Biblion Bible Commentary
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Your God Is the God of Gods
Daniel 2:46-49
46 Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell on his face, worshiped Daniel, and commanded that they should offer an offering and sweet odors to him. · WEB
The king worships the interpreter, confesses the interpreter's God in the right words, and promotes him — and the confession will not survive the next chapter.
Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell on his face, worshiped Daniel, and commanded that they should offer an offering and sweet odors to him Daniel 2:46.
The master of the world lies face down before a foreign captive, and gets it wrong in the most understandable way. He has just been told twice that the interpreter had no wisdom of his own in the matter Daniel 2:27 Daniel 2:30, and he honors the messenger anyway — offerings and incense aimed at a man. It is the reflex of a religious system that has always located power in practitioners. The text records the offer and never says Daniel accepted it; his next sentence redirects everything, as men in Scripture do when this happens to them Acts 10:25–26 Acts 14:14–15.
Of a truth your God is the God of gods, and the Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, since you have been able to reveal this secret Daniel 2:47.
The confession is remarkable — three titles, each exactly right, and each drawn from what the king had just watched happen. The God of gods: the deities whose dwelling was said not to be with flesh Daniel 2:11 had produced nothing, and this one had spoken. The Lord of kings: the appropriate response to a dream in which kings are set up and removed like courses in a meal, from a monarch who has just learned he is the top layer of a doomed statue. A revealer of secrets: Daniel's own phrase, repeated back Daniel 2:28.
But your God is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. The king has added a superior deity to his collection, not exchanged his collection for one God. He grants supremacy without giving allegiance — and the proof is one chapter away, on the plain of Dura , where the man who has just called this God the Lord of kings builds a golden image and threatens to burn alive anyone who will not bow Daniel 3:1 Daniel 3:6. Note what he builds: gold, and gold only, from head to foot. Told he was the golden head of a statue with a coming end, he erects a statue that is gold all the way down. Even the confession of the truth got absorbed into the pride it should have broken.
Then the king made Daniel great and gave him many great gifts, and made him rule over the whole province of Babylon and to be chief governor over all the wise men of Babylon Daniel 2:48.
The promised rewards arrive Daniel 2:6, and the placement is providence with a long view: a Hebrew exile installed at the head of the empire's administration and over the guild that had failed — including the men whose lives he had saved Daniel 2:24. He will still hold rank in that court sixty years and two empires later.
Daniel requested of the king, and he appointed Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego over the affairs of the province of Babylon, but Daniel was in the king's gate Daniel 2:49.
The first thing he does with his elevation is spend it on his friends. The three who had prayed through the night with him Daniel 2:17–18 are given office by his request. The placement also sets up the next chapter, since it is precisely as officials over provincial affairs that the three become conspicuous enough to be denounced Daniel 3:12. Promotion in this book is never simply reward. It is exposure.
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