Daniel writes from inside the Babylonian and then Persian court, but his book is for Jews living under empire — first the exiles by the rivers of Babylon, later the Jews of the second-temple period who watched Greek and Seleucid powers tower over them. The fourth chapter is unique: it is a royal proclamation, signed by Nebuchadnezzar himself, sent out to all peoples, nations, and languages. Daniel hands his readers a propaganda document from the most powerful man on earth — a man who has just been broken — testifying that the God of the exiles is the one who actually rules.

From the writers we read together

Francis Schaeffer

pastor, founder of L'Abri, author of How Should We Then Live? (1912-1984)

Schaeffer spent his life arguing that the modern person's deepest crisis is not moral but metaphysical: we have lost the conviction that there is a personal-infinite God who actually is, and who actually speaks. Daniel 4 is the ancient version of Schaeffer's diagnosis. Nebuchadnezzar had everything — gold, armies, the hanging gardens — and lacked only the one thing that would have kept him sane: a true reckoning with the God who is there. When that God finally got his attention, it was through seven years of madness in a field. Schaeffer would say: the cost of pretending the Most High is not real is always paid in the end, by someone, in some currency.

What strikes me about Nebuchadnezzar's confession is the order of it. First his eyes lift to heaven; then his reason returns. Schaeffer would recognize that sequence. Sanity is not the precondition of worship; worship is the precondition of sanity. The proud mind, looking only at itself, is the mind that loses itself. The mind that looks up — even briefly, even from a field — finds the world ordered again, finds itself accounted for, finds that there is a King and that his works are right. The proclamation Nebuchadnezzar signs is the proclamation of a man who has finally come home to reality.