Got Your Attention Yet?: Another Troubling Dream “How great are his signs, how mighty his wonders! His kingdom is an eternal kingdom; his dominion endures from generation to generation.” Daniel 4:3

Over the last month, we learned: if we intentionally engage the culture around us by taking calculated risks based on the assumption that God is active in our world, then God will put us in the right place at the right time and equip us properly to participate in His activity in the lives of people. we’ll often be called to speak tough truth in love and three reactions can follow – “Nebuchadnezzar moments” where praise is given to God “rich young man moments” where we face rejection and dejection “fiery furnace moments” where persecution comes our way In each of these situations, we need to be assured that God is at work.

Your Attention, please … Today, we learn about how God gains one man’s attention, and we say goodbye to a character who has provided a baseline for the narrative so far – King Nebuchadnezzar. “Pride is the only disease known to man that makes everyone sick except the person who has it”. – Buddy Robinson

Daniel 4:1-28 “It is my pleasure to tell you about the miraculous signs and wonders that the Most High God has performed for me. How great are his signs, how mighty his wonders! His kingdom is an eternal kingdom; his dominion endures from generation to generation.” (Daniel 4:2-3) Do these words come from Daniel, or perhaps one of Shadrach, Meshach or Abednego? These are the recorded words of King Nebuchadnezzar. What has moved this King from a position of self-absorbedness to a posture of praise?

At this point, Nebuchadnezzar has had repeated encounters with the God of Israel through the effective witness of four men – Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. If the Babylonians learned anything at all from their military conquests, it was that with the right religious rituals, you could get any of these gods to give you what you wanted or at the very least, leave you alone. With all of the right gods honoured and appeased, Nebuchadnezzar sat back in his throne, enjoying the comfort of his palace, watching his kingdom expand and prosper.

After experiencing a troubling dream, Nebuchadnezzar calls together his religious brain trust for an interpretation. They fail … Daniel walks in and the king remembers him as a “religious” guy with a penchant for interpreting dreams. The dream: A tree grows great and strong, reaching high to the heavens and providing safety to animals underneath it. Suddenly, an angel breaks into the scene crying for the tree to be chopped down, leaving only a stump remaining, saying: “Let his mind be changed from that of a man and let him be given the mind of an animal, till seven times pass by for him.” (Daniel 4:16)

Daniel is greatly distressed and disturbed by the dream, wishing that it were meant for his enemies and not the King himself. Daniel delivers the interpretation: you are the fruitful and prosperous tree. Unfortunately, God has decreed that you will be reduced to nothing, spending seven years living wildly among the beasts of the field. The stump though, is God’s promise to re-establish you once you have humbled yourself before God. Daniel urges Nebuchadnezzar to do all he can to stay the decree for as long as possible, indicating that no amount of religious acts will prevent what God has decreed from happening, but they might at least earn him some time.

This chapter challenges the illusion that we can somehow operate in independence from God. It becomes very easy to view oneself as “master of one’s domain” when God is eliminated from the equation. Success becomes about what I have accomplished, rather than what God has accomplished through me. “Twelve months later, as the king was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, he said, “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?”. (v. 30) The trouble is that as we grow in success, we become more self-focussed, self-reliant, and self-satisfied.

It’s hard to get one’s attention when he or she is full of pride … in fact, I would suggest that pride makes us deaf to tough truth. “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” (James 1:22) Had Nebuchadnezzar heeded to word of the Lord, he might have prevented some suffering! I am convinced that one of our enemy’s greatest tactics is to convince people of their own innate ability to succeed, effectively preventing them from acknowledging that God just might be involved in their success and keeping them from offering appropriate praise to God.

Even though, this is the case, God still attempts to get our attention. Through His Spirit, God is at work in the lives of the people you live, work and play with and He is seeking to break through their pride in order to communicate important truth to them. God often seeks to get our attention through five specific means:

Making us restless – God often creates a deep sense of dissatisfaction with “the way things are” in order to get us to consider other options, including listening for His voice. A word from others – God often uses other people to grab our attention, often causing the same phrase to come to our attention repeatedly. Unexpected blessings – God sometimes provides unforeseen blessings as an attempt to gain our attention. Unanswered prayer – God sometimes allows prayer to go unanswered in an attempt to gain our attention. Unusual Circumstances – God sometimes allows really strange circumstances to develop around us to gain our attention.

When God sought to grip Nebuchadnezzar’s attention through this strange dream, notice what happens … v.8. In precisely the right place and at precisely the right moment, Daniel enters Nebuchadnezzar’s presence, with the ability to interpret dreams. God has positioned you in a particular place, at a particular time, with a particular set of skills and talents, in order to participate with God in His work in particular people’s lives. At the same time, we must be listening for God’s communication with us. We have to honestly ask ourselves, has pride stopped up my ears from hearing God’s voice?