Welcome to Part III of our Daniel teaching. So far, we have walked through Where the Hate for the Jews Comes From (Part I) and Why We Are Living in the Last Kingdom: Daniel 2 Explained (Part II). If you have not read those yet, you should!

In Part II, we walked through Daniel's interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's statue dream: Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, and the Revived Roman Empire we are living in today. That was prophecy. In Part III, we get to watch some of that prophecy happen in real time!

Daniel is going to live long enough to watch the gold kingdom fall and the silver kingdom rise. And his faithfulness even in this next kingdom had such a far-reaching effect that it even reached all the way to Yeshua's birth in Bethlehem, 600 years after his death.

Let's get into it.

The Writing on the Wall - The End of Babylon

King Nebuchadnezzar has passed on at this time, and a new king is ruling Babylon. His name is Belshazzar. He is the son (technically the grandson, but Scripture and ancient custom often used "son" loosely) of Nebuchadnezzar, and we know from the Bible that he did not appreciate God as much as his father eventually did.

That is about all the context you need, so let's begin our journey in Daniel chapter 5.

Dan 5:1 King Belshazzar gave a great banquet for a thousand of his nobles and drank wine with them.
Dan 5:2 While Belshazzar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken from the temple in Jerusalem, so that the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines might drink from them.
Dan 5:3 So they brought in the gold goblets that had been taken from the temple of God in Jerusalem, and the king and his nobles, his wives and his concubines drank from them.

Belshazzar took the most holy things from God's Temple and began to play with them. Can you predict the ending?

This actually speaks to a wider issue. Things that belong to God should not be treated lightly. This includes the tithe, marriage, your body, your soul, the Sabbath, communion, etc. All of these are God's. We live in a culture that treats the sacred as casual and the casual as sacred, and we should not be surprised at the consequences.

Let's continue the story:

Dan 5:4 As they drank the wine, they praised the gods of gold and silver, of bronze, iron, wood and stone.
Dan 5:5 Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote.
Dan 5:6 His face turned pale and he was so frightened that his legs became weak and his knees were knocking.

Imagine that - Suddenly, a disembodied human hand appears out of thin air and starts writing on the wall.

Side note: the expression "the writing is on the wall" originates straight from this Bible chapter. Every time someone uses that phrase, they are unknowingly quoting Daniel 5.

The queen mother (likely Nebuchadnezzar's widow or daughter) remembers Daniel's gift of interpretation from the statue dream decades earlier, and Daniel is called in. He interprets the writing:

Dan 5:25 “This is the inscription that was written: mene, mene, tekel, parsin.
Dan 5:26 “Here is what these words mean: Mene: God has numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.
Dan 5:27 Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.
Dan 5:28 Peres: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.”

Daniel confirms it to Belshazzar. Because he did not humble himself before God like his father eventually did, his kingdom is over, and it will be handed over to the next kingdom in line: the Medo-Persians.

And that very night, it happens:

Dan 5:30 That very night Belshazzar, king of the Babylonians, was slain,
Dan 5:31 and Darius the Mede took over the kingdom, at the age of sixty-two.

In Daniel 2, Daniel prophesied that the gold kingdom would fall to the silver kingdom. In Daniel 5, he watched it happen with his own eyes. The transition from Babylon to Medo-Persia, the very gold-to-silver moment from Nebuchadnezzar's statue, happened in a single night while Daniel was standing in the room.

Daniel and Buddha

Daniel is a great model for us. Even though kings and empires fall and rise, a man of God should never change. Belshazzar was killed, the empire collapsed overnight, but Daniel kept doing what Daniel had always done. Pray three times a day. Serve faithfully. Speak truth.

One fascinating fact (which I will touch on more in our upcoming Heretical Cults Part II on Hinduism and Buddhism) is that Daniel was alive at the same time as Buddha. Both lived in the 6th century BC. Daniel ministered roughly from 605 BC to 535 BC. Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) is traditionally dated around 563 BC to 483 BC.

Why does this matter?

Buddhists often claim that Jesus's teachings came from Buddha, that Jesus secretly travelled to India during His "lost years" (the years between age 12 and 30 not recorded in Scripture) and learned from Buddhist monks. This is a popular New Age claim and it is completely false.

We know it is false purely because of the Book of Esther.

The Book of Esther is set during the time of the Medo-Persian Empire, the same empire Daniel served in. If you read the book, Esther becomes queen over Medo-Persia. She was a Jewish woman. Her cousin Mordecai, after Haman's plot was defeated, was elevated to one of the highest positions in the empire and used that position to send out letters to all 127 provinces of the Persian Empire. Look at where those provinces stretched:

Est 1:1 This is what happened during the time of Xerxes, the Xerxes who ruled over 127 provinces stretching from India to Cush:

India. The Word of God was being officially distributed throughout the Persian Empire, including India, during Buddha's lifetime.

So the real story is, it was Buddha who heard the Law of Moses, not the other way around. And this makes perfect sense when you actually look at Buddhism's core ethical framework. The five basic precepts of Buddhism are:

  • Do not kill
  • Do not steal
  • Do not engage in sexual misconduct
  • Do not lie
  • Do not consume intoxicants

Four of those five are straight out of the Ten Commandments. Only the fifth (no intoxicants) is a Buddhist addition, but we know from our teaching on Alcohol that this is also mentioned in the Bible! The pattern is exactly what you would expect if a culture had been exposed to the moral framework of the LORD, then re-packaged it inside their own religious system.

Daniel and the Lion's Den

Let's continue to Daniel chapter 6, where we get the famous lion's den story.

Belshazzar is dead. The Medo-Persian Empire has taken over. Most of Daniel's friends are likely gone by this point (he is now in his 80s).

Dan 6:3 Now Daniel so distinguished himself among the administrators and the satraps by his exceptional qualities that the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom.
Dan 6:4 At this, the administrators and the satraps tried to find grounds for charges against Daniel in his conduct of government affairs, but they were unable to do so. They could find no corruption in him, because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent.
Dan 6:5 Finally these men said, "We will never find any basis for charges against this man Daniel unless it has something to do with the law of his God."

His enemies eventually got King Darius to sign a decree that no one could pray to any god other than the king for 30 days. Daniel, knowing the trap, opened his window toward Jerusalem and prayed three times a day anyway, exactly as he always had.

He was caught, thrown into the lion's den, and God shut the mouths of the lions. Daniel walked out the next morning untouched. King Darius then issued a new decree:

Dan 6:26 "I issue a decree that in every part of my kingdom people must fear and reverence the God of Daniel. For he is the living God and he endures forever; his kingdom will not be destroyed, his dominion will never end."

Daniel's obedience turned the king over to God! Daniel is such a role model to us. It is the same in the New Testament - God used persecution to get the disciples to go out. They were very comfortable in Jerusalem, but God then brought hardship on them to get His Word out. This is His heart!

The Magi, Cyrus, and the Long Reach of One Life

Some closing thoughts now, which are individually too short to form their own teachings, but are worth knowing because they show the long-term impact of Daniel's life.

The Magi were trained by Daniel

Have you ever wondered how the Magi (the wise men in Matthew 2) knew that a Jewish Messiah was coming? Or where to look for Him? Or what star to follow?

The Magi came from Persia. They were the priestly class of the Medo-Persian Empire (and later the Parthian Empire that succeeded it). And guess who served as the head of the wise men in Persia for decades? Daniel.

Dan 5:11 ...In the time of your father he was found to have insight and intelligence and wisdom like that of the gods. King Nebuchadnezzar your father, the king, I say, appointed him chief of the magicians, enchanters, astrologers and diviners.

So when wise men from the East showed up in Jerusalem 600 years later, asking "Where is the one born King of the Jews? We saw his star in the East and have come to worship Him," (Matthew 2:2), they were almost certainly operating from traditions that traced back to Daniel's teachings.

See how God can use you? But you need to be able to move when He needs you to. Daniel did not choose Babylon, but made the most of it.

Cyrus the Son of Esther?

Many speculate, based on Jewish tradition, that King Cyrus, who allowed the Jews to return home to rebuild the Temple, was the son or grandson of Queen Esther. The chronology is debated, and there are multiple kings named Cyrus, Darius, and Ahasuerus to untangle, but knowing our God, I believe this is possible.

If true, it means the king who issued the decree releasing the Jewish exiles to go home and rebuild the Temple (Ezra 1) was half-Jewish, and raised by a mother who was a woman of God. It would explain why Cyrus, of all the pagan emperors in history, would issue such a generous decree:

Ezr 1:2 "This is what Cyrus king of Persia says: 'The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah.'

Conclusion

Daniel was a young Jewish exile, dragged from his homeland against his will, planted in a pagan empire that hated his people. He had every excuse to play the victim, but he never did.

Instead, he served faithfully across four kings of two empires (Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius, and Cyrus). He prophesied the rise and fall of empires. He watched his own prophecies come true. He survived a lion's den. He kept his prayer life intact for over 70 years in exile. And his life reached:

  • Buddha and the East, through the Persian distribution of the Hebrew Scriptures
  • The Magi, who carried Messianic prophecy down the centuries until they showed up at a stable in Bethlehem.
  • Cyrus himself, through the lineage of Esther and Mordecai
  • Us!

Here is what Daniel's life teaches us about our time on Earth.

You are not in your job, your country, your family, or your situation by accident. God plants His people in specific places for specific reasons. Daniel did not choose Babylon. Esther did not choose the Persian palace. Joseph did not choose Egypt. But God used every one of them right where they were, and the fruit of their faithfulness is still being seen.

We live in the iron-and-clay kingdom, the final kingdom before Jesus returns. Don't compromise on the things of God to worship kingdoms like those of gold and silver.

Be Blessed!