Who is the Son of Man?

I never thought I’d be making this complaint on my ‘blog, but is there a tendency among Evangelicals when they read the Old Testament to see fulfilment in Christ too quickly? (Usually I find myself groaning that people see themselves in the text, too much, and don’t see fulfilment in Christ!) The vision of the Son of Man in Daniel 7 is a case in point. We studied it in our OICCU group at BNC on Wednesday evening.Now I’m not denying that it is ultimately fulfilled in the Lord Jesus. But what I am saying is that there isn’t quite a straight line connecting this vision with Jesus. The text interprets itself. Daniel sees four beasts coming out of the sea, the Ancient of Days sitting in judgment and then this:

“With the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.”

(vv. 13, 14)

Daniel was very wise and asked one of those in the vision what it all meant and this was what was told to him:

“These four great beasts are four kings who shall arise out of the earth. But the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom for ever, forever and ever.”

(vv. 17, 1

Despite what the text very clearly says, I had a very hard job persuading people, from the text, that the immediate referent of the phrase “son of man” is the saints. Obviously we have to interpret any text within a framework, but are we in danger of allowing our framework to tell us what a passage is saying and stubbornly holding on to that, even closing our ears to what the text (and therefore God) is actually saying? Once we have concluded that the “son of man” is the saints (i.e. Israel), then we learn so much more about the Lord Jesus. In being the “Son of Man”, we thus see that Jesus is the fulfilment of what it means to be Israel and we also see how we can appropriate this promise to the saints for ourselves: by being in Christ, we shall reign forever with him.

What do other people think? Who do you think the Son of Man is in Daniel 7?

Daniel 3: Out of the Frying Pan…

I’m very much looking forward to studying this in the BNC OICCU group this evening. You can’t really go far wrong with this chapter. I thought I’d have a quick look at it this morning in advance (I am not leading) and I ended up devoting my whole quiet time reading to it. There’s so much there. Jeremiah 15 will have to wait! Here follows some thoughts.

Introduction

Do you ever feel as if you just want to give up living the Christian life? You’ve been going for a while and just find it so difficult. You have a new Master to serve. Yet the world around you is carrying on as it always has, doing all that it can to satisfy its desires and you’re tempted to succumb to the attractions you forfeited when you acknowledged Christ as your Saviour and King. It’s so hard. And you know you should be spending time each day praying to your heavenly Father and listening to his voice in the Scriptures. You know you should meet regularly with believers, encouraging one another, and praising God and hearing his voice together. It requires commitment. How easy it would be to miss a day here, a week there, and spend longer asleep, or at work, or doing the DIY, just like the world around you. And being a Christian doesn’t win you many friends - trying to share the good news of the Lord Jesus offends your colleagues, and they just think you’re aloof and ‘holier than thou’. Wouldn’t it just be better to pack it all in?

Well, the people of Israel faced a similar situation. They had been exiled to Babylon, a pagan land with pagan gods and pagan morality. “How shall we sing Yahweh’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137.4) they could well cry. Do they remain faithful to Yahweh, with all the difficulty and unpopularity and persecution that would bring? Or do they forsake him, and adopt the worship and mores and practices of Babylon? Daniel 3 holds up not only the example of three men who remain faithful, but also the saving activity of our faithful God as a goad to compel us to remain true. These are lessons Israel need to hear in a foreign land, and they are lessons we need to hear as God’s church living as aliens and strangers in the world.

There are two big reasons not to forsake God: idolatry is stupid and what goes up must come down.

1. Idolatry is stupid (vv. 1-7)

Here Nebuchadnezzar lays on a united worship service and all the eminent statesmen from all the provinces of his empire are there. When the band strikes up, they are to fall flat on their faces in worship of the statue that Nebuchadnezzar has set up, on pain of death. It seems as thought the writer wants us to see how silly this situation is. The phrase set up is repeated extensively. He “set it up” (v. 1). He gathered the people to worship the image he “set up” (v. 2). “Set up”, “set up”, “set up”, “set up”. It’s not a real god. It’s the work of human hands. How silly all this pomp and ceremony is for something that someone has made. Richard Baxter is recorded as having thanked God for the “class of sinners in this place [Kidderminster]“, where he served, for it demonstrated well the stupidity of sin. That’s the impression the writer is trying to create here.

Don’t God’s people find themselves in the same situation today? Oh, we don’t have to bow down before false gods in such a literal sense (yet - but it’s not all that implausible is it with the growth of Islam in this country, and in America). But isn’t there the pressure at work to plot and scheme to work your way up the pecking order? If you don’t, then you’re passed over for promotion. Or you report some gross act of dishonesty and you’re fired for not being a team player. Perhaps there’s the expectation to work above and beyond the standard hours - perhaps on a Sunday, or late in the evening - and when you refuse, which you’re quite within your rights to do, because you prioritize meeting with God and his people on his day, or because you’ve made that commitment to the children’s club or the home group, you lose your job. There must be some significance to the word “image” - see Exodus 20.4. The people saw no form when God appeared to them at the mountain, so they were not to make any image of him. For us, Christ is the image of the invisible God (Col 1.15) and Christ is revealed to us in the Scriptures. We may seek to proclaim Christ as the exclusive Saviour and Lord and lose our friends. We may be encouraged to think that all religions are equally valid ways of worshipping God and even be invited to multi-faith services. When we refuse, we are thought of as extremists and are reviled.

The pressure to conform must have been great. With all those eminent officials assembled to bow down before the image, it’s as if Tony Blair and Gordon Brown came out to endorse it, as well as David Beckham making an appearance in support. And is there not overwhelming peer pressure on us as believers today to conform to the pattern of the world?

Yes, in all those situations, we could submit to the world and be pressed into its mould. But how foolish that would be, for then we would be worshipping things that have been “set up”, “set up”, “set up”, “set up”, the work of human hands, rather than the true, living and sovereign God. It’s interesting actually, that in the rest of the story, Nebuchadnezzar is only given the title “King” twice. It’s as if the writer is reminding us that the ruler of this world is not the king: God is. The fear of the Lord, then, is the beginning of wisdom, and the fear of mere men is utter folly.

2. What goes up must come down (vv. 8-30)

I intend this in the opposite sense to its common usage. What I mean is that the path to exaltation is humiliation.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused to worship the image, in obedience to God’s word, and they were reported to the king. He gives them one last opportunity to worship his image or else they will be thrown into the furnace. N. even presumes that he is greater than God, expecting there to be no god who is able to deliver S, M and A out of his hands. S, M and A are confident in God’s ability to save but recognize that he may not actually save them. In that case, they are willing to perish rather than deny their God. The furnace is heated and they are bound, fully clothed and thrown into the furnace. A fourth man is with them in the furnace, and then they are brought out unscathed, evoking the praise of N. S, M and A are then promoted.

Isn’t this the continuation of the conflict and victory foretold in Genesis 3.15? This time, S, M and A are the seed of the woman, the people of God, with Nebuchadnezzar and his men the seed of the serpent. Yes, S, M and A are bound, and thrown into the furnace, but they are spared, while N’s men are consumed (v. 22). And is not this the pattern of Jesus’ life? Sinclair Ferguson, in his very helpful Proclamation Trust Booklet on Preaching Christ from the Old Testament, describes this as “proleptic participation”. The shape of the cross is divinely imprinted on the lives of God’s people before and after Christ. Christ, the Seed of the woman, was given the opportunity of saving himself through the worship of Satan (Matthew 4.9-10) and he resisted. He had to go the way of the cross, humbling himself “by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Phil. 2.8). By taking the punishment for sins on the cross, he defeated the enemy of God and his people (Col 2.14-15), the Serpent himself. He rose again from the dead and is now seated at the right hand of the Father: “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name”. Through humilation, he is glorified.

This is true of those who are united to Christ by faith in the present. There is conflict now with the world and pressure to deny our Lord. We must “take up our cross and follow him”. This is surely what the apostle Paul was talking about in Acts 14.22, when he encouraged the disciples “to continue in the faith, and saying that through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God”. Individual believers may be preserved from death. God is good to us, more so than we deserve. We may not be preserved: last October we remembered the 450th anniversary of the martyrdom of Latimer and Ridley, and this March the 450th anniversary of the martrydom of Cranmer. S, M and A are the remnant of the Old Testament church in this narrative and corporately they are preserved. Christ will build his church, “and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16.18).

This salvation will of course ultimately be the experience of each believer when the Lord Jesus returns and crushes Satan under his (and our) feet (Rom 16.20) and we will enjoy the resurrection of the body and everlasting glory. “Be faithful unto death and I will give you the crown of life.” (Rev. 2.10).

It must be stressed that we’re not saved meritoriously. Christ suffered and was exalted, and by virtue of our union with him and his benefits applied to us - the forgiveness of our sins and the imputation of his righteousness - we will be delivered. It’s dependent on God’s mercy, not our merit. But the means or the route through which we get there is the way of the cross.

Having this confidence, let us follow the example of S, M and A in the midst of a land that is hostile to us and to our Lord and resist the pressure to forsake him and worship things that have been “set up” by human hands.

Conclusion

The Christian life is hard. It would be easy to give up and go the way of the world. The message of Daniel 3 is: “Don’t!”. Idolatry is stupid, and hardship is the way to glory. Christ died and rose again. United to him we will rise again. He will preserve his church. So let’s hold fast and not forsake him because of the ultimately temporary pressures of the world.

Daniel 1

The hero of the chapter is, of course, God. He has given his people (as he warned them) into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar (v. 2). This verse gives us another hint as to what this is all about: there is the repeated reference to “his God”, indicating that this narrative is contrasting the God of Israel with the gods of Babylon, particularly important for a people living as strangers and exiles in a foreign land. From this situation springs the implications of the passage for the church today, living as strangers from their heavenly, and ultimately new heavenly and earthly home amidst those who worship other gods.

Daniel and his friends are selected for training in Babylon and their identities are changed from Hebrew to Babylonian. Nevertheless, Daniel remains faithful to his God and does not defile himself with the king’s food. We don’t know what it is about the food that was defiling - perhaps it contained blood or fat (cf Lev. 3.17) or perhaps it was meat from unclean animals. Daniel remains obedient to God’s word. God, not Nebuchadnezzar is his real king. Here we have to be careful. Yes, Daniel is a good example to us and yes, things go well with him following his obedience. But the narrator just tells us that Daniel was faithful and that things went well with him. This is primarily descriptive. We certainly have to be wary of saying that his success in v.15 is God’s reward for Daniel’s faithfulness, or that God was showing his faithfulness to Daniel, even if we do acknowledge that the learning and skill are all from God and give him the glory for it. For a start, correlation does not necessarily imply causation. And God could equally have hardened the eunuch’s heart and led him to execute Daniel, even though Daniel remained faithful, without that reflecting unfaithfulness on God’s part. Job was faithful and look what happened to him in the short- to medium- term. We mustn’t have incorrect expectations of what a life of faithfulness to God will be like. In a sense, this adds to the setting up of the situation in which the story was set. These are faithful believers living in exile. This does, of course, teach us, of God’s sovereignty over the hearts of men.

In verses 17-21, God gave Daniel and his friends learning and skill in all literature and wisdom (v. 17). As a result of this, none was found like these men (v. 19). They were ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in the rest of Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom. This is not so much about God’s care and provision for Daniel and his friends (which would not have ceased to be the case if they were dunces) but about the superiority of the God of Israel - our God - to the Babylonian (false) gods.

Daniel 1 is therefore a message to God’s faithful people in exile (in contemporary terms, the church of Christ in the world), reminding them of God’s sovereignty over the rulers and his supremacy over the gods of this world and so calling them to remain faithful to him.