The Gospel According to Nebuchadnezzar – Part 2

The content, imagery, and covenant structure of Daniel 4 reveal King Nebuchadnezzar, like Daniel, to be a type of God’s future work in the world.

Read part 1.

The Significance of Daniel 4

Since the Spirit used literary location to confer extra meaning upon every verse, stanza, chapter, and book in the Bible, discerning the structure of Daniel helps us to understand the meaning of Daniel 4 as part of the bigger picture. The chapter is revealed to be not only an account of the humbling of a proud king but also an act of atonement. The emperor himself passes through a process of death and resurrection akin to that of Israel’s High Priest.

Like Jesus, God puts Nebuchadnezzar with the beasts in the wilderness. Unlike Jesus, he was there because he was a beast. Priestly submission brought the beasts—domestic and wild—to Adam to name, and to Noah to rescue, and the priestly rule of Israel brought the nations to God in submission during the reign of Solomon. This would occur again under the rule of Mordecai. Here, God cleverly used the exile of Israel to fulfill Israel’s vow, the testimony of Daniel leading to the conversion of the Gentile ruler. This king, like Daniel, would become a type of God’s future global work.

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will send and take Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and I will set his throne above these stones that I have hidden, and he will spread his royal canopy over them. (Jeremiah 43:10)

By the end of the chapter, the king himself is a “priest-king”—a two-pillar man who now speaks as a representative of God, a prophet. This prefigures the end of the “Aaronic” (one nation) order and the return to a “Melchizedekian” (all nations) order of priest-kings under the rule of Christ, one whose succession is not natural but spiritual (Hebrews 7:3).

The Structures of Daniel 4

As a unit, the chapter works through the sevenfold matrix.

With the primary structure of the account identified, some interesting typological correspondences become apparent.

Firstly, it makes sense of Nebuchadnezzar’s introduction. In his preamble (Transcendence), the king speaks as God’s legal representative. He begins as God’s man and ends as God’s man.

Hierarchy moves us from the Ark to the Veil. The meaning of the dream is hidden, but as a Jewish “veil of flesh” Daniel is the man who will become “the door” and reveal the mind of God.

“Land” symbols abound at Ascension (Day 3). The field should remind us of Esau the hunter, and Nimrod the founder of the original Babylon. Relating to the two trees in Eden, the king has been a predator but he must now become a shepherd. The four-cornered “Land” (not “earth”) was represented by the Bronze Altar, so here the mind of the sinful “man” will be substituted for that of a sacrificial “beast.” In the Tabernacle, the Bronze Altar corresponds to the face of the Ox.

The band is made of “iron and bronze,” the lower, “earthier” metals in the statue in Daniel 2. Unlike gold and silver— the more precious, and more pliable “priestly” metals that represent heaven’s glory, these stronger metals represent the earth, identifying the king’s humiliation with Cain, the smith.

The “seven times” were likely lunar festivals, “moons,” and so a Levitical year, not seven years. Since this chapter corresponds to chapter 9 in the second pillar, the “seven times” that befell Nebuchadnezzar relate somehow to the 70 weeks that would be determined upon Israel. Since both chapters are positioned at the Oath/Sanctions step, which corresponds to Atonement, together they comprise a “seventy-times-seven” of both forgiveness (Jesus, Matthew 18:22) and vengeance (Lamech, Genesis 4:24). Thus, the fates of the second Babel (kingly) and the third (prophetic) are linked in the structure of the book as a Head and a Body, with a sacred period of 490 years (a tenfold Jubilee) measured out to put an end to sin and bring in everlasting righteousness (Daniel 9:24).

The seven describes Man’s submission to heaven (the cultus Sabbath: Garden-head – Oath). The seventy images his dominion on earth (the cultural Sabbath: Land-body – Sanctions), hence the seventy years of captivity that gave rest to the Land, restoring the combined Sabbaths that Israel had stolen from it.

[…the king of the Chaldeans…] took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years. (2 Chronicles 36:21)

“Seven times” also relates to the seven itinerant lights in the heavens, the stars that governed the times and the seasons and gave light upon the earth, just as godly kings studied the Word and shared their accumulated wisdom via psalms and proverbs (Genesis 1:14-15; Deuteronomy 17:18-20).
Daniel answered and said:

“Blessed be the name of God forever and ever,
to whom belong wisdom and might.
He changes times and seasons;
he removes kings and sets up kings… (Daniel 2:20-21)

In their “ascension” order, which is the speed with which each light moves across the sky relative to the fixed stars, the sequence progresses from the fastest (the moon, whose reflected light pictures the Old Covenant “night” of humble submission) to the slowest (Saturn, the vehicle of blessing and cursing, picturing the ultimate Man who bears the sword on God’s behalf). The paths of these seven “rulers” not only correspond to the pattern of the Creation Week, the Tabernacle, and Israel’s festal year, but also to the blessings given to the Lamb at His ascension in Revelation 5:12.¹For more discussion, see “Cosmos and Covenant.”

Likewise, these “seven times” would begin with the humbling of the Gentile king and end with his restoration as a vehicle for God, a human “shekinah” mediating between heaven and earth. Like the elements of the Tabernacle and Temple, the king would be cut down like a tree (nature) and lifted up again as a fiery pillar (supernature). These “seven sprinklings” of atonement upon his body would be like the dew of heaven. This judgment was a blessing wrapped in a curse.

And what was God’s purpose in this? It was an ironic bait-and-switch reversal in the roles of Babylon and Jerusalem: the king who governed like the stars of heaven would be humbled on the earth that he might then carry out God’s judgment upon Jerusalem—with Daniel at his side.²Daniel, as the ruler of the province of Babylon and chief prefect of the king’s wise men (Daniel 2:48), would have advised the king as a seer during the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. For more … Continue reading The wicked Jews would be in rebellion not only against a godly emperor but one with an advisor from the kingly tribe of Judah at his right hand. Once Babel had become a city of God, the spiritual “Babel” could be destroyed. As it was in the days of Noah, God founded a new temporary house for His people before He destroyed the old one. The same process would occur in the ministry of Jesus and His apostles, culminating in the sentence pronounced upon Jerusalem in the book of Revelation. The seven lights that governed times and seasons were represented in the Tabernacle by the Lampstand, the “seven eyes” that watched over Israel. This explains the role of the “watchers.” The Lampstand was fashioned to resemble an almond tree. In Hebrew, “almond” sounds like the word for “watching.”

And the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “Jeremiah, what do you see?” And I said, “I see an almond branch.” Then the Lord said to me, “You have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it.” (Jeremiah 1:11)

Thus, the Lampstand that is mentioned in Daniel 5:5, providing the light that revealed the divine fingers inscribing Belshazzar’s fate upon the wall, is every bit as much a “watcher” as the angels in Daniel 4. Likewise, the human angels in Revelation 1 were commissioned to be a light to the saints—a legal testimony—during the judgment of the spiritual Babylon of the Herods. The seven bowls of judgment were the golden bowls that sat upon the branches of the Lampstand.³See Michael Bull, Moses and the Revelation: Why the End of the World is not in Your Future, 147-149.

The Lampstand also relates to “Pentecost”, which explains the tongues of fire upon the Spirit-filled saints in Acts 2:3. We must understand that these heavenly watchers were making “the Unknown God” known to Nebuchadnezzar that the ignorant nations under his power might also be enlightened. James B. Jordan writes:

Acts 17 is very important to our understanding of what is happening in Daniel 4. Paul says that men in former times did not know much about God, and ignorantly worshiped the Unknowable. God, he says, overlooked the times of ignorance, but now has brought about a day in which men must come to knowledge. Now that that day has arrived, men must repent, turn, from their ignorance.

The dream that comes to Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4 is the arrival of that day for him. His former ignorance and confusion is somewhat excusable, and God may well overlook it and not count it against him. But no longer. A dream in the night leads to a new day, a day in which Nebuchadnezzar must repent from ignorance and confusion.⁴James B. Jordan, The Handwriting on the Wall: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, 243.

The Gospel reference comes with the description of Nebuchadnezzar’s “beasthood.” His territory was now claimed by God as a greater “Land” (the oikoumene was an extension of the Abrahamic household), so like a beast he would be driven from it. But why the characteristics of an ox and an eagle?

Read part 3.

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