Sermon Tone Analysis

*The Horror of Human Evil*

*Daniel 7          August 1, 1999*

 

*Introduction:*

 

What upsets every scene, domestic or political, is not man's desire to be so bad.

So far I have never met a man who wanted to be bad.

The mystery of man is that he is bad when he wants to be good.

-- George MacLeod, Leadership, Vol. 5, no.

3.

 

Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance.

Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890)

 

Evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.

Ethiopian Proverb

 

I do not fear the explosive power of the atom bomb.

What I fear is the explosive power of evil in the human heart.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

 

Evil is the real problem in the hearts and minds of men.

It is not a problem of physics but of ethics.

It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

 

There is nothing evil in matter itself.

Evil lies in the spirit.

Evils of the heart, of the mind, of the soul, of the spirit- these have to do with man's sin, and the only reason the human body does evil is because the human spirit uses it to do evil.

A.

W. Tozer (1897-1963)

 

Evil often triumphs, but never conquers.

Joseph Roux (1834-1886)

 

God is so powerful that he can direct any evil to a good end.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

 

God would never permit evil if he could not bring good out of evil.

Thomas Watson (C.

1557-1592)

 

Evil can never be undone, but only purged and redeemed.

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)

 

Many have puzzled themselves about the origin of evil.

I am content to observe that there is evil, and that there is a way to escape from it, and with this I begin and end.

John Newton (1725-1807)

 

          The last half of Daniel’s book is much different than the first half.

The first half dealt with personal stories about Daniel and his life in the king’s court.

We could call it court narrative.

In several of those accounts, Daniel was called upon to interpret divine messages to the king’s of Babylonia and Media-Persia.

Like Joseph in Egypt, he was God’s man in high places for the good of his captive people and to bring God’s message to the Gentile kings.

But God didn’t stop there with Daniel because he was highly esteemed (just like the apostle John later in time to whom God gave the book of Revelation).

Daniel was chosen by God to bring his message of sovereign victory to mankind throughout the ages.

This is appropriate because we, like the Jews of his time, are seemingly captive to surrounding events and to a course of history we can’t understand.

In short, we are captive to our own fallenness and the fallenness of the world.

So the last half of Daniel delves into the private visions of future events that God gave him for the encouragement of his future readers.

And we shall find out in the last half of Daniel as in the first, that God is in control.

So now God gives Daniel visions of his own.

No longer is he just interpreting the visions of others.

These visions come upon Daniel late in life after his heart has been more than broken over human sin and after he has earned most of his stripes.

Wisdom and the ability to handle certain types of knowledge come with age.

Notice the beginning lines of the next several chapters:

 

In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream, and visions passed through his mind as he was lying on his bed.

He wrote down the substance of his dream.

(Daniel 7:1 NIVUS)

 

 In the third year of King Belshazzar's reign, I, Daniel, had a vision, after the one that had already appeared to me.

(Daniel 8:1 NIVUS)

 

 In the first year of Darius son of Xerxes (a Mede by descent), who was made ruler over the Babylonian kingdom--  in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures, according to the word of the LORD given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years.

(Daniel 9:1-2 NIVUS)

 

 In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia, a revelation was given to Daniel (who was called Belteshazzar).

Its message was true and it concerned a great war.

The understanding of the message came to him in a vision.

(Daniel 10:1 NIVUS)

 

In these visions we change from court narrative to a type of writing called apocalyptic.

This word “apocalypse” is growing more and more popular as a Hollywood theme for motion pictures as we move closer to the millenium.

The word in common use strikes us with doom and pessimism which is the world’s inner sense of judgment by God for sins.

But it actually means “revelation”.

The actual purpose of it for God’s people is not to overwhelm us with doom and gloom but to uplift us with joy and optimism as we look at God’s program to bring an end to human corruption and oppression.

Apocalyptic does have an element of war to it, but it is the actions of our warring God against his enemies and not against his children.

Apocalyptic scripture celebrates God’s victory over the enemies of the godly.

So we move from the present circumstances of God’s people in captivity to their ultimate liberation.

We move from the human evil so prevalent in the first six chapters to envisioning the perverse spiritual forces that stand behind them.

We move from stories like deliverance from a burning furnace and a lion’s den to salvation from the power of death itself.

In these visions we suddenly find ourselves in a strange world of hybrid beasts and riders on the clouds.

And we encounter timetables that seen impossible to penetrate.

We wonder what to make of them.

The metaphors and similes we encounter teach us by analogy.

Light is thrown on difficult concepts and things by relating them to something else that we know from common experience.

The images speak truly and accurately, but not precisely.

Sometimes it is difficult to know where analogy stops.

In this way, images preserve mystery about ideas that are ultimately beyond our understanding.

So we cannot interpret apocalyptic images too finely.

And perhaps we are not meant to.

Perhaps God intends a certain intentional ambiguity and sense of mystery.

But we can see and understand the themes that God wants us to know.

The theme that we can grasp in chapter 7 from the vision of the four hybrid beasts from the sea is the horror of human evil and what God does about it.

He will defeat the seemingly unconquerable powers that oppress his people.

Evil may seem like it has the upper hand, but that is a temporary deception.

Comfort for the faithful rides on the wind of the Word of God.

Like Jesus says in John 3:8, we might not see where it blows, but it is none the less real because we can hear it.

It is this hearing of God’s prophetic plan that gives us hope.

All that is evil will be judged and condemned.

In these visions, Daniel sees the course of Gentile world history.

We have already discussed Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of the statue concerning this in chapter 2. *Let us take another look at the diagram that we showed then.

*This chapter as well as the next will give us similar visions but with different themes.

We have already identified the theme of this chapter, the horror of human evil.

We can divide the chapter into three parts.

They are, as you can see in the outline on the back of your bulletin* ---*

* *

*I.

The beastly horror from the human sea, vv.

1-8*

*II.

The almighty power of the heavenly throne, vv.