Verses 1-30
Great Dreams
Nebuchadnezzar was not content to have an interpretation of his dream; he demanded that the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans should tell him not only the interpretation but the dream itself. The question to them is, What did I dream? The Chaldeans said, Tell us the dream, and we will tell thee the interpretation. But the king said, No; the thing is gone from me: it was a broken dream; I dreamed dreams, that is to say, I dreamed one dream, but it was so broken and so disarranged that I cannot put it into coherence; the whole thing is gone from me, but if you are really wise men you will just be as clever in recalling the dream as in giving a right interpretation of it. The magicians and sorcerers said: This is unreasonable; we must have something to start with: we ought not to be called upon first to make a dream and then to answer it by way of interpretation; give us the dream, and we will give the meaning of it. "The king answered and said, I know of certainty that ye would gain the time, because ye see the thing is gone from me. But if ye will not make known unto me the dream, there is but one decree for you: for ye have prepared lying and corrupt words to speak before me, till the time be changed: therefore tell me the dream, and I shall know that ye can show me the interpretation thereof."
Then the Chaldeans complained: "There is not a man upon the earth that can show the king's matter: therefore there is no king, lord, nor ruler, that asked such things at any magician, or astrologer, or Chaldean. And it is a rare thing that the king requireth, and there is none other that can show it before the king, except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh." The Babylonian theology was peculiar in this respect; it assumed that every man who came into the world had a god, or demon, or angel, or spirit peculiarly his own, appointed to watch over him for defence and guidance and the like, but it did not lie within the scope of the genius of these individual deities first to recall a dream and then to give the interpretation of it; but the Babylonian theology had in it the further assumption that there are other gods, a million thick it may be when they gather in full hosts, gods that do not dwell with flesh, non-incarnate gods; and only they can see the whole circle of things, only they can tell a man, king or peasant, what he has dreamed, and can show the dreamer the meaning of the vision.
"For this cause the king was angry and very furious," kings soon got angry in olden times and in Oriental nations, "and commanded to destroy all the wise men of Babylon." Daniel was not one of the wise men of Babylon; Daniel was only a student at this time; he was preparing to join the ranks of the wise men; but the king's decree was complete, all-inclusive, final, that every man who professed to study wisdom be killed, because no man can be found to recall my dream, and put it in the shape which I can recognise. That was a short and easy method with imperfect teachers; many would like to practise it now. We do not recognise the limitations of our function as teachers, seers, and prophets, and children of wisdom. We do not see that there are limits even to prayer; it is not fully recognised by us that men can only go a very little way, a mile or two at the most, on the wondrous road that stretches into infinity and eternity. Sometimes we want to scourge our teachers or goad them, or to prick them with the spears of our inquisitiveness, so as to touch their blood and make them bolt forward several miles at once, but it cannot be done. The wisest man has only a lamp, and a certain quantity of oil in it; if he withhold not his oil he is doing all that lies in his power. We must not insist upon impossibilities from our fellow-men; give us what you can, pray what prayer lies within the urgency of your felt need; if you can bring in our sin, and name it with aught of delicacy to God, help us thus by your intercession; and if you have power so to name the Cross as to bring down the answer ere the prayer has gone, use that power for our edification, our release, and our general advantage. Do not hearers expect too much? They want to know things that are only known to God.
Yet there is a sense in which Nebuchadnezzar was right. This is the cry of heathenism. Tell us what we dream; put the nightmare into shape. We have seen wild things, we have walked across wildernesses, we have been lost in storms, we have been deafened by thunder, we have been affrighted by lightning; serpents have coiled round us, questions have risen in the heart like sparks of fire: tell us what it means. Heathenism is right. By heathenism do not understand something that is five thousand miles away, rather understand the unchristianised portion of your own nature; we, dwelling in civilised lands, represent no inconsiderable amount of heathenism ourselves. Christianity ought to be able to tell heathenism what it has been thinking about and what it wants. This is the difficulty of the missionary abroad, and this is the difficulty of the teacher at home. The Christian evangelist has first to tell his hearer the dream that has troubled the hearer's imagination. It will not do for the hearer to tell his own dream; he really cannot tell it; he can hint at a word here and a symbol there and a shadow yonder: only the interpreter in the Christian sanctuary can tell the dreamer what he dreamed. Christianity therefore undertakes in the first instance to put our memories right, to recall vanished images, to make echoes find their way back to the voices to which they owe their existence. Christianity says, I will tell thee, O poor soul, what thou hast been dreaming about: they were strange things that appeared in thy dream; there was an image, black, grim, awful to look upon, with eyes of reddest fire, and a voice full of reproach and cutting rebuke, and denunciation of the most poignant and severe character: thou didst hear other witnesses testifying against thee in the great clamour, voice following voice, accusation following accusation, until thou wast bewildered by the tremendous impeachment: through it all there was a black line, strange, a crossed line; as thou didst look upon that line it shaped itself into a gallows-tree; there was One upon it, his face marred more than any man's; he was wounded in five places; he looked at thee with the look of omnipotent weakness, the pathos of that face was mightier than the almightiness of God: that was thy dream it was a dream of need, a dream of self-accusation, a dream full of trouble, woe unspeakable, and expectation that burned like hell. That is a dream of humanity: a great fear containing a great hope; a tremendous accusation broken in upon by possibilities of eloquent pleading and prevalent intercession; a sin, a creditor, black, stern, oppressive, and One side by side offering to pay all the debt. Thy dream expressed universal necessity: it was a cry for the living God, it was a groping after something that seemed to be quite near, yet strangely to elude the fingers that searched for it. Until you realise the dream the interpretation will seem to refer to some other man's vision. Every dreamer so far must recognise the nightmare, the dream, the troubled sight that came before him; then he will sit attentive and solemn, and listen to the interpreter who has the key of mysteries.
It may be held, therefore, in general terms, that the demand of Nebuchadnezzar was not so unreasonable as it seemed to be. Christianity must do something that no other religion can do, else it will become one of many. Jesus Christ had no plural; Jesus Christ may be described grammatically as a noun of multitude: he represented all the rest, all life eternal, all beauty unfading, all music everlasting. Jesus Christ does not come in with a conjecture, following the guesses of other men; Jesus Christ claims to be unique, original, one, only begotten of the Father; the Ruler of men, their King, and one who brings from eternity water that can slake the thirst of time; the only one who can do away with the little artificial lamps invented by human genius, and displace them by suns that can never burn away, suns that brighten with their burning. When Christianity loses its distinctiveness it foolishly undertakes to descend to a level already thronged by fretful competitors. When the preacher descends from the platform God built for him and begins to read essays, he puts himself into competition with more able men than himself, who know more about the subject and can more fittingly express it in formal and logical manner. So long as he stands upon the crag built by God, and thence thunders the law, or proclaims as with silver trumpet the evangel of reconciliation, he has no rival; only himself can be his parallel. Christianity does not come to answer our curiosity; Christianity comes to reply to our need. The Cross has nothing to say to our intellectual speculativeness; it comes to tell the broken, self-accusing, self-condemning heart that God is love. Keep to your function; stand by your charter: do not disfranchise yourselves by condescending to occupy the lower levels of wrangling controversy, wordy and pithless disputation.
When the intelligence was brought to Daniel he said, "Why is the decree so hasty from the king?" Does he look everywhere That was John Foster's argument, or part of it, in answer to atheistic inquiry. The celebrated essayist said, Unless a man has been everywhere, the place where he has not been may contain the proof of the presence of the living God; and if a man has been everywhere through and through the universe, why, he seems fit to be God. "Why is the decree so hasty from the king?" Daniel took the right course; he "went in, and desired of the king that he would give him time, and that he would show the king the interpretation. Then Daniel went to his house, and made the thing known to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, his companions: that they would desire mercies of the God of heaven concerning this secret; that Daniel and his fellows should not perish with the rest of the wise men of Babylon." That is always the course that is profoundly prudent, because profoundly rational as well as profoundly Christian. To God! That is your marching order. When you are troubled, affrighted, overwhelmed, imperilled, to God! Do not consult equals, or measurable superiors, but flee! Haste thee! Beat urgently upon heaven's door! Knock, and it shall be opened unto thee. If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not: if ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give the Holy Spirit unto them that ask him: ye have not because ye ask not, or because ye ask amiss.
Here is the divine hand magnified in the distresses of mankind. Life was brought to a sharp crisis. The king's decree went forth, and in Oriental lands kings cared no more for human life than we care for insect life perhaps even less. The decree darkened the whole heaven; there was gloom in every house in the city, mayhap in the whole country. Because Nebuchadnezzar was wrathful, therefore did the sun retire and the whole firmament drape itself in awful guise. What was done? Daniel knew what course to take; he instantly sought fellowship in prayer, and he and his companions fell on their knees and cried to the God of heaven. "Then was the secret revealed unto Daniel in a night vision. Then Daniel blessed the God of heaven." The captain reported to the king that he had found an interpreter. That interpreter was found in unexpected places, as all interpreters are found. Said Arioch, "I have found a man of the captives of Judah." That is God's inscrutable way. It was not a brother-king that told Nebuchadnezzar what had troubled him; nor was it some man that drove to the king's house in a chariot of gold, with steeds of fire, whose scarlet nostrils were distended as if in pride that they were called upon to enter such lofty service: it was a man among the captives of Judah. How wondrously events touch and interrelate in life! Thus captivity is made true freedom, and thus men far from home established a second nativity, and thus persons who suppose themselves to be instances of humiliation find that those circumstances are but a stairway up to primacy, to sovereignty. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid. You are in the captivity of poverty, perplexity, difficulty: there will be a message for you some day; for though you have so little outwardly, what treasures you have spiritually; though everything has been taken from you that can be taken except yourself, you live, you pray, you own Christ's dear, sweet name, you have understanding of human nature; therefore you are rich: when you are sent for, speak roundly, with authority, directly, and make no obeisance that has not in it the stoop of royalty.
Some men cannot be captives except in form. All men are not prisoners who are in gaol. Sometimes the turnkey is more a prisoner than the man whom he has locked up, and oftentimes the judge is more a captive than the man whom he may with unconscious injustice have consigned to a prison undeserved. Consider what you are, and what you have, intellectually, spiritually, educationally. Give a boy a good education, and you give him a fortune, which he cannot spend or throw away, and which will come usefully to his aid in faraway places and faraway times; give a child a rich Christian education, a real, sensible, healthy, wise training, store the memory with Zion's own Psalms and minstrelsy, and with the words of Jesus, small as dewdrops but immeasurable as suns, and somewhere the child may become even in poverty and expatriation and shame a prophet, a teacher, one who can let fall upon the darkening mystery the illumination of Heaven. This is the attitude of Christianity today and every day. It tells men the meaning of their nightmare and trouble and sorrow, and it often has to put before the distracted imagination the very thing that was dreamed. But Jesus can do all this. He answered every one who came to him earnestly and urgently. It was only to speculation that he was so stonily dumb and deaf; it was only curiosity that he smote and turned away with a wheal on its brazen face. When men came broken-hearted, with eyes blind with tears, he told them all they could receive of wisdom and gospel and tenderness. The disciples sometimes failed, but Jesus Christ never. The disciples were represented in some feeble degree by the magicians and astrologers, the necromancers and the soothsayers of Babylon, but Jesus Christ was partially represented by the true interpreter, the completely equipped and qualified prophet. Said one, "I brought my son to thy disciples that they would heal him, but they could not." Said Christ, "Bring him hither," and the diseased son went home a free man, strong, and full of gratitude. Said the disciples, "We cannot feed this great multitude, for we have only a few loaves and a few fishes." Said Christ, "Make them sit down; now," said he, "bring what you have got." What hands he had! He brake, and brake, and gave the disciples a busy time of it. There is a touch that multiplies; there is a smile rich as the dawn of a summer day; there is a voice every tone of which has in it a martial inspiration or a tender benediction. That voice is Christ's.
Prayer
Almighty God, we are thy children; thou hast made us, and not we ourselves. We live by thy power, and because of thy love, thy tenderness, thy daily grace. We are in liberty, we are looking forward to perfect emancipation, when we shall see light in thy light, and have all thy heaven to dwell in. Thou hast inspired great hopes in us through the power of the Cross of Jesus Christ; now we see that with God all things are possible; we have been living in the midst of difficulty and wonder, so that we could not see how the day was to dawn upon the world; but seeing that Jesus Christ, thy Son, has come and has taken upon him the sins of the world, and died for every man, we see that in him is fulness of salvation, and from his Cross and from his throne shall come the redemption and the sovereignty of the world. We bless thee that all souls are thine; thou wilt not forget the least of them; thou dost remember thy jewels; the old man and the little child thou wilt reckon in thine host; the great hero, and the humble sufferer who accepts thy will and does it with a full heart, all alike are thine; thou dost see thine image in the great and in the small, and in the end nothing of thine shall be lost. We pray thee that we may ever remember the solemnity of thy law, The soul that sinneth, it shall die; may we look upon this law as thine, and as irresistible, unchangeable, everlasting; and thus may we discover that we are bound round about by limitations of thine own imposing; may we not seek a freedom with which thou hast not invested us, but accepting what thou hast done for us, may we live in the liberty of thy law, may we enjoy the freedom of thy righteousness, and may we know ourselves to be at our best estate but men, whose breath is in our nostrils, whose days fly like a weaver's shuttle, and whose end can never be far away. Thus in humbleness and reverence, in docility and love, may we spend our time, and behold how the will of God is being done on earth as it is done in heaven. Amen.
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