep. But the allotment is real, the
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 1: reserve is real. The name written before you had a
• 2:06:29
  Speaker 1: name is real. The God who called Daniel highly esteemed
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 1: before Daniel had done anything to earn the title, who
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: sent the answer before the prayer was finished, who fought
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: a twenty one day invisible battle on behalf of an
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 1: old man fasting beside a river. That God knows your
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: name too, not in the general sense, in the specific sense,
• 2:06:52
  Speaker 1: the way a shepherd knows which one has not come home,
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 1: the way a father knows the sound of his own
• 2:06:58
  Speaker 1: child's voice in a crowd. He knows you. You will rest,
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: and you will rise. Let to night be rest, Let
• 2:07:07
  Speaker 1: your body settle into the particular mercy of sleep. Let
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: your mind grow quiet and your thoughts grow still. Let
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: the door close gently on this day and everything it contained,
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 1: and let the next few hours be held by the
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 1: one who holds all of it. He is awake, he
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 1: is watching, He is present in this room, and the
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 1: window is still worth opening in the morning. Sleep well, beloved.
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: He has not forgotten your name, and everything that has
• 2:07:37
  Speaker 1: been allotted for you is still waiting.
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 2: And so we reach the end of Daniel's story, but
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 2: not the end of the story itself. To night, you
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 2: have walked beside a man from the morning everything was taken,
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 2: to the last words spoken over him at the edge
• 2:07:56
  Speaker 2: of a river, at the end of a very long life.
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 2: You have seen him at fifteen, looking up at unfamiliar
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 2: stars in a desert and choosing to believe the God
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 2: who made them was still watching him. You have watched
• 2:08:10
  Speaker 2: him refuse the king's food and open the window, and
• 2:08:14
  Speaker 2: pray toward a city in ruins and tell the truth
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 2: to men who could have killed him for it. You
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 2: have watched him survive lions and carry sealed visions, and
• 2:08:24
  Speaker 2: age through three empires without bending. And you have seen
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 2: what all of that daily faithfulness produced, not comfort, though
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 2: comfort came eventually, not fame, though fame came. Not the
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 2: life he would have chosen, because he never got the
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 2: life he would have chosen. He got something else. He
• 2:08:45
  Speaker 2: got the life that was given, lived as faithfully as
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 2: one person could live it, one open window at a time,
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 2: one plain plate at a time, one prayer toward a
• 2:08:57
  Speaker 2: ruined city at a time, and God, you used it.
• 2:09:01
  Speaker 2: He used it to record history in advance. He used
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 2: it to produce a royal proclamation about the Living God,
• 2:09:08
  Speaker 2: distributed across the entire Persian Empire. He used it to
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 2: preserve a written record that has been read by people
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 2: in every century since. Sitting in rooms Daniel never knew existed,
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 2: carrying questions Daniel never heard asked. You are one of
• 2:09:24
  Speaker 2: those people tonight, and the last words spoken over Daniel
• 2:09:29
  Speaker 2: are available to you. You will rest, and at the
• 2:09:33
  Speaker 2: end of the days you will rise. Not because you
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 2: earned it, because it was allotted, prepared, reserved under your name,
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 2: before you had a name, before you had done anything,
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 2: before you were capable of deserving or not deserving anything.
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 2: The God of Daniel is not a distant historical figure.
• 2:09:55
  Speaker 1: He is the.
• 2:09:56
  Speaker 2: Ancient of days, seated above every empire that has ever
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 2: risen and fallen since Daniel wrote the words down. He
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 2: is the one from whom the river of fire flows,
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 2: the one whose throne has never been vacated, the one
• 2:10:10
  Speaker 2: whose kingdom has no end clause. He is present right
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 2: now in the room you are in, as close as
• 2:10:19
  Speaker 2: the breath you are about to take. Let us pray. Father,
• 2:10:24
  Speaker 2: We come to you tonight, grateful for this man and
• 2:10:27
  Speaker 2: for the story you kept alive through him, across centuries
• 2:10:30
  Speaker 2: and empires until it reached this moment. Thank you for
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 2: the window, for the decision made at fifteen in the
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 2: dust of an eight hundred mile road to keep believing,
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 2: For the faithfulness that opened that window every morning when
• 2:10:44
  Speaker 2: there was no particular reason to feel hopeful, and every
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 2: reason to feel forgotten. Thank You that you were there
• 2:10:51
  Speaker 2: the whole time, in the room where four young men
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 2: prayed through the night, in the furnace, with the three
• 2:10:58
  Speaker 2: who would not bow, in the silence of twenty one days,
• 2:11:02
  Speaker 2: when the messenger was fighting his way through, in the
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 2: field where a king had to learn to look up.
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 2: Thank You that the answer leaves before the prayer is finished.
• 2:11:12
  Speaker 2: Thank You that highly esteemed is a name you give,
• 2:11:15
  Speaker 2: not a title we earn. Father. Everyone resting with these
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 2: words to night is carrying something. Some have been carrying
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 2: it for a long time. Some have been at the
• 2:11:26
  Speaker 2: window for years with no visible answer. Some are in
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 2: a furnace right now and cannot see the fourth figure.
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 2: Yet be present with them, not necessarily in the dramatic way,
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 2: though you are fully capable of that, in the quiet way,
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 2: the way you were present in the plain plate and
• 2:11:46
  Speaker 2: the open window, and the ordinary morning prayer, in the
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 2: sealed vision carried faithfully across decades. Guard their sleep to night,
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 2: Let their bodies rest, let their minds go quiet. Let
• 2:12:01
  Speaker 2: to night be a few hours of genuine rest in
• 2:12:03
  Speaker 2: the presence of the one who holds all things and
• 2:12:06
  Speaker 2: is held by nothing. And when morning comes, let them
• 2:12:09
  Speaker 2: wake as Daniel woke, with the window still worth opening,
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 2: with the face turned toward the place where you have
• 2:12:17
  Speaker 2: promised to be, with the quiet certainty that the God
• 2:12:20
  Speaker 2: of yesterday is the God of to day, and will
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 2: be the God of every day that follows. Thank you
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 2: for the story, for the man, for the window, for
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 2: the angel who fought for twenty one days to reach him,
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 2: for the inheritance that has been allotted and reserved and
• 2:12:38
  Speaker 2: waiting since before the foundations of the world, for the
• 2:12:42
  Speaker 2: promise that holds tonight and every night, in the name
• 2:12:46
  Speaker 2: of the one who came on the clouds of heaven,
• 2:12:48
  Speaker 2: who was cut off and was not kept down, who
• 2:12:51
  Speaker 2: rose and sits at the right hand of the Ancient
• 2:12:53
  Speaker 2: of days, and is coming again. Amen, Good night, beloved,
• 2:12:59
  Speaker 2: you will rest, and you will rise. He knows your name,
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 2: and the window is still worth opening in the morning.