Welcome to Enjoying the Journey with Evangelist Scott Pauli.

Today we are on a journey through Scripture.

We hope you'll join us as we make 66 stops through each book of the Word of God.

In our journey through Scripture, we've come now to the final book that is known as a major prophet.

It's interesting because it's a very brief book. It's the little book of Daniel. And of the five

major prophets, it probably is the book that you think you're most familiar with. For example,

you know the story of Daniel and the Lion's Den. You know the story of the Hebrew

boys cast into the fiery furnace and Christ coming to be with them. And so there's enough

biographical information and historical information in this book that there's some famous

stories well known here. And yet the message of Daniel is often missed. Daniel, whose name means God is my judge,

is a fascinating character in Scripture. It's very possible he was a descendant of King

Hezekiah, and nothing negative is written about him. Think of that for just a moment.

Somewhere between his 16th and 20th year in life he was taken captive. Remember Jerusalem is

destroyed, the people are carried away into Babylonian captivity. Well, Daniel was taken away in the

first group of people that were deported. That means that as a child, as a young person, he grew up

under the influence of a good king named Josiah and a great

preacher named Jeremiah. I think this is wonderful, but it was in his youth that God prepared him

to take his stand in Babylon. With our children and our grandchildren, we must take the window of time

God gives us to get them ready to live in this wicked world. Now Daniel lived through

the entire 70-year captivity, and so he ties together both the period before the exile, during

the exile, and after the exile. He was close to 90 years of age when he's writing this book

of the Bible. We think of Daniel as being a very young man.

...