I prayed to the Lord my God
and confessed: “Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of
love with those who love him and keep his commandments, Daniel 9:4
1) Those
who know God have great energy for God.
In one of the prophetic chapters of Daniel we read: ‘the people that know their
God shall be strong, and do exploits’ (11:32)…. This shows us that the action
taken by those who know God is their reaction to the anti-God
trends which they see operating around them. While their God is being defied or
disregarded, they cannot rest; they feel they must do something; the dishonour
done to God’s name goads them into action.
This is
exactly what we see happening in the narrative chapters of Daniel, where we are
told of the ‘exploits’ of Daniel and his three friends. They were men who knew
God, and who in consequence felt compelled from time to time actively to stand
out against the conventions and dictates of irreligion and false religion.
2) Those
who know God have great thoughts of God.
There is not space enough here to gather up all that the book of Daniel tells
us about the wisdom, might, and truth of the great God who rules history and
shows His sovereignty in acts of judgment and mercy towards individuals and
nations according to His own good pleasure. Suffice it to say that there is,
perhaps, no more vivid or sustained presentation of the many-sided reality of
God’s sovereignty in the whole Bible.
In face
of the might and splendor of the Babylonian empire which had swallowed up
Palestine, and the prospect of further great world-empires to follow, dwarfing
Israel by every standard of human calculation, the book as a whole forms a
dramatic reminder that the God of Israel is King of Kings and Lord of Lords,
that ‘the heavens do rule’ (4:26), that God’s hand is on history at every
point, that history, indeed, is no more than ‘His story,’ the unfolding of His
eternal plan, and that the kingdom which will triumph in the end is God’s.
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