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So tonight we launch ourselves on the study of the memoirs of a very ancient civil servant who simultaneously was a great saint of God. The character who comes before us, namely Daniel, in these memoirs, is very easily recognizable. He was an expatriate Jew, living far away from his native Jerusalem now, in Babylon. Part of a contingent of young Jewish men that had been taken by the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar as some of the earliest exiles to Babylon. He grew to be exceedingly influential in Babylonian society, and is recognizable because he has been one of many hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews, particularly in Europe, but elsewhere around this world, that are expatriate and not living in Israel, but have risen to great heights and made enormous contributions to Gentile civilization and culture, in science, in arts, in law, economics, medicine, and in a good many other fields. So was Daniel. Very early on in his university life, he was singled out for first class honors, as we have read, and promoted in the civil service of Babylon. When eventually the Babylonians were taken over by the Medo-Persians, Daniel now became head of the imperial civil service for the Persians. It is interesting, therefore, to see that in his great success and promotion in the secular affairs of Babylon, he remained a believer. That has not always been true of Christian young folks that have come up to universities. It is to be noticed, too, that he maintained his piety. For in chapter six he tells us how under the Medo-Persians, under King Darius, there was a law passed, instigated by some of the civil servants, that for a certain period, it should be illegal for anybody to pray to any other god except the emperor himself. And, uh, the, uh, penalty, of course, for breaking that particular law was to be cast into the den of lions. Uh, Persian emperors kept dens of lions, and not just for the amusement of their guests, you see. Come and see how the lions are fed, or perhaps they were invited to come and see how they were fed by, uh, uh, politicians and others who had made a nuisance of themselves. In spite of threat of that penalty, Daniel went home as usual, opened his window towards Jerusalem, and knelt down on his knees and prayed, as people did in those days, openly, not under their breath, so to speak. So he was overheard, brought before the law, the law, uh, the law, and convicted and put in the den of lions. He maintained his piety. Secondly, he maintained his principles, as we have read from chapter one. For it was a principle, a religious principle indeed, amongst the, uh, Hebrews, that there were certain foods that they did not eat because they regarded them as unclean. And Daniel, in his first year in the Babylonian university, maintained his principles, refused to eat of the king's meat because it would have been defiled, and courageously asked the manager, uh, to be given simple porridge stuff and got on at his face, and Nebuchadnezzar found no fault with his insistence. More interesting too, perhaps, he not only maintained his piety, said his prayers. And that's a very good thing. The professor, the Regius professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge, a dear believer that many of you know, told me on one occasion that when he goes to international conferences on the study of the Old Testament, and meets their scholars who in their youth vigorously protested their faith in God and their faith in Holy Scripture. But perhaps have drowned a little bit in the tides and floods of modernism. He asks them, do you still pray? Fancy asking a theologian that. Daniel maintained his piety, his praying, maintained his principles, but he maintained his faith. Daniel Lucy had been brought up under the great prophet Jeremiah, who in God's name had protested against the ungodliness of the Jews of his time, and had warned them that God would allow the Gentiles to come eventually and sack the city of Jerusalem, destroy the temple, and take the whole lot of them off into exile. And so it happened, of course. But Jeremiah had also prophesied of God's marvelous gospel, his good news for Israel, in the coming of the Messiah, the Lord of righteousness. Jeremiah had preached the wonders of the new covenant that God would make with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, and in fact insisted that the only ultimate hope for our world is the coming of Messiah. Daniel had been brought up under that preaching. And now, through a very long career in the civil service of the two leading empires of the day. He maintained his faith. Witnessing to the fact that there is no ultimate hope for our world, except in the coming of God's Messiah. That didn't mean that he then ran off and away from life and went and sat on a mountain and, uh, predicted that the Lord was about to come next Thursday or the week thereafter, so you didn't have to be involved in life. Daniel gave himself to his studies one hundred percent, rose in the civil service, became one of the senior civil servants, worked hard in it. But at the same time, witnessed. And now, after long experience of life in Babylon and under the Persians, he writes his memoirs. We're reading them still, all these centuries later. And you'll see that in them, he criticizes, he critiques the Gentiles' value system, and points out time and time again the great tendency of Gentile people to treat things that are of relative value as though they were of absolute value. You say, what do you mean by such a funny phrase? Well, dress, you know, is a thing of value, isn't it? I hope you think it is. They charge enough for it in the shops. We all want to look as nice as we can, don't we? Or should do. Mm-hmm. God grant that soon the cult of the scruffy in de- de- dress shall pass away. But But some some pe- people treat dress and fashion as though it were life's absolute value. They live for it. And not only dress, but other things. And Daniel is there to give his witness. The folly of treating things that are only of relative value, as though they were of absolute value. And when people do that, they fall to the o- o- o- the obverse thing, don't they? And they treat things of eternal value as if they were only of passing relative value. And therein lies a challenge to us all, of the spiritual things and our service of God for God. Be a mere matter of hobby with which we fill our leisure hours. Or whether the service of God and his kingdom is, as our Lord said it should be, the prior principle in all that we seek to do in life, daily work and leisure activities, to seek first the kingdom of God and its righteousness. For it is this that is of absolute value. So So, Daniel Daniel. maintained his piety, his prayer life, his principles, but maintained his faith. And you will find, we shall find, as we study his memoirs, how he critiqued, he does in his memoirs here, he critiques Gentile ways of living and thinking. In this chapter one, you noticed immediately he made his protest in the context of education. Incidentally, they weren't children in our English sense of the term who attended the university with the, with the da- along with Daniel. They were young men and, uh, young men, if not young women. They were students. And from the first day in the university, he stood his ground and critiqued idolatry and its implications. If there should be any idolatry in the university, that was a very sad and sorry thing, but he stood against it. Then he critiqued their politics. We shall find a lot of Daniel's critique of Gentile politics in chapters two and three, in chapters seven and eight— uh Long critiques of Gentile politics. Not only content to critique Gentile educational system and Gentile politics, we shall find out he critiqued also the use of religion in politics. Witness chapter six. Politics controlling religion for its own political ends. And what is even more remarkable, we shall find, as we come to chapter nine of his memoirs, he critiques Israel and Jerusalem. He wasn't a starry-eyed pro-Israel man that took the view that Israel was always right. But wrote of his intercessions for Jerusalem, chapter nine of his memoirs, his confession of Israel's dark, dark sins and rebellion against God, and that the only hope for Israel's restoration was repentance on Israel's part and coming back to faith in God. And he indicates, even though briefly, as he comes to the end of his intercessions, that while there will be some temporary restoration of Israel, Israel will eventually cut off their own Messiah. And until they repent of it, there will be no restoration of Israel without Christ, their Messiah. So now, as our preliminary exercise, I want us to study this book, which perhaps is not a strange thing to do, seeing this is a Bible study. I'd like us to take our Bibles in our hands, if we will. And I want us just briefly to read a passage from each major section of this book, so that we can begin to get the book as a whole in front of our eyes and onto our minds. For Daniel is one of those books in which it is so very easy to have to pay special attention to one or two chapters. Who do you think are the toes of Daniel's image in chapter two? What would you say, Mr. So-and-so hold that the toes are? Uh, but somebody else holds that no, that might be the big toe, but the other toes are something else, you'll see. And what about his two legs, and who do they represent? So easy to do, isn't it? Or to take chapter seven, marvelous chapter. Who is the fourth beast, you see? And as for that curiosity of the wild beast in chapter eight, why on earth is he humped up on one side? And that's that. The main chapters we are so interested in and so often discussed. I would like to make the practical point tonight that we take our Bibles in hand and look at the thing as a whole. And that in itself, when we've done it, will raise certain profitable questions in our thinking. So, okay, Bibles in hand, yes, yes, Bibles in hand. This is a Bible study, not here to listen to my voice, but to study the Bible. Bible in hand, then chapter one we have already read. Daniel in the context of education. Chapter two as you see, uh, from uh, uh, verses thirty one, thirty two onwards, is the story of how Nebuchadnezzar had a dream one night and saw this colossal image of a man made of multi-metaled layers, and how Daniel was called in to interpret it. And this great, marvelous, beautiful image was a, a representation of successive world empires, beginning with the world empire of the Babylonians and proceeding down the ages to the Romans, if not beyond. We shall know the passage well. Chapter three is of another image, an image in chapter two, an image in chapter three. It is important not to get the images confused. The one in three is the image of gold that Nebuchadnezzar set up, that was made of some other material as to its skeleton, but uh, adorned outwardly with gold. And Nebuchadnezzar assembled his provincial administrators and brought them to it and had them bowed down before his image, uh, with the playing of suitable music. And Daniel's 3 com- uh, uh, uh, friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to bow down and got themselves thrown into the fiery furnace. Chapter four tells of God's discipline upon Nebuchadnezzar. For if chapters two and three were to do with politics, chapter four and five are going to deal with culture. And so, in chapter four, Nebuchadnezzar has a dream, and in the dream he seem- sees a beautiful tree, lovely to look at it was, and good for food, and its branches and leaves were shelter for man and beast, and the tree provided fruit for man and beast. And it represented Nebuchadnezzar and his culture. And the chapter goes on to tell us how he was walking on the roof of his house one night, his palace, and looking over the great city that he had built. It was magnificent. It would make Limavady look like a slum, you know. Wonderful as Limavady is, you see. Magnificent Ishtar Gate. If you haven't gone on holiday to East Berlin, well, go next year and enter the great museum there and see the reconstituted Ishtar Gate with some of the actual tilings that were salvaged in the dig, the archaeological dig some years ago, uh, decades ago, and now brought home by Schliemann to, to, uh, Berlin. And you'll get some idea of what it must have be- mean, uh, for Daniel to leave a little city like Jerusalem, perched on its hill, and come to this modern, big, large metropolis, magnificent in its architecture and its artistry and its gardening. Nebuchadnezzar was, um, walking on the roof of his palace and saying, is not this the great Babylon that I have built for my majesty and my glory? And in that very moment, the discipline that God had warned him would happen if he didn't repent fell on him, and the tree was cut down, and the great architect and beautifier of Babylon got some curious illness in which he, he became and lived like an animal. They turned him out to grass, and he ate the grass. A pitiful sight indeed. God's verdict on Nebuchadnezzar's attitude to culture. And it ends happily with how Dan- uh, Nebuchadnezzar, in his misery, eventually reached out for God and found God, and was restored to his sanity and to true culture. That's Daniel chapter four, isn't it? Chapter five, what is that about? Well, forgive me if I call it culture. It isn't strictly speaking culture, is it not? Not the banquets. But this was a some banquet, wasn't it? It was a royal banquet in the palace put on by Belshazzar, who was, uh, holding place viceroy for his father Nabonides, who was away on, uh, business, I suppose, and it was some banquet. The ladies were there in all their latest, you know. What ho! Uh, Hello Magazine had some photographers there, I tell you they did. Aha, it was magnificent. And the wines, I hadn't tasted anything like it. And the music, well, magnificent. Culture, if that's what you're dignified by. When a hand appeared writing on the wall, and Daniel being brought in, interpreted the write. God had weighed it all in a balance and found it wanting. That very night Belshazzar was slain. The Babylonian Empire passed, and the Medo-Persians took over. It had two passages, two chapters, two and three, on politics. Now we've had two chapters, three and 4, on culture. And we can learn a lot, if God help us, in the critique of our own modern culture, learning to see what is good in it and what is bad in it? In chapter, uh, uh, uh six, of course, we have changed from Babylon to life under the Medo-Persians, under Darius. And it is an example of how politics sometimes and politicians will use religion for their own very questionable ends. So some, uh, civil servants came along to Darius, and they said, your majesty, you know, uh, you rule over a very wide empire of many different nations with all their different cultures and their religions, and the emperor said, yes, I do indeed, yes. Well, they said, you know, haven't you ever considered the difficulty in a multicultural empire where religion can cause a lot of damage and fighting and terrorism and things like that, you see? Why, the fundamentalists, you know, they won't pray to anybody except their own God. They keep on telling the world there's only one true God, and that offends people of other religions. Doesn't it now? You'll see. So we have a suggestion to make, Your Majesty, for the good of the empire, really, that you pass a law and you sign it so that it cannot be changed. The laws of the Medes and Persians cannot be changed. To the effect that for a month, no one shall pray to any god except to one god that everybody can agree on. And the emperor said, yes, well, it's a very good idea, perhaps, but what, what, what god, uh, uh, uh, could we get like that, you see? They said, Your Majesty, you would be the perfect God, wouldn't you? Well, he said, I hadn't thought of that before. Well, if you say so, and we get everybody praying to you for a month, and anybody that doesn't will be thrown into the den of lions as a miscontent and possible, uh, creator of trouble. So Darius consented. The civil servants had passed it because they wanted to get at Daniel, actually. They were jealous that he had been made head of the civil service when they felt they ought to be. So they invented all this thing, knowing that Daniel wouldn't pray to the emperor, would pray to his own God still. As a result, he was put into the den of lions. My dear brothers and sisters, as we read it, surely we have one eye on our own society. The multiculturalism tells us that we mustn't say that our God is the true God and all other gods are false gods. Where it bids us say, uh, not to say that Jesus Christ is the only way to God. There will come days when the final great universal emperor will forbid everybody to pray to the God of heaven. They will worship his image and take his mark in their foreheads and in their hands. This is not just fable, you know. Daniel stood against it in his own day. The roost by politicians of religion for their own political ends. Chapter Chapters and eight again reverse to, uh, revert to politics. This time the Gentile kingdoms are symbolized not by a big image of various metals, but by wild beasts. And we shall have to ask, why do we get another two chapters on politics? And why is it that whereas in chapter two the various empires were likened to a magnificent statue, statue of man, glorious, huge, whereas in chapter seven, these same Gentile empires are represented as wild beasts. Is the symbolism significant? Well, I want to put that to you so that you should do perhaps a little thinking on the use of symbols in scripture. We need to get it straight so as to get the maximum value out of Daniel's prophecy. So let me take a little illustration of what I mean. Take an easier book of symbols, the book of the Revelation and chapter five. You've heard that read, haven't you, many times? And when Daniel wept because nobody was found worthy to open the book or to loose its seals, an angel said, weep not, Daniel, for the lion of the tribe of Judah has prevailed to take the book and open the seals thereof. And you say to me, perhaps, um, well, the lion of Judah, well, who is the lion of Judah? And I say, well, that's our Lord Jesus, of course. Well, you say, why didn't he say outright the Lord Jesus? Why wrap it up in this lion thing? Well, now we know who it is, so let's go get the lion. It's the Lord Jesus, you see. And I looked, says John, and I saw a little lamb. Really? You say, who is the little lamb then? Well, I say, that's the Lord Jesus too. Ah, there you say right there again. Well, why can't you say outright the Lord Jesus? Why muddle it all up and talk about lambs and lions? In other words, when we say that, we're treating these symbols as though they were codes. You say, what are codes? Well, when, uh, one army tries to send a message that they don't want the other nation to understand, they put it into code. And if you received the code, you couldn't read it. But if you've got somebody come along and interpreted the old code and got the meaning in straightforward English, then you would ditch the code. You're not interested in the code. Yeah, you're interested in the actual English meaning. And some people treat the imagery of the book of the Revelation and here in Daniel as though it were code. If only you could break the code, then we could get at the real message and leave the code. No, no. When the Lord Jesus, it is said that the lion of the tribe of Judah, that's not code. You're supposed to know when you read it, it's the Lord Jesus. If you don't know it's the Lord Jesus, perhaps you wouldn't read the revelation to say, to start with. You know it's Jesus, but who is Jesus? Oh, he's the lion, says the pro- the the the prophet. The majestic lion, listen to him roar. And the world seems to shake. That's our Lord. He's a lion, is he? Yes, but he's also a lamb as it had been slain. You say, yes, he was slain, wasn't he? Yes, literally slain at Calvary. What for? Well, because he was the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. And when we call him lamb, it's not a code. It's helping us to see who he is and what he has done. So when we come across this great image of various metals, or this succession of beasts, we shall consider the symbolism. We shall not treat it just as code and say, now what does this represent? I think it represents the Romans or the Babylonians or, or something else. We shall try to understand the symbolism. And what's left after that? Well, after chapter eight you get chapter nine, which is Daniel's prayer for the restoration of Jerusalem. And then finally, there's a final vision. It occupies three chapters, chapters ten, eleven, and twelve. Prophecies of history that then go off into the future and come to depict the great Antichrist, the man of sin that shall rise in the last times of a present world system. And with that we come to the end. So let's now look at that formally put, simply put, and what we're aiming to do here now is to acquaint ourselves with the outline of the contents of the book of Daniel. My good brothers and sisters, if we mean business for God, we shall try to get Daniel at our fingertips. Why shouldn't we? Easily done. Not a complicated system, is it? There is chapter one, the refusal to eat the king's food because it was unclean. Daniel and his colleagues protest and are vindicated. Then two images. The big image of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, with a succession of empires from Babylon down to the Romans, and then a second image, the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar set up, representing his god, which was largely himself. And his, uh, governors of the provinces and high leading officials had to come, and when the orchestra played, they had to bow down to Nebuchadnezzar was responsible. He was the great architect of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, so that, uh, his buildings and Babylon at that stage was one of the seven wonders of the world. Delightful it was. Culture. And this, the story of the great banquet, the royal banquet put on by the Vice Regent Belshazzar. But you notice that both of them are concerned with God's discipline of culture. For in this one, Nebuchadnezzar is likened to a big tree, glorious in itself, but because Nebuchadnezzar became proud in his own majesty and glory and forgot God, his tree was cut down under the discipline of God, and Nebuchadnezzar lived like an animal, the very opposite of art and order. And yet, Nebuchadnezzar's repentance and the way God restored him. The second one on culture, the great banquet that Belshazzar gave. And how, as we shall see in a moment, he defied God. And God's discipline fell on him. This time there was no restoration. That was the end. And Daniel made the point to Belshazzar as he rehearsed Nebuchadnezzar's experience and how Nebuchadnezzar had humbled himself under God's discipline and Belshazzar, though you knew all this, you wouldn't humble yourself. And God intervened. That was the end of Belshazzar. It was, in fact, the end of the Babylonian Empire. So in this first half of the book, you come from Nebuchadnezzar, who funded the Neo-Babylonian Empire, down to Belshazzar. He was the last. At that point, the Medo-Persians took over. And if we keep that in our mind, we shall ask what is the connection between these two, these various things here, and finding the answers will be useful. We're told here, for instance, that when Nebuchadnezzar took away some of the leading citizens from Jerusalem and then eventually sacked the temple, he took the golden vessels, or some of the golden vessels, from the house of the Lord in Jerusalem and put them in the house of his gods in Babylon. And you say that was a very bad thing to do, wasn't it? Well, it wasn't way, but he wanted to be respectful. Because it was a funny idea that idolaters have. Nebuchadnezzar preferred his own gods, and his chief god was a god called Marduk. On the other hand, he recognized that, uh, Israel's God, Yahweh, was a God. And if you asked him, therefore, how did Nebuchadnezzar manage to conquer the Jews, he would have told you that it was their God, Yahweh, that allowed me to go and conquer them. But because he respected gods as gods, so to speak, in his pagan mind, he took the vessels devoted to the service of God out of the temple at Jerusalem and put them in the temple of his god, meaning to respect them. They were vessels of a god. That's a pagan idea, but that's what he did. And this chap... when we come to the real climax, do notice they didn't just drink wine and get a bit tipsy. At that banquet, Belshazzar, uh, had decided in his own mind he was going to take a stand. Do you know he'd heard from the Queen Mother all about Nebuchadnezzar, what they c- they called his father, that's uh, uh, Aramaic for grandfather, perhaps, you'll see, Nebuchadnezzar, and how he'd been a wild fellow, and how he got converted and found the true God, and Belshazzar ought to think about that and find the true God, you see. You can understand what, uh, a queen mother like that would be at, can't you, talking to the young chap? He got fed up with it. And he'd made up his mind. What life was about. Being a little bit tipsy, perhaps, at the dinner party, he eventually stood up, commanded his servants to go to the temple in Babylon where Nebuchadnezzar had put the golden vessels of the house of the Lord, and to bring them to his table. And when the golden vessels from the house of the Lord were put on his table, then he had the wine bearer fill them with wine, and in front of all the people, he said, if you want to know what my chief values are, this is the God I serve, my pleasure. And he drank out of the vessels... of the God of the universe. Wow. That night, his dead body lay in the streets of Babylon. It's a vivid story, isn't it? And all I'm quoting it for now, just to revive your memory, because you knew it anyway. Do you see how the thing is running? From here with the golden vessels, put in the temple, pagan temple, I admit, but put reverently in the temple, to the point where the vice regent takes those vessels, dedicated to the service of God, and says, I'm the God to be served, my pleasure. Ladies and gentlemen, do you see, my dear brothers and sisters, there are multitudes of our fellow citizens that take precisely that attitude to life. Life's values? But serving God? I don't believe it. What are life's values then? Those values are myself, my pleasures, my interests. So that's a, that's a one set of stories, and here you will notice is the end of the Babylonian Empire. You come to an end here. Cyrus the Mede took over the kingdom. Now here, of course, Daniel will record visions and date them, and you'll see from the date that they happened under these Babylonian kings. But he's remembering them now. You start off here, at the top here, in group two, with Darius, emperor of the Medo-Persians. And Daniel is promoted to be head of civil servants, the imperial civil service of the Medo-Persians. So we're in a different world, even though he will look back upon images of visions that he had in the earlier time. And here, under the Medo-Persians, we come through until you get to the end of chapter twelve. We'll read of the great rising, rise of the great Antichrist, the man of sin. And of course, the coming of Christ to rule and to reign. But let's look briefly now, and then we'll finish. When we've got this on our heads and can think about it as a whole, do see, and ask questions to how the thing is related and what are the major topics, and why we need even, in addition to getting the little detail of the visions, to see the point, the big point of all the visions and the histories and how they relate together. As we do that, we shall find, um, interesting questions arise. What about this? In that dream image, as I said earlier, the succession of Gentile empires are represented by glorious parts of a big image. Beautiful it was. It was, uh, made like a man, so big and glorious. This is a bit frightening. A man so big. And it tells us of the great achievements of mankind in government. Ah, I know Westminster isn't very popular. Perhaps Stormont is more popular. But anyway, um, would you not prefer to be living under this modern systems of government than, say, in Kenya, where tribal law holds sway and people massacre each other because they're of different tribes. We don't do that any longer in Northern Ireland, do we? The glories of man's progress in the development of forms of government. Something to be very grateful to God for, and to admire. They have their weakness, of course, we shall discover that. But here, forms of government are there for our admiration. Or to be thankful for any government, didn't we? Any government's worse, it's better than no government at all. But by contrast, over here, these same governments are likened to wild beasts. Why is that so? And how will you recognize the two of them? And what lessons will you learn from each one. Oh, there's an interesting little, uh, question arises here, doesn't it? You think of Nebuchadnezzar and how he was disciplined. His beautiful tree, as he saw in his vision, was cut down. And, uh, nevertheless, its trunk was left, and it was restored under God's discipline and mercy. Come across here to chapter nine. And Daniel is concerned. Why? Because Jerusalem lies waste. And who laid it waste? Well, him, of course. Nebuchadnezzar. And it was the emperor Nebuchadnezzar that ruled the place, Jerusalem, and had sacked the city and sacked the temple. And Daniel is praying, but he doesn't put the blame on Nebuchadnezzar. Puts the blame on his own nation's sins. And he prays for their restoration. And you'll see God had told them through Amos the prophet, Israel, you only have I known of all the nations, you are my chosen people. Therefore what? Therefore, I will deal in severer discipline with you than I do with the Gentile nations. Because you have professed to know me, because I have blessed you and give you extraordinary privileges, I shall discipline you more than the others. And Dan- uh, Nebuchadnezzar was restored after seven times. Jerusalem will be restored. That's seventy times seven will be the time of her tribulation. Undisputed. Interesting connections, aren't they? And we needn't worry ourselves more tonight with them. I've made my point, and it's a very simple point, that we are about to study Daniel. Our first secret of success, so to speak, will be to get Daniel's vid- uh, book and the contents of it simply at the moment, but the main contents of it clear in our minds. And if you wake up tonight and and can't sleep for five minutes, well, have a go at seeing if you can place the contents of Daniel and say, now what came after, I can't forget now, what came after chapter, was that two or three? where the chaps got thrown into a a furnace, or what happened next? And if you can't remember, well, get up and and and get it on your mind while you're thinking about it, you see, but get it whatever you do, get it. So you've got the book as a whole on your mind. For we rely upon the Holy Spirit to teach us, don't we? But if he's going to bring things to our mind and show us their meaning, we must first put them on our minds to start with, mustn't we? So God use our study tonight to help us get hold of the major contents of the book, and then in these coming weeks, God surely will draw near and show us its meaning. Shall we pray? Our Our f- Father, we thank thee for thy servant Daniel. We thank thee for his godly life in the exalted circumstances and duties in which he lived. And we thank thee that the benefit of his spiritual exercise has come down through his writing to us these many centuries later. We thank thee for it. Pray now, as we commence these studies again of his writings, that thou wilt help us to grasp their contents. Then, Lord, lead us to see their significance, that we in our own day might be veritable Daniels for thee in our modern world. We pray, therefore, thy blessing on thy word and our fellowship together now and the refreshments that we are to have for thy name's sake. Bless them, we pray, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.