Believers in Babylon

Daniel and his friends were among the young nobles of Judah taken to Babylon around 605 BC to be trained for the king’s service (1:1–6). Babylon gave them new names; Daniel became Belteshazzar, a name that honored the king’s god (4:8). They could not control their names, their schooling or their address. But Daniel “purposed in his heart” that he would not defile himself with the king’s food and wine (1:8). Notice how he did it: he asked kindly, proposed a ten-day trial of pulse and water, and let the results speak (1:12–15). God gave the four young men “knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom,” and the king found them ten times better than his own advisers (1:17, 20).

🔗 Cross-references

• Doctrine and Covenants 89:18–21 ↗The Word of Wisdom promises health, wisdom and hidden treasures of knowledge to those who obey.
• Genesis 39:9 ↗Joseph, another captive in a foreign court, refuses to sin against God under pressure.

Nebuchadnezzar demands that his wise men tell him both his dream and its meaning, and orders them all killed when they can’t (2:5–13). Daniel asks for time, gathers his three friends to pray, and the secret is revealed to him “in a night vision” (2:16–19). His first act is not to rush to the king but to praise God (2:20–23). Before the king he gives the credit away: “there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets” (2:28). The dream is a great image of gold, silver, brass, iron and clay, shattered by a stone “cut out without hands” that becomes a mountain filling the earth (2:31–35). The Lord later applied that stone to the gospel rolling forth in our day (Doctrine and Covenants 65:2).

🔗 Cross-references

• Doctrine and Covenants 65:2 ↗The Lord says the gospel will roll forth like the stone cut out without hands until it fills the earth.
• Amos 3:7 ↗The Lord reveals His secret to His servants the prophets.
• James 1:5 ↗The promise that led Joseph Smith to pray: God gives wisdom to those who ask.

A golden image about ninety feet tall, a crowd of officials, music, and one command: bow or burn (3:1–6). Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego stay standing. Offered a second chance, they answer without hesitation: “our God whom we serve is able to deliver us,” and then, “But if not,” they still will not bow (3:17–18). Their faithfulness does not depend on the outcome. The furnace is heated seven times hotter, and it kills the soldiers who throw them in. Then the king sees four men walking loose in the fire, “and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God” (3:25). They come out without even the smell of smoke. The Lord did not keep them out of the fire. He met them there.

🔗 Cross-references

• Isaiah 43:2 ↗The Lord promises that when we walk through the fire, we shall not be burned.
• Mosiah 24:14–15 ↗The Lord eases Alma’s people’s burdens without immediately removing them.
• Job 13:15 ↗“Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him,” an older witness of faith without conditions.

This chapter is written as Nebuchadnezzar’s own testimony. He dreams of a great tree cut down to a stump, and Daniel, clearly troubled, tells him it is about him and urges him to “break off thy sins by righteousness” (4:19, 27). A year later the king walks in his palace and says, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built…?” (4:30). While the words are still in his mouth, he loses his reason and lives like an animal in the fields (4:31–33). Then, “at the end of the days,” he lifts his eyes to heaven and his understanding returns (4:34). He ends his letter praising the King of heaven, who is “able to abase” those who walk in pride (4:37). Even the proudest king was not beyond the Lord’s reach.

🔗 Cross-references

• Alma 32:16 ↗Alma teaches that those who humble themselves without being compelled are more blessed.
• Luke 15:17 ↗The prodigal son “came to himself” in a field, much as Nebuchadnezzar did.

Belshazzar throws a great feast and has the gold and silver vessels taken from the Lord’s temple in Jerusalem brought out so his guests can drink from them while praising idols (5:1–4). Suddenly the fingers of a man’s hand write on the plaster of the wall, and the king’s knees knock together (5:5–6). Daniel, now an old man, is called in. Before he reads the writing, he reminds Belshazzar of Nebuchadnezzar’s humbling and says, “thou … hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this” (5:22). The verdict is short: “Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting” (5:27). That same night Belshazzar is slain, and the kingdom passes to the Medes and Persians (5:28–31).

🔗 Cross-references

• Proverbs 16:2 ↗Our ways look clean to ourselves, but the Lord weighs the spirit.
• 1 Samuel 16:7 ↗The Lord looks on the heart, not the outward appearance.

Under Darius, Daniel is so honest that his rivals admit they will never find fault with him “except we find it against him concerning the law of his God” (6:5). So they trap him with a law against prayer. Daniel goes home, opens his windows toward Jerusalem and kneels three times a day, “as he did aforetime” (6:10). The king who signed the law cannot sleep, and at dawn he calls to the den. Daniel answers that God “hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths” (6:22). He was unhurt “because he believed in his God” (6:23). Chapter 7 then lifts the view: after four beastly kingdoms, “one like the Son of man” receives “an everlasting dominion” (7:13–14). Jesus often called Himself the Son of Man.

🔗 Cross-references

• 1 Kings 8:48 ↗Solomon asked the Lord to hear captives who prayed toward Jerusalem and the temple, just as Daniel did.
• Matthew 26:64 ↗Before the high priest, Jesus speaks of the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven, echoing Daniel 7:13.
• Doctrine and Covenants 116:1 ↗Adam-ondi-Ahman is identified as the place where the Ancient of Days shall sit, as Daniel foresaw.

Read the lions’ den again and listen to the king’s question at dawn: “O Daniel, servant of the living God, is thy God, whom thou servest continually, able to deliver thee from the lions?” (6:20). Even a pagan king had noticed the word that describes Daniel’s whole life: continually. From a quiet request about food as a teenager to open windows as an old man, his faith looked less like a single brave moment and more like a long obedience in the same direction. The furnace and the den were only the moments when others saw it. As you take the sacrament today, you promise to always remember the Savior. That is continual service too, one week at a time.

🔗 Cross-references

• Moroni 4:3 ↗The sacrament prayer includes the promise to always remember Him and keep His commandments.
• Galatians 6:9 ↗Paul encourages us not to be weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap.
• Alma 37:37 ↗Alma counsels his son to counsel with the Lord in all his doings, night and morning.