Thank you for downloading the Focus on the Family Parenting Podcast. You can find more helpful advice at

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slash parenting podcast. You might have grown up hearing Bible stories, hearing about Daniel and the

lion's den and think, wow that's awesome I want to be like Daniel. It's easy to

overlook powerful truths in that familiar story, but it does tell us a lot about who God is and who we are as God's children.

I'm John Fuller along with Danny Werta who leads our parenting and youth department here

at Focus and Jim Daly and I recently talked with Ray Van der Laen, who is an author and Bible teacher

and hosts the video series called that the world may know.

We asked Ray for some insights about the story of Daniel from the Bible.

What about Daniel? That's how many years after David was Daniel

and what was the environment like for him?

Probably about 500 would be a safe number to throw out.

There's various dating schemes, if you will,

in terms of exactly.

But about 500 years later, that's an interesting story to me for

some of the same reasons the word used to describe Daniel's friends means a

pre-adolescent or an adolescent. So again we got middle school

kids. We make Daniel's friends college age or maybe early career at 28. These are guys as young as the students sitting in here today. Maybe

younger than that. These are just kids. And there's an interesting commentary

at the beginning which Westerners don't pick up on. We believe it but we don't

pick up on it. Do you remember their names? We got these strange names.

Meeschak, Shadrack, Shadrak, and Abedigo. Now if you look at the meaning of those names they're awful.

...