A National Tragedy
If you were alive on September 11, 2001, you probably remember how you felt when you heard that the United States had been attacked. I remember my mom on the phone with my stepdad, with a look of shock on her face. When she told me what had happened, I was scared. My mind began racing. For the next few days, even at school, I couldn’t think about anything else.
Around 600 years before the time of Jesus, a national tragedy struck Judah, the people of God. The Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, conquered their capital, Jerusalem. He took the city’s treasures and the best of its people to Babylon. This event challenged the faith of the most orthodox Jew. The Lord who had always defended Judah in the past had been defeated.
Or so it seemed.
Did God Lose?
When nations waged war in ancient times, they believed their conflict reflected a parallel warfare between their gods. The conquest of Jerusalem and robbery of God’s temple, therefore, seemed to mean that Marduk, Babylon’s god, had conquered Judah’s God.
Destroying other gods was Marduk’s claim to fame. A Babylonian document, the Enuma Elish, describes his defeat of Tiamat, the goddess of chaos: “Oh Marduk you are indeed our Avenger. We have granted you kingship over the entire universe, your word shall be supreme. When you sit in the assembly your weapons shall not fail. They shall smash your foes joyfully.”[1]
It looked like Marduk had joyfully smashed the God of Israel, just like he smashed Tiamat. The God who had once delivered his people from slavery in Egypt, parting the Red Sea (Exod. 14), had been conquered by the god of Babylon.
Imagine the terror of being invaded by a foreign army. Everything about your life has changed. And the God who had always defended your people has been defeated.
Even in less extreme situations, we’re sometimes tempted to ask, “God, why does it look like you’re losing?”
God Is Still in Control
The book of Daniel is written to people in exile. It’s written to people who ask, “Where is God?” in the midst of a culture that looks like it has beaten him. And Daniel tells them that despite their circumstances, God is still in control.
It’s not just these exiles in 605 BC that need to know God is still in control. Every Christian needs to know this. Every Christian is, in one sense, far from home. Every Christian experiences exile.
The apostle Paul said, “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20). The New Testament calls Old Testament saints like Daniel “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Heb. 11:13). They were seeking “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:16). Heaven was their homeland. It’s our homeland, too.
Jesus said, “If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:19). We’re exiles. We’re outsiders. This world isn’t our true home.
So the book of Daniel has a lot to say to us. And the first thing it says is that in the midst of terrible events, God is still in control.
Why did this catastrophe happen? Daniel 1:2 tells us: “And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into [Nebuchadnezzar’s] hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God.” Who gave Jehoiakim into the hands of the Babylonian king? God.
There are three rulers described here: Jehoiakim, Nebuchadnezzar, and the Lord. But only one of them was the sovereign. It looked like Nebuchadnezzar was in control, but Daniel tells us that Jehoiakim was placed in Nebuchadnezzar’s hand like a gift. The sovereign God handed one king over to another. The true sovereign, the Lord, was still in control.
Desolate, but Comforted
God is in control, even in bad times. This message is meant to comfort God’s people. Regardless of what we experience, regardless of what circumstances tell us, God is still in control.
Daniel doesn’t say in these verses why God allowed this catastrophe. Later in the book, he says it’s because of Israel’s sin. But here he focuses on why his readers can have hope. God doesn’t always explain why certain things happen, but he tells us he’s still enthroned. The Lord hasn’t abandoned his people.
The book of Daniel shows how God cares for us even in our exile.
And this story of God’s apparent defeat reminds us of another time when it looked like God had been defeated. Six hundred years after Daniel was taken away from Jerusalem, another Israelite was shackled and taken out of the holy city. He was the true Israelite. He was God in human flesh. He was taken captive, exiled, and put to death by his enemies.
But he was in control. In Acts 4:27–28, the apostle Peter says, “For truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.” Jesus died because God planned it. Whatever evil Herod or Pilate or anyone else intended, God was in control.
Daniel reminds people in exile—people who suffer, people who feel like God is losing—that God is in control. And when we look at the cross of Christ, we’re reminded that our God is in control even when the world does its worst.
This is our comfort. God isn’t losing and he hasn’t abandoned us. For that reason, we can have hope no matter how bad things get.
[1]. Timothy J. Stephany. Enuma Elish: the Babylonian Creation Epic: Also Includes ‘atrahasis’, the First Great Flood Myth (United States: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform), 2013.
This is an excerpt from our newest Core Bible study on the book of Daniel. Learn more and request your copy here.