John Russell

The focus of the story moves away from Daniel to his three friends, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, a.k.a. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The King erected a massive golden idol in what had to have been the equivalent of Millennium Park in Chicago and issued an order that whenever his orchestra started to play, everyone within earshot had to drop to their knees and worship the image. If anyone refused to bow in this manner, they faced immediate execution by being “thrown into a blazing furnace.”

The narrative story of Chapter 2 is incredibly significant as a follow up to Chapter 1, in it shows how Daniel and his three friends were sustained by God and established by God as influencers in Babylonian society.

The King has a dream that so disturbed him, he calls upon all his “magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and astrologers to tell him what he had dreamed.”

The prophecies against God’s people that we have just been reading about in the book of Ezekiel, and earlier in Jeremiah and Isaiah, have become reality. Babylon has defeated Judah, and we get the details of the insidious but ingenious plan of the victors to subjugate the conquered people.

The author of the book of Daniel has been traditionally recognized as the prophet Daniel himself. While most of the book appears written by an unnamed third-person narrator, Daniel speaks in the first person in chapters 9 and 10. A reliable source for accepting Daniel as the author is Jesus, who, in Matthew 24:15, cites to prophecies spoken “by the prophet Daniel.”

The first two chapters in this week’s reading program (Isaiah 43 and 44) have meant a great deal to me through the years. It’s not without some irony that I look back over my personal bible study journal, and see that on New Year’s Day, 2017, I was reading in and meditating on these same chapters. Because it was the turn of the year, I was looking to God’s word for some enlightenment as to what to expect. There is a tendency to pause at the start of every January; we make resolutions, we set goals, and we often try and predict what might happen.