Biblion Bible Commentary
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My God Has Sent His Angel
Daniel 6:19-23
19 Then the king arose very early in the morning, and went in haste to the den of lions. · WEB
The king runs to the den at dawn and asks a question, and Daniel's answer credits an angel, an innocence, and a trust — not a coincidence.
Then the king arose very early in the morning, and went in haste to the den of lions Daniel 6:19.
He is there at first light, running — a sixty-two-year-old emperor Daniel 5:31 hurrying through his own palace grounds to a pit. And he calls with a troubled voice, which is the honest detail: he had told Daniel the night before that God would deliver him Daniel 6:16, and by morning the confidence has thinned to a shout into a hole.
Daniel, servant of the living God, is your God, whom you serve continually, able to deliver you from the lions? Daniel 6:20.
The question is nearly the one Nebuchadnezzar had thrown at three men outside a furnace — who is that god who will deliver you out of my hands? Daniel 3:15 — but the mood has entirely changed. That was a taunt; this is a plea, from a man who has already conceded the title the living God and is asking whether the living God can reach into a sealed den. The book keeps putting its central question in the mouths of Gentile kings, and keeps answering it with a man's voice from an impossible place.
O king, live forever! My God has sent his angel, and has shut the lions' mouths, and they have not hurt me Daniel 6:21–22.
Daniel's first word is a courtesy — the formal salute to a king who has just spent the night in misery on his behalf, and no reproach for the sentence. Then the account, and it credits an agent: my God has sent his angel, the same deliverance the furnace received Daniel 3:28 and the same means the Psalms describe as ordinary Psalms 34:7 Psalms 91:11. The lions were not tame, drugged, or fed; their mouths were shut, which is a way of saying the animals were exactly as dangerous as everyone thought and were prevented.
And the reason he gives is worth weighing: because innocence was found in me before him; and also before you, O king, I have done no harm. Not a claim of sinlessness — this is the man whose great prayer says we have sinned Daniel 9:5. It is a plea to the specific charge. He was condemned for praying, and on that indictment he was innocent both before God and before the crown, which is precisely why heaven intervened. The deliverance is a verdict on the decree.
So Daniel was taken up out of the den, and no kind of harm was found on him, because he had trusted in his God Daniel 6:23.
The inspection matches the furnace's Daniel 3:27 — nothing on him — and the narrator supplies the final clause himself: because he had trusted in his God. Trust is named as the link, not as the mechanism; the God who is able Daniel 6:20 did the shutting. The New Testament remembers this night in one phrase, filed among the acts of faith: they stopped the mouths of lions Hebrews 11:33 — and in the very next breath records the faithful who were not spared Hebrews 11:37.
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