God’s Word for You

Daniel 4:24-27 Justified

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Thursday, October 9, 2025

24 This is the interpretation, O king: It is a decree of the Most High, proclaimed against my lord the king. 25 You shall be driven away from people, and you will live with the animals of the field. You will eat grass like an ox, and you will be wet with the dew of heaven, and seven times will pass over you until you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to anyone he wants to. 26 The command to leave the stump of the tree and its roots means that your kingdom shall be restored to you when you acknowledge that Heaven rules. 27 Therefore, O king, let my advice be acceptable to you. Break away from your sins with righteousness, and from the guilt of your sins by showing mercy to the poor. Perhaps then your prosperity will be lengthened.”

Here we have Daniel full interpretation of the king’s dream. Every important detail is explained, and those that are not explained here have been touched on earlier. What we want to give our attention to now is what Daniel says after the interpretation. Even if one of the king’s magi could have told him what the dream meant, not one of them could have proclaimed law and gospel to him as Daniel does here. It is perhaps Daniel’s greatest pastoral moment, when he touches the king’s very soul with words that could rescue Nebuchadnezzar from the approaching fate. Daniel’s words were the difference to the king, not simply between life and death, or his throne or terrible poverty and wildness, but between eternal life and eternal death. Daniel is holding out heaven and hell for the king to understand.

The prophet says: “Break away from your sins with righteousness, and from the guilt of your sins by showing mercy to the poor.” The doctrine being held up here for our comfort (and the king’s!) is the doctrine of being saved by God, a doctrine we term “justification.” We call it that because this is what the Holy Spirit calls it, through the mouths or pens of the prophets and the apostles. Paul says: “Through Christ, everyone who believes is justified from everything you could not be justified from by the law of Moses” (Acts 13:39). The word is dikaios and its verbal forms. This means “to be put into a right relationship with God.” In a courtroom, it means acquit, to be proved and judged to be not guilty. And it also means to be set free. We are set free because Christ set us free through his suffering and death on the cross. In his great prophecy about Christ, Isaiah said, “My righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their sins” (Isaiah 53:11). Bearing our sins, he allowed himself to be executed, paying the penalty for them all. But then he rose from the dead, and since only a man can rise from the dead and not sins or their penalties, our sins remain dead, but Christ is alive, and he will raise us to life on Judgment Day.

Now, we are saved simply through faith in Jesus, and not by any of our actions or works (that is, good deeds), “for a man is justified by faith alone apart from observing the law” (Romans 3:28). And again, “A man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 2:16). Sometimes someone will try to hold out a passage that makes it sound like our salvation isn’t certain, and that we should only be confused or terrified. For instance, the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine held up Ecclesiastes 9:1, “No one knows whether love or hate awaits him.” But Solomon was only showing that nobody can be sure of someone’s state of grace and of being saved by external matters, since on the outside it seems the same with the godless as with the righteous (Ecclesiastes 9:2 and following, in the very same context). Certainty of being saved is not about what is on the outside, but what is in the heart. It by the grace of God that we are saved by faith (Ephesians 2:8). And more than this, the faith that we have is also a gift from God, for “faith was poured out on me abundantly” (1 Timothy 1:14).

So, a skeptic may read Daniel’s words, “Break away from your sins with righteousness” and he may try to say that this should be the king’s righteousness. But being righteous is impossible apart from faith in God, and in Christ. Therefore breaking or tearing away from sin is only possible for someone with faith, since the motive for doing it apart from faith would be a false motive, and therefore sinful, and therefore not righteous at all. But Daniel holds out the righteousness that is by faith to the king. Faith, forgiveness, righteousness, and salvation were all there to be had by the king, simply by trusting in the gospel promise given to him through his prophet. And then the fruits of that faith would indeed include showing mercy to the poor and other things. Daniel simply gives the most obvious example of the kind of faith-based response to forgiveness that every king, every leader, faces. Mercy and kindness to the poor is necessary in every nation, in every age. It is not a dividing point between liberals and conservatives, or between Tories and Whigs, but the compassion of God himself: “The Lord has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor” (Luke 4:18).

Anyone in the world, from the poor man to the king, can be saved by Christ, simply by putting our faith in him. His blood atoned for our sins. His Name justifies us before the Father on his throne in heaven (1 Corinthians 6:11). This teaching, the doctrine of justification and being saved by Jesus, proclaims to our hearts and to the world that we have forgiveness in Jesus, and a place with him forever in heaven.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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