Daniel: Unshakable Trust in Uncertain Times — Daniel 2:1-49

So now Daniel chapter two, I wanna remind you what we're looking at here.

So for the Jews, the world had just been turned upside down.

Everything had changed because after they were rescued from Egyptian slavery, hundreds of years before the book of Daniel was written, they had always had their own country, their own capital, their own king, their own temple, their own priest.

They were in their own little bubble, and they could live their life in a relationship with God as they saw fit.

But then... 600 years before Jesus, when Daniel takes place, there's a bully on the block named Babylon.

And they come in, they're getting ready to wipe Jerusalem off the map.

Already they've taken captives back.

And so now Jews, same Bible, same God, but now they were living under a very different cultural context.

The culture that they were living in wanted to dismiss their relationship with God.

It wanted to discourage their relationship with God.

Even wanted to destroy their relationship with God.

These are Jews living in Babylonian exile under Babylonian rules.

And how do you in that situation? By the way, the application of this is easy.

You could arguably say that 50 years ago we lived in a Christian culture.

Kind of doubt it.

But now we live in a post-Christian culture.

So how do we, like Daniel, have an unshakable trust in uncertain times? And so what we have here in the book of Daniel is a survival guide.

A survival guide through these stories and these visions on what it means to live in a world that everything we know seems to be turning upside down.

So this is Daniel chapter 2.

I just want to read the first six verses and kind of set the scene here.

In the second year of his reign, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, he had dreams and his mind was troubled.

He could not sleep.

So the king summoned magicians, enchanters, sorcerers, astrologers, ghostbusters to tell them what he had dreamed.

When they came in and stood before the king, they said to him, or he said to them, I have had a dream that troubles me, and I want to know what it means.

The astrologers answered the king, King, may you live forever.