Observation: Daniel is a Jew in exile in the kingdom of Babylon. He has a relatively cushy job as a servant in the king's court, but he keeps having these bizarre visions. In this vision, which the angel Gabriel says is "for the time of the end," he sees a ram with two horns that represent the kings of Media and Persia. The Goat itself stands for the king of Greece. After these kings play their part, the vision describes "a king of bold countenance, skilled in intrigue." More on this king: "By his cunning he shall make deceit prosper under his hand, and in his own mind he shall be great."
Application. "He shall make deceit prosper under his hand, and in his own mind he shall be great."
Yikes. I mean...Yikes.
Look, I'm not sure what you want me to say here. Well no, actually, I know exactly what roughly half of you want me to say. And still, I'm not sure it's the best idea to say it.
A lot of us probably read this verse, written down thousands of years ago, and want to apply it directly to our time and place, our country, our culture, this specific year, this specific election cycle. So yes, many people of faith reading this would say our current president, Donald Trump, has said a whole lot of things that turned out not to be true, and he seems either not to know or not to care that he is spreading false information. And yes, I'm one of those people. If you disagree, I can and will still joyfully love you and serve with you. I mean that.
THAT BEING SAID. What I preached on Sunday about reading apocalyptic language is also true of this text. It is a huge mistake for modern people to make the Bible "all about us," as though every apocalyptic vision applies directly to our time and place. For instance, with this text, we'd have to throw out a whole lot of it--the whole piece about the kings of Media, Persia, and Greece, which, by the way, applied directly to Daniel's time and place--in order to shoe-horn the text into fitting our situation.
So what do we do when part of an apocalypse seems to speak directly to our time? We pray about it. We talk about it. We do our homework and learn more about where it came from. And we remember the bottom line of all apocalyptic literature, laid out perfectly in today's text: "he shall be broken, and not by human hands." The future is God's problem. Faithfulness in the present is our problem.
In my non-scientific Biblical survey, in precisely 0.0% of cases does God expect the faithful to go out and defeat the forces of evil and deception on their own. In precisely 100.0% of cases, we are expected to stay faithful, keep right on doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly, and let God handle the big picture. Many scholars of this kind of literature would say that, indeed, is its whole message to the original audience: "The Babylonian Empire is not your problem. It's God's, and God is handling it. In the meantime, hang in there, and don't bow down to any idols. I've got your back."
So, yeah. My application today is to be careful about Biblical application, because most of the time it's not just about me.
Prayer: God, thank you for visions, for dreamers, for those to whom you reveal truths. Help us to not make that truth about us, but about you. Always. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment