I was teaching from Daniel last week. It’s always amazing how threads of thought come together. I’ve been pondering whether much of the trouble and strife we have in the country today is caused by pride and then I’m asked to teach from this particular book. My text was Chapter 4 where the king has a dream. He is troubled, but he doesn’t know why. No one can interpret the dream, until Daniel (who is about to be killed along with all other educated men) says, Wait. I can help.
Now, my daughter earned a master’s in psychology. Me, I am just a perpetual student–but not in schools. I’ve read most of Freud, all of Jung, all of the Bible (more than once), and a lot more. She says that a dream is just a bunch of random neurons firing over night probably dredging up random thoughts you’ve had during the day.
My studies (and personal experience to some degree) say that occasionally a dream is more than a dream. (Carl Jung, who studied these things and was much more wise than his followers, once said, sometimes a dream is just a dream. But then he studied a lot of dreams.)
When you are in a position of great authority, your thoughts are on things that are beyond everyday living. You are concerned with history, your importance, what people are plotting, and especially in the ancient world, God. Early leaders right up through the rulers of Rome and continuing into the Middle Ages’ kings and Popes would get the idea that they were, indeed, God himself.
So, the king is full of those thoughts–we would say full of himself, or maybe something soft, brown and squishy–and goes to sleep. He has a numinous dream–one from God. Paraphrasing Daniel’s analysis, “You’d better change your ways, or you’ll go crazy.”
He didn’t; and he did.
Later, when the king was restored to health, he praised God because he had experienced the mighty power of God.
Just so, do we all today–and all those loud-mouthed pundits on TV and radio, and so on–need to go through a season (or seven seasons like this king) of insanity before coming to our senses? Acknowledge your pride and turn your life away from it.
The best advice I’ve seen so far about this is to live only in the present moment without dwelling either on the past or the future but focused only on walking with God during this minute. If you are doing that, then there is no place for the ego to assert itself and get you into trouble.
Faith Venture 
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