Living Words

With the Clouds of Heaven Daniel 7:1-28 by William Klock The seventh chapter of Daniel begins this way: In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel saw a dream and visions of his head as he lay in his bed. Then he wrote down the dream and told the sum of the matter.   It’s finally Daniel’s turn to dream.  The storyteller rolls back the clock about a decade to the first year of Belshazzar, which would have been about 550 BC.  The implied audience, remember, is the faithful Jews living in Judah in the early 160s BC, during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes.  The purpose of the book of Daniel was to encourage them and to exhort them to stand firm for the Lord, to stand firm for his law, even as this pagan king was making it illegal for them to live according to the law and to worship the Lord, even as many of their fellow Jews were caving in to the pressure and apostatizing.  The book of Daniel points them back to their ancestors who lived during the Babylonian exile and had their own struggles