Reader’s Guide: “The Word for Today” Wednesday, December 19, 2012 Read – Daniel 5 & 6 Two more stories make up today’s reading. The first story is set at the time of the end of the exile – 539 BC. A new king is reigning in Babylon named Belshazzar. The scene is a banquet and this king is pictured as using the sacred vessels taken from the Temple in Jerusalem as drinking goblets. Suddenly a hand begins to write on the wall. The interpretation of the writing evades all who are present but it does cause the king to be reduced to terror – he is as white as a sheet with fear. Daniel comes to interpret the writing. The message on the wall is that the king has been found wanting and that his kingdom will be taken away from him and given to the Medes and the Persians. The king attempts to avert the disaster by making a proclamation about Daniel and Daniel’s God as his predecessors had done but to no avail. That very night Belshazzar is killed. The Babylonian empire, so feared and mighty comes to an end. The writer of the book of Daniel tells us that it was Darius, the Mede who now took over the kingdom. That is a troubling report. Isaiah clearly tells us that it was Cyrus, the Persian, who would be God’s anointed (messiah) and would destroy the Babylonian empire. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah concur. Historically, it really was Cyrus, the Persian, who rose to power and did destroy the Babylonian empire. There was a king named Darius who ruled the Persians at a later date but not at the time of the end of the Babylonian empire. How are we to deal with this discrepancy? Does it really matter very much? The point of the story is abundantly clear – evil tyrants who make fun of God and God’s people by misusing sacred vessels will meet their end. That point is true even if this is just a story that is not really very concerned with historical facts. The final story in Daniel is probably the most familiar of all of the stories. The story picks up with Darius, the Mede, as the king. The story unfolds much like the story of Daniel’s friends who wound up in the fiery furnace unfolded. This time king Darius is pictured as a friend of Daniel and is duped by his own satraps who are out to get Daniel because they are jealous of him. The issue is once again about worship. The satraps know that Daniel worships only God. They trick the king into signing an edict that anyone who is caught worshiping anyone other than king Darius himself for a thirty day period must be thrown into a den of lions – what king wouldn’t sign such an edict! Daniel will not comply – in fact he deliberately worships God in full view of everyone. The king is left no choice – in the lion’s den Daniel must go! King Darius is pictured as tossing and turning all night long worried about Daniel’s fate – and to his joy, in the morning he finds that the lions have not harmed Daniel. God has shut up their mouths. Overjoyed by what has happened, the king has Daniel’s enemies thrown into the lion’s den and they are immediately devoured. Darius issues a decree praising the God of Daniel. Of course, once again, this story could have unfolded exactly as it is told. Or, it just might be a really good story that makes its point abundantly clear to Daniel’s hearers. It is the same message as was proclaimed in the story of Daniel’s friends and the fiery furnace. When you are commanded to worship anyone or anything other than God, or in this case when you are forbidden to worship God, you must resist – even if it means you may suffer. All of the stories in the book of Daniel have great meaning to people who are living in threatening times when their faith is being challenged. They call for resistance. They proclaim that the powerful forces that are against God’s people will eventually perish. They poke fun at the high and mighty who rule over God’s people. And they are really good stories. Whether or not they reflect historical facts is immaterial to their meaning. The only reason we might consider them as stories and not historical accounts is that they do not fit with anything else we know about the history of their time – in fact they sometimes contradict that history. They sound like stories. They sound like the parables that Jesus told and used to proclaim his truth. It is not only facts that tell the truth – so do stories – and sometimes stories can do it better. There was a time when it seemed important to me that all these stories in Daniel be historically true. If they weren’t historically true then how could I believe anything else in the Bible? I no longer think in this way. It really doesn’t matter much to me whether or not these stories reflect historical fact. I have come to learn that stories have power to proclaim the truth too. I do believe that God can save people from fiery furnaces and from the teeth of lion – it is not the miraculous in these stories that leads me to think of them as something other than historical accounts. It is simply because these stories do not fit with everything else we know about that history that leads me to think of them as powerful stories that proclaim God’s truth and not an historical account of events that happened.