Born To Win Podcast - With Ronald L. Dart

Early in the 2nd century BC, a truly vile man came on the scene in the Middle East. What is it about planet earth that our soil periodically brings forth such singular men—men of consummate evil? That they recur again and again is clear enough. What you may not realize is that the prophets recognized this repetition—at least they predicted that it would be so. How much they understood is less clear. It is only from a later vantage point that we can look back over the prophecies and the history of the time and see the importance of this theme.If you are computer oriented, you know what an icon is. They are the little images around the your computer screen, each one standing for some action you might want to take. We also see them all the time on signs and labels, implicitly representing a concept.Daniel, like most of the prophets is loaded with icons. They are verbal descriptions of things he saw. And the things he saw stood for events, systems of government, rulers, kingdoms. Even certain people o

One of the most fascinating prophecies in the Book of Daniel (and one that raises as many questions as it answers) is the 70 weeks prophecy at the end of the ninth chapter. Frankly, explaining the implications of this prophecy will stretch my abilities to the limit. But maybe, if we concentrate, we can study this together.Daniel has been in prayer, a deep and repentant prayer that followed on the heels of his realization that he would not return home to Jerusalem. He would grow old and die in Babylon. He learned that the captivity would last for 70 long years. It was a crushing blow and it underlined for him how grievous the sins of Judah had been.But there was another 70 about to be revealed when the angel Gabriel showed up on his doorstep and tapped him on the shoulder as he prayed. Gabriel said he had come with a message from God that would give Daniel insight and understanding. Let’s hear that message.

If you were looking for a resolution for the new year (or the new decade), you'd have to go a long way to do better than this:Wash you, make yourself clean; put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil; Learn to do good; seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.Come now, and let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land:But if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.Isaiah 1:16–20 KJ2000

What did the First Christians believe and practice about Christmas? I know in a way that is a loaded question, because the word Christmas is found nowhere in the New Testament, nor is any noticeable celebration of Christmas as we know it.Among many Jews, birthday observance is eschewed as originating in Egypt, and that could have influenced many among the First Christians, most of whom were Jews. Whatever the case, there is nothing in the New Testament that so much as hints at celebrating Jesus’ birth. It could be argued that this fact does not weigh against modern celebration, but that is not what interests me at this point.My question is what the First Christians believed and practiced relative to Jesus’ nativity. To get a better understanding of this, let’s first look at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke and the story of another birth—that of John the Baptist.

One of the things that puzzles me about the Book of Daniel is the question, Why now? Why did God, at this particular juncture in history, lay out the prophecies that he did? The visions that he gave to Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar span a panorama of prophecy that goes from their day all the way to the very end.And as you read along through here and see the incredible breadth of revelations of times and empires and places and you ask yourself, Why? I’m not sure I have the answer to that question, but sometimes it’s important to ask the questions and get them out on the table so that we can better know where we are going—and recognize when we get there.We have been going through Daniel in this series of programs and now arrive at the eighth chapter, which is, appropriately enough, another vision given to Daniel. It begins with the prophet standing beside a river and witnessing a conflict between two fantastic beasts. Let’s join him beside that river as the vision is explained.

What was it about Daniel? Through at least three major administration changes in Babylon, he kept coming out on top. For the believer, it makes perfect sense. God gave Daniel and his companions favor through these hard and dangerous times for his own purposes. But you have to wonder what this looked like from the perspective of King Darius, the latest king Daniel had to deal with.From Darius’ point of view, Daniel and his ilk were smart. And they had a great common sense. They made wise decisions and he could depend on them. What Darius had no way of knowing was that the Jews in his newly-conquered kingdom made their decisions within the framework of the Law. This is more important than most people realize. Most of us make life’s decision based on what feels good and looks safe at the moment, with no overriding framework. And that can leave us all over the landscape in our decisions; having no standards, no consistency.Daniel and the Hebrew children had been brought up on the law of God and it for

Did you know that Nebuchadnezzar, the mighty king of Babylon, wrote one chapter of the Book of Daniel? Initially, I couldn’t help but wonder why God would allow a writing from a pagan king to enter the Bible. But then the answer occurred to me.Yes, the Bible is the word of God—and inspired by God—but it many cases, it takes the form of testimony. One of the strong threads in biblical jurisprudence is that everything has to be established by witnesses. No man could be condemned except by the testimony of two or three witnesses. Perhaps that is part of the reason we have four Gospels in the New Testament, not just one.So it is, that the best way to establish for history what happened to Nebuchadnezzar was to have him write it down and have Daniel attest to it—two witnesses. Here is that king’s account of his encounter with the God of Israel.

Daniel may be the most important prophet in the Bible. He is easily the most fascinating. And he is the one that most tempts us to offer interpretations. And his work is of singular value in providing a framework for understanding those who would come later.The dream of Nebuchadnezzar in the second chapter is an excellent example of this. Nebuchadnezzar saw in a dream a great statue—the image of a man. The image degenerated from head to foot. The head was gold. The breast and arms were silver. The belly and thighs were mere brass; the legs, iron. The feet and toes were iron and clay.I want to be careful not to over interpret Daniel, because that has been done too often. But what makes this prophecy so important is that it outlines the history of a governmental system (a kingdom, if you will) that continues from Nebuchadnezzar until it is destroyed and supplanted by the Kingdom of God. Here is how Daniel interpreted the dream for the king.

The prophecies of Zechariah are among the most difficult in the Bible. It’s not only that Zechariah is so rich in imagery and symbols; it’s a strange mixture of the past and the future—an odd mixture of events in history, of people, personages, places, things that happened…and of things that never happened then, but are going to happen before man’s age is finished.There’s absolutely no doubt that some of Zechariah has been fulfilled in history. It is just as certain that much of it is prophetic; and I was debating with myself as to whether more of it is future or whether more of it is past, and I think I have come down on the side of more of it is future. Some of it is prophetic to the coming of the Messiah. Some of it looks all the way to the Millennium. And right in the middle of this difficult prophecy is a prophecy of a great king to come. But, oddly, it is not what we would expect to hear about a great king. He says,Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daught

Of all the major prophets of the Old Testament, one stands out as the most fascinating. One has had a hold on the imaginations of men from time immemorial. One has more fulfilled prophecies that any of the rest. In New Testament prophecy, this man is referred to more than any other. His name is Daniel.Daniel was captured and taken as a hostage to Babylon some 600 years before Christ. He was a very young man at the time. He was a contemporary of another prophet in the same captivity: Ezekiel. He probably finished up his memoirs some 60 years later.And I think it is good to approach his book as the memoirs of a prophet. I don’t mean to suggest that the book is anything but divinely inspired. But I think it is Daniel’s story, his testimony of the interactions he had with God, with angelic beings, with the Holy Spirit, if you will. I believe Daniel’s story—and it is a fascinating story, indeed.

The last days of Jerusalem and Judah were hard times. When a nation, a people, begin to lose their identity—their sense of who they are and where they are going—when a nation becomes morally bankrupt, indolent, self-indulgent—sooner or later, the nations around then sense the weakness and begin to gather.Israel had a good leader in King Josiah, and leadership makes an enormous difference among the people, but things didn’t change much at the grass roots. They had just gone too far down the slippery slope to oblivion. And after the death of Josiah, when Israel could no longer effectively govern herself, God turned her over to the nations to govern.Jehoiakim was twenty and five years old when he began to reign; and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. And his mother’s name was Zebudah, the daughter of Pedaiah of Rumah. And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his fathers had done. In his days Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up, and Jehoiak

Almost any kingdom will get a little tired and old in 300 years. The House of Israel only made it a little more than 250 years. And Israel must have been worn out by the end of the long reign of King Manasseh. No one did more to corrupt the worship of God than did Manasseh in his day.The strange thing about all this was that it was not so much ordinary sin that destroyed Israel, it was idolatry. And the idolatry was not merely a pattern of setting up idols and bowing down to them. The idolatry involved destroying the lives of their own children, both in sacrifice and in temple prostitution. What makes idolatry different from other sins is that it destroys the way back to God for the repentant sinner. By the time King Manasseh died, some 330 years after the death of Solomon, the worship of Jehovah was on the rocks in Judah.And Manasseh slept with his fathers, and was buried in the garden of his own house, in the garden of Uzza: and Amon his son reigned in his stead. Amon was twenty and two years old when he be

There are some strange things about the way God works that I am not sure I understand. I know what he does, it just isn’t always clear why he does it the way he does. Take Sennacherib, king of Assyria, as a case in point. Isaiah, in his prophecy, acknowledges the truth of something Sennacherib said. He was a rod in God’s hand to chastise Israel. But the lesson that creeps out from this is that if God ever gives you a job to do, it is not a good idea to get on your high horse as you do it.When the King of Assyria besieged Jerusalem, he said quite frankly that God had sent him down there. I’m not sure he had any reason to think that. It may have been no more than a ploy on his part. But whatever the case, he went way over the line, as Isaiah will say in his prophecy. He wrote what I would call a smart-alec letter to Hezekiah that insulted God, and Hezekiah had the presence of mind to take that letter into the house of God and lay it out before him. He prayed a very short prayer. He acknowledge

Should we take God seriously? it may seem a stupid question to ask, in a way. We’re dealing with someone here who could blink his eyes and start the Big Bang. God spoke the word, and out of that comes a universe that is some 14 billion light years across. That’s who we’re talking about here, with that kind of power. But I’m asking it anyway because it seems to me that a lot of people really don’t—they really don’t take God very seriously. It's been said that the First Commandment reveals that our relationship with God is not casual—it’s rather covenantal. And I am persuaded that a lot of people take God very casually, and I want to explain to you what I mean. If you’d turn to the 50th psalm, there is coming a time when God will come, not quietly, but in a storm of fire devouring before him...

The Middle East is a very curious place, but I hardly need to tell you that. For instance, everyone learns the parable of the Good Samaritan in church, and they learn that the Samaritans were pariahs to the Jews. I wonder, though, how many people know that the Samaritans are still there. Fewer still will know the story of how the Samaritans came to be.The Assyrians carried all of northern Israel captive into lands beyond the Euphrates, and lest the land go to waste—just lie there and grow thorns—they imported people from other parts of their empire to settle there. After they arrived, though, they had a serious problem with wild animals, and assumed that it was because they didn’t know the God of the land. So the king of Assyria sent back a priest to teach them the right way. Presumably, this priest brought a copy of the Torah with him, because the Samaritans copied it and made it their own.There is a document called the Samaritan Pentateuch. It is a Hebrew copy of the first five books of th

Reading through the stories of the last kings of the house of Israel, I always get a feeling of ineffable sadness. That nation had been served by two of the greatest prophets who ever lived—Elijah, the archetype of all prophets, and Elisha, who had a double portion of the spirit of Elijah. There were only two more significant prophets during the entire history of the house of Israel. The first was Amos, who wrote during the last years of Jeroboam II. Then came Hosea, who wrote as the age of violence descended upon Israel. But after Hosea, God seems to have written Israel off. And I guess you have to expect that. There comes a point in time—when prophets are sent to them…and ignored, when they drop deeper into sex and violence—that they are judged as simply being beyond redemption. There is no significant prophet who speaks during the last 40 years of the kingdom.In the days of Pekah king of Israel came Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, and captured Ijon, and Abel-beth-maachah, and Jano

It was now 126 years after the death of Solomon and the division of the Kingdom of Israel into two houses—the House of Israel and the House of Judah. A man named Amaziah came to the throne to rule for 29 years. To give you a feeling for the passage of time, if you count forward from the Declaration Independence—a similar sort of division—that 126 years would bring you to 1902. The comparable time period would be from 1902 to 1931. In Ussher’s chronology, this was 849 BC.And he did that which was right in the sight of the Lord, yet not like David his father: he did according to all things as Joash his father did.2 Kings 14:3 KJ2000Note, he doesn’t hearken back to Solomon to look for an example, but to David. Now, we all know what a rounder David was at times, and a bloody man. So what does it mean when we look back to David as a kind of archetype? Well, the key element with David is that, while he did sin and was chastised for it, David never allowed idolatry to flourish and never

It is a sobering thought to consider that the Kingdom of Israel was once ruled by a woman—but not a very good woman. To secure her throne, she had all the royal children murdered. But a priest, Jehoiada, hid one of the boys, and thereby hangs a story. Athaliah, the queen, ruled for six years until the boy Jehoash was seven. Then the priest and the army conspired to dispose of her and place the young Jehoash on the throne. It was a good choice. The idealism of youth served Israel well for many years. The story is told in 2 Kings, chapter 11.And Jehoiada made a covenant between the Lord and the king and the people, that they should be the Lord’S people; between the king also and the people.2 Kings 11:17 KJ2000Mind you, they are not going to be the people of Baal. They are not going to the people of no god or a nameless, generic god. They are Jehovah’s people. It turns out it was none too soon, because the worship of Baal was gaining a foothold in Judah.And all the people of the land went into

Are you angry? Are you mad at what is going on in government? If you are a Republican, you are probably mad at the Democrats. If you are a Democrat, you are mad at the Republicans. If you are an independent, you get to take your pick. But even here, we are forgetting something really important. Remember something Abraham Lincoln said to a generation of Americans:It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.That last line rings down through time. And it serves to remind us that if we need someone to blame, someone to be angry toward, we really ought to look in the mirror. Blame congress, blame the pres