Daniel: Does God Reign? Does God Care? - Reading PlanНамуна

Take a moment before we start, to pray, and ask God to meet with you through his word.

Then watch the video and read Daniel 1:1-7.

Does God still reign?
Does God still care?

Those questions are at the heart of Daniel, and they’re questions we often ask too when faced with struggles and difficulties in life.

Right from the outset though, the writer of Daniel is clear what the answers are going to be. It opens with apparent disaster, as God’s people are defeated and some carried off into exile, along with treasures from the Temple. Social media (if they’d had it) would have been buzzing with news of Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon’s success.

In the culture and thinking of the day, most people would have assumed that it meant that God had lost too. Babylon’s gods had been proven stronger and more powerful. That was how Nebuchadnezzar saw it, as we can tell by his actions – he plundered treasures from the Temple, and ‘carried them off to the temple of his god” (v3).

But the writer of Daniel knew better – and so do we.

We’re told Nebuchadnezzar succeeded because “the Lord delivered Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand” (v2). There are still lots of questions and answering to come in the rest of Daniel – but from the start we know the answer to that question ‘does God reign?’ will be a resounding “yes”!

At that point though, we zoom in from the widest to the smallest of scales – we move from the affairs of nations to the lives of four young men.

We might think that God would answer these questions on a grand and cosmic scale – and if we read on in Daniel, he does. But first he roots all those questions in the lives of these four friends. And in doing so, he shows us not only that he reigns, but also that he cares.

There are still lots of questions and struggles and answers to come though. And often that’s true in our lives too – we don’t know what God is doing, or why, or how. But like Daniel, we can know that God does still reign, and God does still care. As the song Waymaker puts it:

Even when I don't see it, You're working
Even when I don't feel it, You're working
You never stop, You never stop working.