And the king says: “I know he will not bow down and worship me. I know that Daniel worships the God of Heaven.”
Then the king sets his heart to deliver him, all the day, from those hundred and twenty men. But they come to him and say: “If you break your law, your kingdom will depart. Your subjects will no longer obey you. You must drive him to the lions’ den.”
So Darius is compelled to yield, and at last he gives the word to have Daniel sent away and cast into the den of lions. These men take good care to have the den filled with the most hungry beasts of Babylon. He is thrown headlong into the den, but the angel of God flies down, and Daniel lights unharmed on the bottom. The lions’ mouths are stopped. They are as harmless as lambs. The old prophet, at the wonted hour, drops on his knees and prays, with his face toward Jerusalem, as calmly as he did in his chamber. And when it gets later he just lays his head on one of the lions and goes to sleep. Undoubtedly no one in all Babylon sleeps more sweetly than does Daniel in the lions’ den.
In the palace, the king can not sleep. He orders his chariot, and early in the morning rattles over the pavement and jumps down at the lions’ den. I see the king alight from his chariot in eager haste, and hear him cry down through the mouth of the den: “O Daniel, servant of the living God! Is thy God, whom thou reverest continually, able to deliver thee from the lions?”
Hark! Why, it is a resurrection voice! It is Daniel, saying: “My God is able. He hath sent one of His angels, and hath shut the lions’ mouths.”
I can see them now just embrace each other, and together they jump into the chariot and away they go back to the palace to breakfast.
I want to say something further about Daniel. I want to refer to how an angel came to him, and, as we read in the twelfth chapter of Daniel, told him he was a man greatly beloved. Another angel had come to him with the same message. It is generally thought this last angel was the same one spoken of in Revelations—first chapter and thirteenth verse—as coming to John when banished to the Isle of Patmos. People thought he was sent off there alone, but he was not; the angel of God was with him.
And so with Daniel. Here, in the tenth chapter and fifth verse, he says: “Then I lifted up mine eyes, and behold, a certain man clothed with fine linen, and otherwise arrayed as God’s messenger, who cried: ‘O Daniel, a man greatly beloved, understand the words which I speak unto thee, and stand upright, for unto thee am I now sent.’”
It was Daniel’s need that brought him from the glory land. It was the Son of God right by his side in that strange land. And that was the second time when the word came to him, saying he was greatly beloved. Yes, three times a messenger came from the throne of God to tell him this. I love to speak of that precious verse in the eleventh chapter—the thirty-second verse: “The people that do know their God shall be strong and do exploits.” I also love to speak of the twelfth chapter and second and third verses: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt; and they that be wise shall shine as the stars of the firmament, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.”
This was the angel’s comfort to Daniel, and a great comfort it was. The fact with all of us is that we like to shine. There is no doubt about that. Every mother likes her child to shine. If her boy shines at school by reaching the head of his class, the proud mother tells all the neighbors, and she has a right to do so. But it is not the great of this world that will shine the brightest. For a few years they may shed bright light, but they go out in darkness, without an inner brightness. Supplying the brightness, they go out in black darkness.