Sovereign: Daniel 4:1-3
God is every bit as sovereign now as He has always been. God’s power does not change. God’s love does not change. God’s character does not change. God is God, and He will always be. Even when we have passed away, He will remain.
Nebuchadnezzar writes these opening verses of this chapter on a spiritual high. Take these verses with a huge dose of context. Remember that Nebuchadnezzar was a Gentile king in a polytheistic land. Just because Nebuchadnezzar pens these verses, he should not be considered as having come over to God’s ways. Nebuchadnezzar is a king paying homage to God because He has performed something incredible in his life. This is a wonderful testimony of Nebuchadnezzar’s state of mind, but it is not to be read as a testimonial. The greater context of the scripture will attest to this, especially as we go through the dream and even as we head into the next chapter.
Even though Nebuchadnezzar never leaves his polytheistic religion to worship God as the true sovereign over his life, that doesn’t mean we cannot take his words here seriously. When Nebuchadnezzar pens these words, he is serious about them. Nebuchadnezzar is genuinely impressed by the acts that God puts in his life. He considers the signs that God does in his life as acts worthy of praise.
What does Nebuchadnezzar say about God? First, Nebuchadnezzar says that God’s signs are great and His wonders are mighty. In other words, God’s ability to impact the world is impressive. One might even say that His ability to influence the world is unique. God has dominion over certain aspects of life that are untouchable even by the Chaldean gods. He is an impressive God.
Second, Nebuchadnezzar acknowledges that God’s kingdom is an everlasting kingdom. God is not something that has been invented out of necessity. God was not discovered by a set of priests looking for the next big thing to get the people to worship. Human beings come and go, yet God remains.
This second thought impresses me every time I think about it. If we roughly approximate the time between generations to be twenty years, there have been a hundred generations since Jesus died on the cross. God is the same now as He was when He sent Jesus to the earth. If we go back another fifty generations, we can say that the God of David is the same God as the God we worship. Going back another fifty generations, we can claim that the God Abraham worshipped is the same God we worship now.
Think about how much time has passed from Abraham to now. Think about how many kingdoms have risen and fallen. How many billions of people have been born and died! How much has technology changed the face of this world! Yet God remains the same. God is every bit as sovereign now as He has always been.
