URC Daily Devotion 18th July 2019

Hebrew is the mother tongue, the language of YHWH. Aramaic was the global language, the language of Empire and trade. Most of the enslaved Hebrews after a time would have been more fluent in Aramaic than their mother tongue.

At the moment the language shifts to acceptable language, one hears the other holy men say: “tell your servants to interpret the dream”. The king challenges the holy men to ‘guess’ what he is dreaming, then interpret it. There is a big difference between knowing what to say and knowing what needs to be said. Nebuchadnezzar already knows the representatives of popular religion are ill-equipped to see his anguish. He is set to put popular religion to death because it is not deep enough to see through him.

When religion reaches the zenith of its popularity at best and at worst is obvious to everyone, it loses public trust and its prophetic edge. Let’s be honest: sometimes our lament on the decline of the Church is really a lament on the loss of Christian superiority in public life: Victorian buildings no longer are easily filled; stadiums don’t overflow like the Billy Graham days; children can no longer recite the Lord’s Prayer from memory. We say, “The church is dead.”  We give up on faith. We tell folks things they want to hear. We water down worship. We stop preaching. We never liked doing it anyway, so why bother? We ask, “What are we doing wrong and how can WE fix it?” When religion is popular and obvious, we go into ‘survival’ mode.

This episode teaches that prophetic wisdom opens communication and saves lives. It is a language that sets captives free and even brings monarchs to their knees. It is a language that can see through the emperor’s dreams, yet speaks clearly in any language.