The sheer arrogance of the insular modern Western mind makes the Devil giggle.
It flows from the essential nature of the Fall, of the “boastful pride of life” elsewhere called “hubris.” We stole from the Greco-Roman Civilization all the things of least value and forgot what few virtues they offered. We forget the lesson God taught Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4).
Why would Daniel in the second chapter prophesy that the pinnacle ruler of Babylon represented the most valuable portion of the symbolic statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream? Daniel had an opportunity to make of it what he would, but honestly told the emperor that, in that ancient context, Nebuchadnezzar was gold compared to the lesser value of what was to follow in the march of empires. It’s more than the emperor’s obvious intelligence. Given what little we can know of the ancient Mesopotamian scholarship of that time, we can be sure the emperor was already educated above Daniel’s level.
The Bible takes seriously the notion that the dream came from God, but was more than Nebuchadnezzar could handle. Daniel got a message from God that revealed the dream and what it meant. As soon as Daniel spoke, the emperor recognized it all as obvious truth. That ancient scholarship carried a high level of awareness in areas of the human mind we consider far below the intellect. Our shallow culture sneers at such things, but wiser minds are more respectful. God Himself said Nebuchadnezzar was far wiser than the Greeks and Romans whom we prefer as nearer kin. What made him so much better in God’s view of things?
It could easily occupy a book to chase down all the things they already had in common. Our lightweight American education glosses over the many ways even Rome was better than later Western Civilization because it is utterly lacking the frame of reference for discerning such things. We want it all quantified objectively and think that’s enough to decide. We have all the things Western minds consider “good” and cannot imagine any other frame of reference could possibly matter. We cannot imagine that all of the ancient civilizations before us shared certain conceptions, took certain things for granted, things we don’t even grasp.
We talk of the trio gods-gold-glory that seemed to characterize what drove ancient adventurers. Our Western culture is dismissive of that first item, but ancient men universally took that more seriously than the rest. Such indicates the first of our many failures to understand. Babylon demanded her servants bow the knee to imperial deities, those various gods the ruling family felt sponsored them and whose power enabled their dominance. The primary source of conflict Daniel and his friends had to satisfy was specifically what they could do to meet that demand without violating the demands of their own God. It hardly required the degree of separation we might expect from our distant perspective. The Covenant of Moses was peculiar in some ways, but not entirely foreign to Babylonian sensibilities. The Hebrew boys had to negotiate a clear conscience far more complex than anything we are prepared to acknowledge. They took for granted God put them there and sought to meet His moral requirements without provoking their hosts.
Daniel’s answer to Nebuchadnezzar was not just sucking up as we might view it. We so easily ignore the wider context of this whole scene. The Babylonian court would have been aware of Hebrew prickly peculiarities and powerful sense of honor by now, so were expecting the young man to either wow the emperor or be summarily executed. With all the thousands of people coming and going, it would take something special to accomplish the former, while many were hoping for the latter. In the context, Daniel’s God was able to carry His servant through. While many in that imperial court would have viewed Jehovah as the minor deity of a troublesome people, they didn’t pretend to understand politics among gods, only among themselves. If Daniel’s God kept Daniel alive, that didn’t stop them trying to trap Daniel in his own religious peculiarities against those of the emperor. It would take an awful lot of successes for Daniel to become significant to Nebuchadnezzar. Yet we know from Daniel 4 that Nebuchadnezzar’s value system rejected hubris.
Obviously Daniel had met his own God’s requirements, because he kept succeeding long past the lifetime of the Babylonian imperial family and the empire itself. And Daniel said Nebuchadnezzar was actually superior to those who conquered him. In what way? Given the nature of what God tends to talk about in the Old Testament narrative, we can be sure it has something to do with moral justice. While God’s plans might be inscrutible, it wasn’t gross immorality from Nebuchadnezzar that caused his empire’s fall. And while we clearly see that Belshazzar himself was judged, nowhere does it say his personal debauchery was the whole story. So far as we know, he was only playing at regent temporarily at that time. We suffer greatly from this distance reading the Bible with a silly literalism against the historical records. Still, the primary mistake here was hubris against deity, the Hebrew deity in particular. While Nebuchadnezzar came to terms with Jehovah, whatever those terms migth be, Belshazzar was too good for that. In contrast we notice the imperial house of Medo-Persia was careful not to insult anyone’s gods. Is it too obvious that Daniel never slandered anyone else’s gods, only clung to his own faithfully?
But the Persian religion, complex though it was, contained too much of chasing gold and not enough of the gods. This figures large later on as an influence in a specific heresy of Pharisaism. Thus, it was considered silver against Babylon’s gold in the statue image. But to shortcut a lot of other endless chatter and not make a book of this post, let’s cut to the chase: If we examine the rest of ancient history through the lense of God’s revealed standards of morality, the single thread that glows brightly in this broad tapestry is respect for the tribal structure. It was considered a sacred bond, a major element in the moral fabric of the universe. Babylon honored it, not just reflexively, but with a will. We see in Chaldean literature the high regard for the integrity of the social stability contained within the extended family political and social structure. The government dealt only with whomever the family-clan-tribe followed as their chief. The Persians were noticebly somewhat less careful about this, the Greeks less so, and Rome only pretended to care with mere lip service.
Consider how God judges the governments of today by that standard. If you think this isn’t a major element in Satan’s pleasure, you cannot pretend to understand anything Christ Himself said.
