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[0:00] I realize that it's going to sound somewhat strange when we gather together this morning for our initial session and consideration of the book of Daniel because I'm going to ask you, in preparation for understanding that content as well as we can, we need to go to the book of Jeremiah.

[0:21] So, if you will open your Bibles, please, to Jeremiah chapter 5, we will begin providing a little bit of background that is essential to the understanding of the book of Daniel.

[0:34] We have what is referred to as the four major prophets, and they begin with Isaiah, and then Jeremiah, and then Ezekiel, and then Daniel.

[0:45] And following those, there are the twelve shorter prophets. Actually, they aren't terribly short. I mean, after all, Zechariah is kind of lengthy.

[0:56] But they are commonly referred to as the minor prophets. In a sense, there is nothing minor about any prophet that God has called because each one is strategic to the plan and program of God.

[1:08] But just for purposes of understanding, we will commonly maintain the customary designation of the four minor prophets, the four major prophets being Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel.

[1:25] And they are, generally speaking, in chronological order. In other words, Isaiah approximates about 700 years before Jesus will be born in Bethlehem.

[1:46] And you need to keep in mind, and by the way, this shouldn't even need to be said, but I'm going to say it for the record. This content that we are looking at is as Jewish as it can possibly be.

[2:02] There is nothing in this content for Gentiles other than application. And there are lots and lots of applications.

[2:15] But so far as interpretation is concerned, you cannot get more Jewish than what this is. In fact, that is true of almost the entire Bible.

[2:30] And I know it is commonly believed, but I'm convinced it is a misconception. It is commonly believed that the Old Testament is Jewish and the New Testament is Christian.

[2:45] That is not true at all. It isn't even close to being true. You get into the New Testament. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, you can't get any more Jewish than that.

[2:57] Even the last book of the New Testament, Revelation, you can't get more Jewish than that. And the book of Hebrews, you can't get more Jewish than that. And when you consider all of the New Testament, there is only a relatively small segment that is really addressed to and for Gentiles.

[3:21] And that's the letters written by the Apostle Paul. And that contains the marriage of Jew and Gentile into one body.

[3:34] So, we're talking about a very, very Jewish book. And that, too, is generally misunderstood even by the Christian community. So, Dan, you had a comment or question?

[3:45] I just want to know what you meant by Jewish. By Jewish? It was directed to the Jews. Yeah. What do you mean of that? Yeah. It is. Let me put it this way.

[3:57] Everything in the Bible is for us. Old Testament, New Testament, every verse, every line. It is for us. But most of it is not to us.

[4:11] In other words, there are nations and individuals to whom many specific passages of Scripture are addressed. And they need to be kept in context as to who the recipient is.

[4:26] So, while all the Bible is for us, as Paul mentioned in Romans 15, 4, I think it is, for whatsoever things were written aforetime.

[4:41] And he's talking primarily there about the Old Testament because the New hadn't even been completed as of that time. Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning.

[4:53] That we, through patience and comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope. And that word, of course, means we might have confidence. So, the Bible is designed to provide us with the ability for confident living.

[5:08] And it is all wrapped up in the Scriptures. But that which is so often maligned and misunderstood and underappreciated, not only by Gentiles today, but even by Jews themselves, is the strategic nature of the nation of Israel and the plan and program of God.

[5:34] And it all began with the calling of Abraham, extended then to Isaac and Jacob and the twelve sons and the twelve tribes and so on. It's very, very Jewish.

[5:46] And that tends to be depreciated by the non-Jew. And you all know how the Jewish people have suffered a great deal of persecution. Much of that is due to the ignorance of the Gentiles, who simply did not and do not understand the Scriptures.

[6:03] And the sad part about this is, and the truly sad part about this is, what we are sharing and will be sharing is today very little understood and appreciated even by the Jew.

[6:19] And that is really something. Even by the Jew. They do not see themselves, many of them, of course the Orthodox do. The Orthodox do.

[6:31] But they are a small minority of the Jewish population worldwide. And that is, they see and understand themselves to be in the plan and program of God, but the vast majority of Jewry does not.

[6:44] Don? When did Jewry or Jews come into being? It wasn't right at Abraham, because there was no designation Jew then.

[6:54] What time did that happen? Well, the Jew did not come to be known as the Jew, and that's just a, what shall I say, just an abbreviated term for it.

[7:11] Technically, technically, it is a Hebrew. Abraham is referred to as the first Hebrew, and he got his name, Hebrew, Hebrew. It is believed, the scholars take this position generally, that it comes from the word habiru.

[7:29] H-A-B-I-R-U. Habiru. And in that ancient language, habiru meant one who crossed over.

[7:41] That's the meaning of that word. Habiru. One who crossed over. And over time, it came to be morphed into the word Hebrew. H-E-B-R-E-W.

[7:54] And what Abraham crossed over was the Euphrates River, which was quite a feat in that day. He crossed over from Ur of the Chaldees. Actually, he went north first, and was up at Haran.

[8:07] And there he was in Damascus of Syria, which happened to be the oldest continuing inhabited city in the world today. And there in Damascus, he purchased a slave by the name of Eliezer.

[8:22] And he thought that he would be his total heir, and he was pretty much resigned to that. But God had seed from Abraham's own body in mind, not a purchased slave, who was going to carry on the line.

[8:34] So then, after crossing over, he comes down, all the way down to Mamre, Hebron, in Israel, and pitched a tent and dwelt there.

[8:46] And God appeared to him, gave him the promise about the Son, about being the Father of mighty nations, and so on. And then, many years later, and actually this is going to be a time that we are going to be engaging in Babylon, where Daniel will be taken prisoner, when the tribe of Judah and Benjamin, and we'll be looking at this yet this morning, this is very key, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin constitute the two southern tribes that remained intact when the northern ten tribes seceded from the Union.

[9:24] And we'll talk about that a little bit later. And when the two tribes in the south were carried into captivity, Judah and Benjamin, into Babylonian captivity, where they're going to be for 70 years, because most of those people, the vast majority of them, were from the tribe of Judah, which happens to be the tribe from which Jesus descended.

[9:49] He was the Lion of the tribe of Judah. And the only other tribe will be the tiny tribe of Benjamin, and they were the least populated of all. But they were key because it was in the area of the tribe of Benjamin at the temple.

[10:07] And the city of Jerusalem was located. It's in the tribe of Benjamin. So it was Benjamin and Judah that were carried into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar, and they're going to spend 70 years there.

[10:22] And Daniel will spend almost his entire life in captivity there in Babylon. And while they are there, they are going to adopt the nickname Jew, which is short for Judah.

[10:40] Instead of calling them Judahites, which is exactly what they were, they're just going to be shortened and called Jews. And the spelling for that, at least in English, is J-E-W.

[10:52] So a Jew is Hebrew. And that's how, to the best of our knowledge, that they got the name.

[11:03] So you, as you read in the Bible, as you read in the Old Testament, the word Jew, J-E-W, does not even surface until you get in with the tribe of Judah being in the land of Babylonians, the land of Chaldee.

[11:25] And I remember reading in the book of Esther, and that will be later, by the way, but in the book of Esther, she is referred to as a Jewess.

[11:36] And her uncle Mordecai is Mordecai the Jew, and he's designated as such. So that name came along. And today, it is still kind of referred to as the Jew, or the Jewish people.

[11:49] Okay, let's look at Daniel chapter 5. And I'm going to begin reading here, because this is key. And this, it is, it is this event that, that Jeremiah is talking about.

[12:04] I mean, Jeremiah 5, I'm sorry. It is this event that Jeremiah is talking about that is going to provide the whole backdrop for the book of Daniel. And it is, this is, Jeremiah is writing this earlier, so the prophets are pretty much in chronological order.

[12:23] First you have Isaiah, and then Jeremiah, and then Ezekiel, and then Daniel. So in, in Jeremiah chapter, chapter 5, and let's, let's, for time's sake, let's just jump in at verse 11, if we may.

[12:42] And the Lord said to me, Faithless Israel has proved herself more righteous than treacherous Judah. Now what is this about? Okay, let me explain something here.

[12:55] He is talking about these nations, and I'm using that in the plural, because they have divided. And, many times, when Jeremiah, or the prophets, is talking about Israel, they are talking about the ten tribes of the north that have broken away, but they are going to retain their original name, Israel, which was the name they had before when all the twelve tribes were, well, let me go back, let me, alright, let's go back for a minute.

[13:32] Let's go back to, let's go back to David. Okay? I'll be as brief as I can, but this is important stuff, guys. We've got King David on the throne.

[13:44] He's going to rule and reign in Israel for forty years. And this is about one thousand years before the birth of Christ.

[13:56] Alright? One thousand B.C. Before the birth of Christ. And when David dies, Solomon, his son, comes to the throne, and Solomon is going to reign for forty years.

[14:11] And when Solomon passes off the scene, his son, Rehoboam, Rehoboam came, came to the throne, and everything is intact, but Rehoboam had visions of grandeur, and he called the leaders of the twelve tribes together, and as much as said, my father, Solomon, brought this kingdom to a new height.

[14:39] I just want to advise you that I'm going to bring it a lot higher. I'm going to outdo my dad, and of course, that's going to cost money, and I'm going to raise your taxes.

[14:52] And, in short, the ten tribes said, what interest have we in Jesse? And that, of course, is, Jesse is David's father, and there's a tradition thing there.

[15:04] And they said, the ten tribes says, to your tents, O Israel, we're out of here. We're gone. We're not going to put up with this. And ten tribes seceded from the Union.

[15:18] They were in the north. They pulled away. They established their own capital called Samaria, and their own king, which was not legitimate because the king had to come from the line of Judah.

[15:30] They put their own king on the throne. They established their own priesthood, which was illegitimate because priests had to come from the tribe of Levi. So they established their own priesthood, their own royal seat, their own capital, and everything, while the two tribes remained intact in the south with Judah and Benjamin and the rightful king who was the son of David on the throne, Rehoboam.

[15:59] And that is going to continue for quite some time. This took place in 931 B.C. This is 70 years, about 70 years after David.

[16:12] 931 B.C. And they are going to continue separated like that until 722.

[16:23] And in 722 B.C., which will be about roughly 200 years after they pulled out of the Union, the Assyrians are going to attack from the north and they are going to besiege Samaria.

[16:41] This is when this is when the decapitated head of a donkey will be purchased at an exorbitant price because the city is under siege, they're undergoing starvation, and the people are reduced to cannibalism.

[17:03] This is a very ugly picture and it is found in the books of the kings, 1 and 2 Kings.

[17:14] So they are carried away into captivity and an element was left in Israel to farm the soil and produce things that would be eventually carried into the neighborhood into the company that captured them, the Assyrians, and they're going to leave an element of Jews there in the land just to maintain things.

[17:41] Well, they also brought in a contingent of Assyrians to occupy and administer the land of these ten tribes and they began intermarrying with the Jews who were left behind and that produced a race of people called the Samaritans.

[18:04] And the Samaritans, of course, are going to be half-breed Jews. And this is why they will be contemptible in the eyes of the Jews down south who are the purists and so on.

[18:16] So, what we've got now is 722, they're carried into captivity and the two tribes in the south remain intact even though they have experienced incursions also from the Assyrians, they're going to be able to survive that until, until 586 B.C.

[18:38] when the Babylonians come over from the northeast and they invade and they set up a siege around Jerusalem so nobody can get in, nobody can get out.

[18:51] And they cut them off and finally they defeated the Jew, tore down the city of Jerusalem, tore down the walls and everything and led the people into captivity. And Daniel was one of those in the first captivity.

[19:06] Joe? Just a point there, Mark. The reason they didn't go down south and get them earlier is this is world history now. This is not the Bible. This is world history. The Egyptians were the other power at the time.

[19:19] The Egyptians were a power with the Babylonians and they couldn't do that because they were fighting over the territory of these two big kingdoms. The Babylonians finally defeated the Egyptians.

[19:29] They defeated the Egyptians and then that cleared it so they could go down to Jerusalem and do what you said after the Babylonians. Exactly. Thank you. I appreciate you pulling that. And by the way, what I have just shared with you is not simply in your Bible.

[19:45] You'll find it in any encyclopedia. this is all secular history as well. It isn't just biblical history. This is the stuff that history is made of. And you'll find what I just recounted to you in secular historical sources, exactly as I've given it regarding the dates, the events, and so on.

[20:06] So, it isn't just a biblical thing. All right, now let's get back to Jeremiah chapter 5. Thus says the Lord, the whole land shall be a desolation.

[20:18] I'm sorry. I'm starting in the wrong place here. Okay, Jeremiah 5.

[20:33] Where were we? 5.11. Okay, yeah. Okay, thank you. For the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Now, you see, what he's saying there is all twelve tribes.

[20:45] The ten tribes of Israel and the two tribes of Judah. The house of Israel and the house of Judah. Now, when he uses the word house, he's not talking about a dwelling.

[20:56] He's talking about a constituency. He's talking about the people that belong to the nation of Israel and the people that belong to the nation of Judah.

[21:06] So, don't be thrown by the word house. Likewise, when they talk about the house of David, we aren't talking about the physical place where David lived. We're talking about the structure that consisted of David and his lineage and so on.

[21:21] So, he says, the house of Israel and the house of Judah have dealt very treacherously with me, declares the Lord. They have lied about the Lord and said, not he.

[21:33] Misfortune will not come on us, and we will not see sword or famine. And the prophets are as wind, and the word is not in them.

[21:44] Thus, it will be done to them. Now, what he's saying is, the north and the south are saying, we are dwelling in peace and safety and security and prosperity, and none of these bad things are going to happen to us.

[21:58] Therefore, verse 14, thus says the Lord, the God of hosts, because you have spoken this word, behold, I am making my words in your mouth fire, and this people would, and it will consume them.

[22:13] Behold, I am bringing a nation against you from afar, O house of Israel, declares the Lord. It is an enduring nation, it is an ancient nation, a nation whose language you do not know, nor can you understand what they say.

[22:31] Their quiver is like an open grave. All of them are mighty men, and they will devour your harvest and your food. They will devour your sons and your daughters.

[22:44] They will devour your flocks and your herds. They will devour your vines and your fig trees. They will demolish with the sword your fortified cities in which you trust.

[22:55] And all the while these people and both of these are thinking and saying, not us, you crazy old coot. You're not a true prophet at all. You're just prophesying propaganda.

[23:06] We don't believe you. You're so much hot air. Jeremiah is going to suffer a lot of persecution, going to pay a terrible price for delivering the message because the principle has always been when you cannot defeat the message, you come after the messenger.

[23:27] And that's exactly what Jeremiah is going to experience. Verse 18, Yet even in those days, declares the Lord, I will not make you a complete destruction.

[23:41] Now that's a little bit of a bright hope. Jeremiah is saying, you're going to be soundly defeated, but that's not going to be your end because there will be a continuation.

[23:55] And of course, the nation that he's talking about is Babylon. Babylon, the mother of harlots. Jeremiah, I mean, Revelation 17 and 18, this is ancient Babylon, and it will be a kingdom that will have reached incredible heights under this man, Nebuchadnezzar.

[24:22] And I don't know if you know it or not, but it was Saddam Hussein, considered himself a kind of descendant, protégé of Nebuchadnezzar.

[24:40] And he set about to rebuild Babylon with the glory that it had in the days of Nebuchadnezzar. And he had already succeeded when the U.S.

[24:51] and other nations combined entered Iraq in 1990. Remember that? The first invasion under George W.

[25:04] Bush? And he had already established and reestablished, rebuilt the gates of Ishtar, which I understand was a glorious thing to behold.

[25:15] They're in Babylon, and they were trying to figure out how in the world the Babylonians made the famous hanging gardens, because they wanted to duplicate that too. But when the war came his way, he had to abandon all of that.

[25:27] But it was Saddam Hussein who saw himself and publicized himself like Nebuchadnezzar the second. And that was his goal and that was his dream, but we of course know that it did not come to pass.

[25:42] So, it's what he's talking about, this nation here that is going to come against him will be the Babylonians. And in verse 18, he declares, I will not make you a complete destruction, and it shall come about when they say, Why has the Lord our God done all these things to us?

[26:01] Then you shall say to them, As you have forsaken me, and served foreign gods in your land, so you shall serve strangers in a land that is not yours.

[26:14] And that of course will be Babylon. All all told, the vices and the sins that brought enemies upon both Israel and Judah, and were brought by God.

[26:34] These were both instances of God chastening his chosen people. He is going to use pagans, heathens, to chastise and correct his own people.

[26:51] And it is going to cure the nation of Israel of idolatry. This is the thing, this is the principal thing for which they are going to be judged and carried into captivity.

[27:02] It was in forsaking the Lord, establishing false idols of worship, sacrificing to them, engaging and accepting the gods, the foreign gods that were around them as their neighbors, and these idols that are not gods at all, and Paul in writing to the Corinthians later, many, many years later, is going to say, these people do not realize it, they think they are sacrificing to gods, they are in reality just sacrificing to demons, and they don't even know it, because it is the demons that are behind these false gods, and the false worship, and everything that goes with it.

[27:49] It is all demonic, and it goes all the way back to the book of Genesis. Remember, remember when Rachel, when Jacob was leaving the land there, and he had taken off, and his father-in-law, Laban, didn't know that he was gone, and he loaded up everything, he served seven years for Leah, then he served seven more years for Rachel, and then he decided, I'm going to get out of here, I'm going to go home, going to go back to Israel, and he loaded up with camels and mules and everything, and they took off, while Laban was gone.

[28:25] Laban was at the sheep shearing, and they took off and left, and Laban comes back and says, what is this? Where did everybody go? These were his daughters and his grandchildren, and they were gone, and they sneaked out undercover, and he came back, and he got his army together, and he chased after him, and, he told them, he said, yeah, you took my gods.

[28:53] These were the household idols, and Jacob says, no, we didn't, no, we didn't, you can search every bit here, and if you find them, we'll be unto the one who's carrying them, and he searched everything and all of their belongings, and he came to Rachel, the daughter, and the text tells us that Rachel was seated on her animal, and she, if I'm not mistaken, she was either with child, or she was menstruating at the time, and Jacob, Jacob, I'm sorry, Laban, Laban did not insist on searching her possessions, and she was the one that had the household gods.

[29:56] What are they doing with household gods? What is this? What's this all about? This goes back to the tradition and the superstition of these people that began even before Abraham.

[30:07] You see, when God called Abraham out of Ur the Chaldees, he was a moon worshiper. And this, by the way, is the seed of Islam. It is the moon, and the moon worship, and by the way, it is no coincidence that in the symbol of Islam, there is the crescent moon.

[30:31] Remember seeing that? And it goes all the way back to what we're talking about here. But I'm getting too far for you. Let's get back to Jeremiah. Verse 27, like a cage, is that where we are?

[30:48] What did I leave off? I'll tell you, all this stuff is so good. Okay, let's jump into verse 22.

[31:05] Do you not fear me, declares the Lord? Do you not tremble in my presence? For I have placed the sand as a boundary for the sea, an eternal decree, so it cannot cross over. Though the waves toss, yet they cannot prevail.

[31:17] Though they roar, yet they cannot cross over. But this people, this people, has a stubborn and rebellious heart.

[31:28] They have turned aside and departed. They do not say in their heart, let us now fear the Lord our God who gives rain in its season, both the autumn rain and the spring rain, who keeps us the appointed weeks of the harvest.

[31:43] Your iniquities have turned these away, and your sins have withheld good from you. For wicked men are found among my people. They watch like fowlers lying in wait.

[31:56] They set a trap. They catch men like a cage full of birds, so their houses are full of deceit. Therefore they have become great and rich. They are fat, they are sleek, they also excel in deeds of wickedness.

[32:11] They do not plead the cause, the cause of the orphan, that they may prosper. And they do not defend the rights of the poor. Shall I punish these people, declares the Lord?

[32:23] On a nation such as this, shall I not avenge myself? An appalling and horrible thing has happened in the land. The prophets prophesy falsely.

[32:36] You know what, that's the equivalent of today. There are preachers who are preaching untruth. There are preachers who are preaching just what people want to hear, not the truth.

[32:53] That's what got Jeremiah in trouble. That's what got all the prophets in trouble. That's what got Elijah in trouble. That's what got John the Baptist in trouble, and it cost him his head just for preaching the truth.

[33:07] That's what it cost Jesus Christ for preaching the truth. That's what it will cost the apostle Paul for preaching the truth.

[33:18] Where is all this opposition coming from? What's wrong with the truth? Because men prefer to believe a lie. That's what's wrong with the truth.

[33:32] It has always been that way, and behind it all, orchestrating, pulling all the strings in a completely unseen, undetected fashion, is the prince of lies.

[33:49] He is a deceiver, and there is no truth in him. He is orchestrated. He is the god of this age. Fellas, you need to keep in mind, you are a tiny, tiny minority.

[34:07] don't expect the world to give you a fair shake. It won't, and it can't. It is made up of a different material, and it marches to a different drummer.

[34:20] This is why we are in the world, but not of the world. Most of the world is of the world. That's why it's in the condition that it's in today.

[34:34] We, who are in Christ, are like the proverbial cry in the wilderness, and we are vastly outnumbered, if you look at numbers, but as someone has said, God plus one equals the majority.

[34:55] So, we need to keep in mind who is on our side. This is, this is the forerunner of what is going to happen in the book of Daniel, and we'll engage that in our next session when we start with Daniel 1 and verse 1, because Daniel will be in the first increment of deportees that will be ripped out of the land of Israel and forced to walk all the way to Babylon.

[35:34] And there, they will take up a new residency and a new government, and we will see how that Daniel is even given a new name.

[35:49] He's given a Babylonian name. And Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are not Jewish names. They are Babylonian names.

[36:00] And all of these young men, including Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, and some others, are going to be installed in a special educational program, because they are viewed as young men with high intellects and great promise.

[36:23] They are going to be pressed into the service of this new foreign government in Babylon, and there they will distinguish themselves in a way that is quite remarkable.

[36:35] And the chiefest among them, of course, will be Daniel. So we will see. And by the way, the name Daniel means God is judge. There is a tribe that is named the tribe of Dan.

[36:50] And that means judge. And the name Daniel, it ends in an E-L, like every other name that ends in E-L, like Michael and Ezekiel.

[37:05] And there are dozens and dozens of names that end in E-L. And there are even some that begin with E-L, like Elizabeth and Elijah and Elisha.

[37:20] That E-L is, it literally means God. E-L means God and it is taken all the way back in the Hebrew actually to Genesis chapter 1 where in the beginning Elohim.

[37:39] And there is the E-L and that is a plural. E-L means the strong one, the mighty one. We're talking about Hebrew now. and some think that it has its derivation in the word horn, H-O-R-N.

[37:57] And we are going to see when we go through the book of Daniel what a tremendous role horn plays. The Antichrist will also be given another name. He'll be given many names, but one of his names is the little horn.

[38:13] And the horn in the ancient world was a symbol of power because it was associated with the animal horn.

[38:24] Like, well, imagine, imagine if you will, trying to take literally, trying to take a bull by the horns.

[38:36] Are you going to have a contest on your hands or what? You can imagine. You can imagine the strength, the raw energy that is wrapped up in a live animal horn.

[38:49] It will do as it pleases and go where it pleases. And if any of you watched rodeos, and I'm sure you have, you know what kind of strength there is in the horns of an animal that has a pair of horns.

[39:02] So this goes back and it is associated with the most powerful strong thing that these ancient people could imagine or could think of. And it was a horn. And that was El.

[39:13] El. And it translated in the English is G-O-D. And in the beginning, Elohim, which is interesting because it is never translated with a plural.

[39:28] It's never translated God's plural. But in the Hebrew, there's no escaping it. It is Elohim. And the em, I am ending in Hebrew is plural.

[39:45] For English language, we add the letter S, and that makes it a plural. But in Hebrew, it is an I am ending. So you have an angel that is a seraph, S-E-R-A-P-H, a seraph.

[40:07] They are referred to in Isaiah chapter 6, and the plural is seraphim. That's multiple seraphs.

[40:19] And it is used that way in the plural a number of times. So keep these things in mind, and we will engage Daniel in our next session, verse 1, chapter 1.

[40:30] Yes? Yes. Elohim. And there is a singular form, and it is Eloah.

[40:41] I'm a little bit familiar with this, because I'm not nearly as familiar as I should, but I just recently undertook a self-study course of Hebrew, and I want to learn the Hebrew language and be able to speak it and read it, because I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but the language, the language that is the official language, of the state of Israel today, and everyone in Israel speaks it, is Biblical Hebrew.

[41:09] It is the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and that is the vernacular for the Hebrew people in Israel today. That's the official language, and they speak the language of the prophets, and of Genesis, and of Exodus.

[41:21] They are speaking that same language in Israel today. And it isn't what you would call modern Hebrew, although it's modern Hebrews that are speaking it, but it is the Old Biblical Hebrew.

[41:32] And you can thank I think his name was Joseph Ben Yehuda for that. They even named the street after him in Israel, Yehuda Street. Joe.

[41:43] When you run into Daniel, it's going to tie in with what you discussed a week ago, two weeks ago, about all things work together for good. You know, things bad happen to us, you know, good people, and if we love him, if we love the Lord and have our faith in him, truth in him, then things will work out good for us.

[42:05] We can have confidence in that because that's exactly what happened to Daniel. Absolutely. Daniel kept the law in this case, but God had given him the law, and he's stuck with that law and if we do that, things that happen to us, if we're bad, are going to turn out good.

[42:21] What God is using is for our good and for the good of others. Amen. Amen. But one caveat I would add to that. You may not realize the good until you see the Lord in glory.

[42:33] It doesn't always come here. Someone said God doesn't collect all his debts at the end of the month. He sees the whole picture, and he takes everything into consideration.

[42:46] Think of this in closing. God does nothing, and God permits nothing, without taking everything into consideration. And that calls for a mind beyond that which we can understand.