To Whom He Wills

Starting at the End

There's a recent action thriller called The Fixer that begins with these words: "My name is Donovan Carter, and if you're listening to this message, it means I'm dead. But I still have a story to tell."

Like so many great stories, it begins at the very end — to hook us, to intrigue us, and to force us to ask one question: Why on earth did we get into this situation? The ending is no longer the surprise. The mystery now lies in the journey.

That's precisely what we encounter this morning in Daniel 4. We start at the finish line. King Nebuchadnezzar, that ruthless pagan emperor of Babylon, suddenly sounds like a faithful follower of God. He proclaims to the whole world the blessings he has received from the Most High God, and later writes:

I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise, and exalt, and glorify the King of Heaven.

How has a pagan king ended up writing a worship song? How has he come to this point in his life?

The Main Point

Today's story is perhaps less famous than those surrounding it. Most of us know about the fiery furnace, the writing on the wall, and the lions' den. But the lesson here is no less profound. In fact, we're not left guessing what the main point is. Three times the same line is repeated — in verses 17, 25, and 32:

...so that the living may know that the Most High is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he pleases.

Here is information — not just for a dead king from the ancient past, but for the living. Here is information for you and for me.

God humbles the pride that we might recognize his rule.

Nebuchadnezzar thought — and sometimes we fall into the same trap — that God only rules in heaven, up there. But we are told that God rules on earth as in heaven, down here. It's the very thing we pray week by week when we say the Lord's Prayer.

Nor is this simply about God's rule over empires. It is also about his right to rule over the individual — his right to rule over us. This is what makes it a deeply personal story, much more than a generic history lesson. It is an account of God working in a person's life: the story of how God took a self-centred individual and compelled him to acknowledge the living God, for his good and for the good of God's purposes in the world.

The Pride: A Builder Who Cannot Acknowledge God

In the classic British comedy Fawlty Towers, hotel owner Basil Fawlty loses his patience with a demanding guest complaining about her room's lack of sea view. His sarcastic response perfectly highlights the absurdity of her expectations:

May I ask what you were expecting to see out of a Turkish hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain?

As we look through our metaphorical window this morning, this is precisely what we are asked to see: the majesty of Babylon. Look at verse 30 and Nebuchadnezzar's boast:

Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?

In Nebuchadnezzar's day, Babylon was the largest and greatest city on earth. Engineered for glory, dressed to impress, and impossible to ignore. Standing on the roof of his palace was the king who believed it all came from him. As he puts it in verse 4, "I was at home in my palace, contented and prosperous."

A new city, a new empire, a new culture had risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the Assyrian empire, and the king was very proud of it. In the dream Daniel interprets, the king stands like a mighty tree in the middle of the land — a tree of life whose influence stretches to the ends of the earth, where people and nations prosper in its shade. There is food for all and shelter for all. Everyone benefits from this king's rule.

And to top it all off, his achievements appeared to have the approval of the gods. He alone had managed to pillage Israel's God, raid his temple, and drag its king and top officials into exile. Nor was he entirely deluded, for Daniel had confirmed as much in the previous chapter: "Your majesty, you are the king of kings. The God of heaven has given you dominion and power and might and glory."

The Danger of Pride

As Nebuchadnezzar looks from his window at the Hanging Gardens below, he is delighted by what he sees. As one commentator writes, he is settled, secure, and at ease. He has come to believe that all these achievements are the result — the reward even — of simply being him.

But that kind of pride is incredibly dangerous. As we heard last week, it moves us from wanting recognition to demanding worship. It builds its own success on the backs of others. The prophet Habakkuk had warned:

I am raising up the Babylonians, a feared and dreaded people... They are a law unto themselves and promote their own honour.

This is the curse of the powerful. Centuries later, the Roman emperor Domitian would declare, Dominus et Deus imperator est — "The emperor is lord and god." This is the great delusion of pride: it moves us from thinking we are a king to believing we are a god.

I once watched a YouTube video on the causes of street fights — London is a difficult place to live. The instructor said this: "Your greatest danger to you is not the other man's fists. It is your own ego." As Proverbs 16 warns us:

Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.

What Nebuchadnezzar completely missed was that the one true God was the power behind the throne — not him. Everything he had came from the Lord and existed for his glory alone. This God will brook no rival, neither an individual nor an empire. Even when Jesus came to establish the kingdom of God on earth, he refused to rival his Father, but only came to do his Father's will. If the Son refuses to step into the spotlight, then we would be foolish to claim it ourselves.

It's Easy to See in Others

It's easy for us to hold these lessons at arm's length. We can easily spot foolish pride in others — particularly powerful world leaders who to this day build lasting memorials in their cities and name things for their own honour. But it is far more difficult to see these tendencies in ourselves: our own pride, our own use of authority, no matter how small our sphere of influence.

We are all building something. And the more we have been given, the more gifted we are, the more prone we are to assume that we can build Babylon in our own strength.

Everything Serves at God's Pleasure

My one minor success in the military was to win a book prize at Sandhurst — Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. It's a sweeping history tracing the destiny of the world's great empires over five centuries. The author's main observation matches that old proverb: what goes up must come down. All empires fail, and they fail in similar ways — largely, he claims, through imperial overreach, when their commitments outstrip their resources.

But Daniel's point goes much deeper than standard history. It is that all human rulers, and the empires they build, serve at God's pleasure. Things fail because God ends them. Everything is a temporary affair.

That's soberingly true of everything we achieve. I remember it hitting me with full force after my parents died. We took almost everything they owned — everything they had spent a lifetime working for — and lobbed it into a skip, because no one wanted it. Eventually, it all comes to an end. And God determines exactly when that end will be. It happens to a lifetime of middle-class belongings just as easily as it happens to those building empires and palaces. We all live and serve at God's pleasure.

A Gracious God

Yet even with that heavy truth writ large, God is incredibly gracious here. Look how he operates.

Daniel has been uniquely positioned in the palace for such a moment. He is a generous gift from God to the king — the living opportunity given to Nebuchadnezzar to reconsider his choices and turn back to God before it is too late. Likewise, the dream itself, even though it terrifies him, is a severe mercy, meant to rebuke and correct the king before disaster strikes.

At my Roots table we recently read in Romans that we are invited to consider both the kindness and the sternness of God. Here is a patient God, one who wants no one to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

The problem, of course, is that the king would rather look to the bankrupt wisdom of the world. Verse 6: "I commanded that all the wise men of Babylon be brought before me... magicians, enchanters, astrologers, and diviners." If there were a horoscope on page three of the Babylon Daily News, he'd be the first to read it. He knows the dream is a supernatural event; he feels a deep sense of foreboding. And yet he completely forgets to call the one person who can actually help him — Daniel, the man who unlocked his previous dream, the one who speaks for God.

The Gentleness of Daniel

Finally, Daniel is brought in and the time for interpretation arrives. But notice the stark contrast between the confidence of the king's decree at the start of the chapter and the profound gentleness of Daniel as he delivers God's decree.

James Robson, the principal of Oak Hill College, once said that if you find it easy to say the hard things in life, then you have a problem. Here Daniel is hesitant, even fearful, in delivering the hard message. He's not fearful for his own life — though that might be why the other wise men stayed silent. No, he's fearful for the king, and for the countless others whose food and shelter will be lost when this tree of life finally gets the chop. Verse 19: "If only this applied to your enemies, to your adversaries."

It's an incredible moment. Israel was Nebuchadnezzar's enemy. Before Daniel stands the man who ransacked God's temple and dragged him into exile. Yet here is Daniel, genuinely appalled to deliver bad news to the wicked ruler of an evil empire. Why? Because Daniel was living out what God had commanded the exiles to do through Jeremiah:

Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile, and pray to the Lord for it.

There's a lesson for us all when we're standing before an uncooperative and difficult boss.

The golden head atop the imperial statue of chapter 2 is about to tumble — but neither God nor his servant takes any pleasure in its crash. And yet the truth must still be spoken. Daniel confronts the king with these shocking words in verse 22: "Your majesty, you are that tree."

A Warning, Not a Verdict

What follows is God's agenda for personal transformation. The king will be cut down to size and cut off from human society. He'll be stripped of his protection, separated from his home, drenched by the dew of heaven, and driven into madness.

But this is a warning, not a verdict. It is conditional — if the king will accept his civil servant's advice.

If Yes, Prime Minister is to be believed, civil servants are rarely inclined to give straight advice. I've always admired Sir Humphrey Appleby's masterful habit of speaking at great length while avoiding saying anything meaningful at all. Perhaps you're thinking I'm doing that right now. But not Daniel. He's been asked for an interpretation, but now he offers the king advice. Verse 27:

Your majesty, be pleased to accept my advice. Renounce your sins by doing what is right, and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed.

Daniel does not gloss over the king's faults. He confronts the king's injustice and oppression of the poor, and yet still offers a glimmer of hope: "It may be that then your prosperity will continue." An opportunity still exists. God gives the king a full year to turn back — another twelve months of grace.

But finally, the axe must fall. The warning has been ignored, the transformation stillborn. Standing on the roof of the royal palace, the king boasts once more — and in an instant the warning becomes his reality, and the king is turned out to pasture.

Yet even in the verdict there is grace: the stump of the king's reign will be bound and protected, so that it might later be restored. Here's the lesson the king must learn, summarised in verse 37:

Those who walk in pride he is able to humble.

God humbles the pride that we might recognize his rule.

The Humbled Pride Restored

Nigel Hawthorne played Sir Humphrey in Yes, Prime Minister — but he also played the title role in The Madness of King George, another true story of a king humbled by his illness. Hawthorne described the film like this:

It's a very human story about a man who goes mad and is separated from his wife and family and is returned to them and reunited. And then you add all the trappings of royalty, and then you say he is the monarch of a country, and you get something quite extraordinary.

Daniel 4 is exactly that: a national story, a personal story, and a curious story of how God intensely breaks a man's pride and bends him to his will. I love how the theologian Dale Ralph Davis puts it:

A man who thinks he is like a god must become a beast to learn that he is only human.

Nebuchadnezzar once asked, "Is not this the great Babylon I have built?" Centuries later, the explorer Claudius Rich stood on the very same spot in the 1800s and wrote:

I imagined I should have said, "Here were the walls, and such must have been the extent of the area. There stood the palace, and this, most assuredly, the Tower of Babel." I was completely deceived.

Despite being declared a World Heritage Site, the source of Nebuchadnezzar's pride is nothing more than a ruin. Its Hanging Gardens are long gone. There is no view worth seeing from any window.

Acknowledging His Absolute Authority

Ultimately, this chapter demands that we acknowledge God's absolute authority — over our nations, over our leaders, and over our individual lives. No one can oppose him. He always gets his way and achieves his own purposes.

Any power ever given to us is always relative power, never absolute power. It sits and serves under a much higher authority. Nebuchadnezzar believed the gods had chosen him to rule, but in reality his authority came from the one true God of Israel.

When the mad King George III was crowned, the crown was placed on his head by the Archbishop of Canterbury. That symbolic act is a perpetual reminder that power descends from above; it does not arise from below, at least not in any ultimate sense. As Paul later wrote to the Romans:

There is no authority except that which God has established.

All power is delegated power — God's power. We merely borrow it for a while. He appoints, even where he does not approve.

Questions for the Heart

Recognizing this should humble us without God having to shatter us. It's a direct invitation to examine our own hearts. If you want to know what you are truly building, ask yourself:

1. What do I instinctively take credit for?
2. Where do I feel indispensable?
3. What would shake me if God took it away?

As one commentator remarks, the purpose of the king's illness is plain: to bring low the one who has forgotten his human dependence on the Most High.

So let us choose to begin as Nebuchadnezzar ended — to praise, exalt, and glorify the King of Heaven, because everything he does is right and all his ways are just.

The chapter concludes as the fallen head of state lifts his eyes towards heaven. The madness of opposing God dissipates as quickly as it came. Sanity is restored, dignity is restored, his throne is restored. The king finally glorifies him who lives forever. The lesson has been learned:

The living know that the Most High is sovereign over all kingdoms on earth and gives them to anyone he wishes.

God humbles the pride that we might recognize his rule.

Closing Prayer

Let us pray, using the words from Psalm 25:

Show me your ways, Lord. Teach me your paths. Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Saviour, and my hope is in you all day long. Amen.