Quote for the Day
“The God of heaven has given you dominion and power …”
Today's Prayer
This week pray for those who are traveling that they may see the authority of God in all they encounter. Ask God to give a special comfort to those remaining at home and who are hurting without their family.
Daniel 2:36-45
Daniel 2:36-45 (NIV)36 “This was the dream, and now we will interpret it to the king. 37 You, O king, are the king of kings. The God of heaven has given you dominion and power and might and glory; 38 in your hands he has placed mankind and the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Wherever they live, he has made you ruler over them all. You are that head of gold.39 “After you, another kingdom will rise, inferior to yours. Next, a third kingdom, one of bronze, will rule over the whole earth. 40 Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others. 41 Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay. 42 As the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. 43 And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.44 “In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. 45 This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands—a rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver and the gold to pieces. “The great God has shown the king what will take place in the future. The dream is true and the interpretation is trustworthy.”
Message
For those who are hoping and waiting to see an expository analysis of the prophetic writings in Daniel, don’t hold your breath. I intend to leave that to others! What I do want to look at carefully here is the blatant fact that God has given some very important powers and authorities to someone who is NOT yet a believer in Himself. This is one of several passages in Scripture that show two competing facts that God has placed the earth under. First, as we have seen and will continue to see, God is in full control of ALL events at ALL times. Second, God says directly to Daniel that He has given Nebuchadnezzar (a man who worships other gods) “…dominion and power and might and glory; in [his] hands he has placed mankind and the beasts of the field and the birds of the air.” Talk about delegation and empowerment! The Master is a master at it! This is a difficult concept for us to fully comprehend, but what is most important to understand, is that God has set all authority in place on earth and in heaven. Ultimately that authority will come back to Him, so how it is used has great consequences.