22 Jun The Book of Daniel
When I enrolled at the University of Mississippi in the year 1998, I wanted to know where mathematics fitted into the big picture of science and where science fitted into the big picture of the world.
I was convinced early on, mainly by my physics professor, who stimulated my mind to think of all sorts of worldviews that Christianity was true, I, therefore, felt that you can take the Bible as seriously as you can take your physic book. My professor was a brilliant mentor who introduced me to the world of thought philosophy. He mentored me for ten years, years after I left the university. What he introduced me to was learning to take the Bible intellectual and philosophically seriously.
In the book of Daniel, Daniel was a prophet that lived in the 6th century B.C. Daniel was taken from Judea to Babylon. Babylon, at the time, was a high power, it was very advanced. You, the reader of this post, have in your hand, a device that keeps time, this is evidence of Babylon mathematics; 60 seconds and a minute, 60 minutes in an hour. Their art, music, and engineering was astonishing, to say the least.
Daniel, this young believer in God finds himself in King’s College Babylon. He begins to think about this great culture, what could be wrong with it? He wanted to know why his culture had not produced liked the Babylon culture. It had occurred at this point in time that faith in God had hit a rather low point. Furthermore, you have young Daniel, a firm believer in God, rise to the top and run two colossal empires. Daniel, as an old man, begins to write about the big things he notices in life.
As I, the reader of the Word, start to analyze this book and look at the thought flow and study the literature of the text, I begin to realize this is extremely powerful. This book is one of the most brilliant analyses of the nature of values that you will find in any literature. What I want to advocate, is that the Bible deals with the big questions of our time. I’m concerned, that too many of our youth think the Bible is a devotional book, it’s intellectual relatively trivial, and adults only run to the Bible when they have a problem. I want to take the Bible as literature and use it as a powerful tool to dig into the culture and bring up the big questions of our time so that we can study what the answers are. Finally, one of the reasons I believe that scripture is the Word of God, not because I have a technical belief but because of the sense it makes, and when I came convinced that scripture had more to say than all of other philosophies my life was completely changed. Thus, this has been my principal motive to spread His Word.
Thank you, John.
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