Able to Humble

Daniel 4:37 Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and exalt and glorify the King of heaven, because everything he does is right and all his ways are just. And those who walk in pride he is able to humble.

Some people are just plain thick! They are so stubborn, so self-important, that even the most obvious rebuke doesn’t seem to stick. They are able to brush off these mortal attacks as if it they were swatting a fly.

But some people are able to take the rebukes of life and learn from them, not just a temporary lesson, but a permanent one. They are able to step out of themselves and gain a perspective on life, their importance falling in line with reality. The are learners!

Other people seem to repeat their mistakes repeatedly. No lesson is every gained from failures or rebukes. They finger point and obfuscate. Nothing sticks to them. For sure nothing becomes personal, no responsibility is accepted.

We read about a hybrid human in our text today. He seems to get the lessons, take them to heart, own their mistakes, but then he returns to the same sin. The actual new mistake might be different from the last one, but the sin is the same.

King Nebuchadnezzar seems to eat too much pizza right before going to bed. He gets dreams, dreams that haunt him. He struggles to figure out what they mean and the man of God, in his case Daniel, has to come to his rescue and give him the interpretation. And the dreams have one thing in common: his pride!

His first dream dealt with a statue and his place as the golden head of the statue. The statue was destroyed by God. The lesson was that only the LORD was worthy of worship and respect.

But instead of heeding the lesson, he built a giant statue of gold in his own honor and required everyone to bow down before it. It doesn’t sound like he learned the lesson, does it?

This second dream deals with this same theme of pride. What is interesting is the way this dream, the interpretation and the outcome are written. They seem to be the official report submitted by the king himself to the hall of records of the Babylonian empire. The record is included in the Scriptures as a way to reinforce the message: don’t let pride get in your way.

In this official record the dream, Daniel’s interpretation of the dream, and the fulfillment of the dream occur in rapid succession. Just the facts. Once the facts have been put on the table, the author, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, tells us the lesson he has learned.

What has he learned? Firstly, he learns that he has a personal stake in what happens. He enters into worship of the One who was able to give him the dream, the interpretation, and then bring about the fulfillment of the dream. That is the kind of God he wants to worship. Praise, exalt and glorify. Worship terms.

Notice next the things that helped Nebuchadnezzar come to his senses. He recognizes that the things the LORD does are right and just. The LORD’s actions conform to what really is, to reality itself. There is no fuzzy when it comes to the ways of the LORD. How many people do you know who live in some type of false reality? Not the LORD!

The next thing the king learned is that the LORD is just. When He makes a judgment, the judgment is fair, right, true. People get what they deserve. He got what he deserved! And he knows it! It is one thing to know someone else got what they deserved, but another thing entirely when someone admits that they got what they deserved. And this is exactly what the king proclaims.

And the official record of this event ends with his lesson learned. He learned that the LORD is able to yank the rug out from anyone, even a king, whose pride causes them to reject the message from the LORD. Remember, the LORD had warned the king in a dream about what would happen, but his pride prevented him from learning the lesson proactively. Instead, he learned it the hard way.

What I find interesting is that this account is placed right before the account of his successor’s failure to learn this lesson from himself. His pride gets him in trouble with the LORD as well.

Maybe we should heed this lesson. Maybe we need to get a handle on our pride. Maybe we need to take the role of a servant, rather than demanding our own way.

Unless we want to end up eating grass like cattle!