Today, I am reading and commenting on  Daniel 1-2.

Just before I started writing this I watched a scene from “Good Will Hunting” where Matt Damon’s character interrupted an Ivy League student trying to sound intelligent and thoughtful by plagiarizing various authors from the syllabus if his economic courses.  And in some ways, the other young men among whom Daniel and his friends were trained in Babylon were like that Ivy League student, as were the men whom Nebuchadnezzar initially consulted to interpret his dreams.  They thought they were the best and the brightest, but none of them had ever taken the risk of having an original thought.  I really want to continue the link between these two stories.  Usually when we examine the first two chapters of the Book of Daniel we separate them and talk about the lessons they have independent of each other.  But there really is a common thread between them.  In the first story, Daniel and his friends did not ask for a kosher diet because they thought it would make them healthier than the diet the other young men were consuming.  They requested a kosher diet because they desired to be faithful to God and were confident that God would not have commanded them to eat an unhealthy diet.  In the second story, Daniel did not believe that he had abilities beyond that of the wise men who had failed Nebuchadnezzar’s request.  He had faith that if God wanted him and his friends to survive, He would reveal the answer for which Nebuchadnezzar was asking.  From both of these stories we learn that if we put our trust in God, and are obedient to Him, He will bring us results which bring glory to His name.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.