Sadly, the warning of the dream remains ignored by Nebuchadnezzar. Apparently the price was too high, or maybe the judgment was too obscure. The king was passing up a great opportunity to make a new beginning and submit to the will of the Most High God. He made the wrong choice. He had a year to think about it, an opportunity to take a different course, to change his thinking, to repent. Instead, he mistook this merciful reprieve as a sign that this warning could be safely ignored. As a result, everything that had been prophesied, “came upon King Nebuchadnezzar” (Dan. 4:28).
Twelve months later, as Nebuchadnezzar was walking on the roof of the royal palace (Dan. 4:29) in Babylon, he foolishly said, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” (Dan. 4:30).
Nebuchadnezzar was on his rooftop dwelling on his favorite subject—Himself! Every syllable drips with glory, pride, arrogance and self-glorification. Paul David Tripp notes: “What a clear and outrageous statement of self-glory. While the words are still in the king’s mouth, God reduces him to a groveling beast” (Everyday Gospel, p. 322).
“Look what I’ve built. Isn’t it amazing? Has any other king ever created something so fantastic? Is there anyone on earth with even half my power? I did it all with my two hands and my creative mind. Yes, I am a really big deal!”
Matthew Henry makes note of the reality that Nebuchadnezzar had not built all of Babylon, but built upon the work of others, but boasts of building it , as Augustus Caesar boasted concerning Rome, “I found it brick, but I left it marble.”
It reminds me of what people have said about humility, an important distinction: “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less.” In other words, you take your focus off of yourself and put it on God and others.
The root sin, pride, had gone untouched during these twelve months (even if Nebuchadnezzar did amend his dealings with the poor, cf. v. 27). Pride still flowered strong in his heart! Though eager to avoid judgment, he still retained his pride, taking to himself all the credit for the remarkable achievements he really owed to God’s grace.
We can hardly blame Nebuchadnezzar for his sense of pride. As he looked around, there was much for him to appreciate and be proud of, including one of the seven wonders of the ancient world: the famous hanging gardens, which he had built for his wife. The walls of Babylon were a wonder in themselves: wide enough to enable a chariot driven by four horses to circle around on top (according to Herodotus, Tremper Longman, Daniel, p. 121).
The city was a massive square, fifty-six miles in circumference. The Euphrates flowed through the city providing the city with an abundance of water. On one side of the bridge stood an enormous temple dedicated to Belus and filled with numerous golden idols. On the other side stood Nebuchadnezzar’s grand palace.
The outside walls were 335 feet high and 87 feed broad. The walls were matched by a hundred gates of solid brass, twenty-five on each side of the city. In the center of the city, 150 pillars, each 88 feet high, supported the chapel of Baal. Inside was a colossal golden image of Baal.
Notice the words again of verse 30: “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?”
This intense focus for glory echoed the words of the Babylonian king (and possibly Satan himself) in Isaiah 14:12-15 “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far reaches of the north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’ But you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit.”
Thinking so highly of himself, God would make sure he was brought low.
Again, these kinds of boasts are typical not only of devils and kings, but all of us. We all have bloated images of ourselves, our goodness and our abilities and accomplishments.
These boastful words were hardly out of Nebuchadnezzar’s mouth before the sentence of judgment was suddenly pronounced against him from heaven:
31 While the words were still in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, “O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: The kingdom has departed from you, 32 and you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. And you shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and seven periods of time shall pass over you, until you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.”
“We never know when God’s voice will speak or His hand touch our lives. Whether it’s the call of Moses in Midian (Exod. 3), the drafting of Gideon to lead the army (Judges 6), the opportunity of David to kill a giant (1 Sam. 17), the summons to the four fishermen to leave all and follow Christ (Matt. 4:18-22), or the warning that life has come to an end (Luke 12:16-21), God has every right to break into our lives and speak to us. What the king learned from Daniel’s interpretation of the dream, he now heard from heaven! “No man knows when his hour will come” (Eccl. 9:12 NIV)” (Warren Wiersbe, The Wiersbe Bible Commentary: OT Volume, p. 1358).
“What he should have learned from his vision of the great image and from the deliverance of the three Hebrews from the fiery furnace, would be indelibly impressed on him” (Gleason Archer, Jr.
And this is immediately what happened:
33 Immediately the word was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers, and his nails were like birds’ claws.
Nebuchadnezzar thought himself more than a man, so God makes him less than a man (Matthew Henry).
“God’s patience is great. But it is not [infinite]. For the unbelieving world there will come a time when sin becomes so great that His forbearance will end. Just like in the days of Noah, He will pour out His wrath upon His creation. But also, just as He saved the righteous Noah and his family by lifting them above the punishment by means of an ark, He will save His righteous children from His coming wrath by lifting them above the tribulation by means of the rapture. While the believers of the church enjoy their rewards with the Savior, the rest of humanity will endure seven years of tribulation” (Amir Tsarfati, Discovering Daniel, p. 93).
Don’t mistake the patience of God as negligence or indifference or leniency. He is giving us time for one thing—to repent. This is why Peter says, “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9) and Paul attributes God’s patience to his kindheartedness, saying “Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Rom. 2:4).
Six symptoms are relayed: a loss of reasoning (Daniel 4:16), being drenched in the dew of heaven (Daniel 4:15, 25, 33), being exiled with animals (Daniel 4:16, 25, 32, 33), a change in dietary patterns i.e. eating grass (Daniel 4:25, 32, 33), growing hair like eagles’ feathers (Daniel 4:33) and possessing nails like birds’ claws (Daniel 4:33).
Nebuchadnezzar lost his power and his position. He was driven away from Babylon. His humanity was affected. Not only was he living among the beasts of the field but he was eating grass like an ox. His insanity made him think he was an animal. His hair and nails remain untrimmed and his shaggy, grotesque appearance would have struck fear in the hearts of anyone who found him. David Jeremiah notes: “The one who had tempted Daniel and his three friends to eat forbidden food from the royal table now ate grass like an ox” (Agents of Babylon, p. 131).
Many commentators have tried to find parallels between Nebuchadnezzar’s condition and recognized mental or psychological illnesses known today. Some call it lycanthropy, which comes from the words lycos, meaning wolf, and Anthropos, man. He was not a Jekyll and Hude, but a wolf-man.
“Lycanthropy stems from a centuries-old belief that some humans can transform into wolves—and revert back to human form. But clinical lycanthropy is a psychiatric diagnosis of a person who believes he or she has become a nonhuman animal (not necessarily a wolf)” (David Jermiah, Agents of Babylon, p. 130).
British scholar R.K. Harrison (1920-1993) provides the following account from physician Raymond Harris on his experiences with a man suffering from boanthropy in a British mental institution in 1946:
A patient was in his early 20’s who reportedly had been hospitalized for about five years. His symptoms were well developed on admission, and diagnosis was immediate and conclusive. He was of average height and weight with good physique, and was in excellent bodily health. His mental symptoms included pronounced anti-social tendencies, and because of this he spent the entire day from dawn to dusk outdoors, in the grounds of the institution… His daily routine consisted of wandering around the magnificent lawns with which the otherwise dingy hospital situation was graced, and it was his custom to pluck up and eat handfuls of the grass as he went along. On observation he was seen to discriminate carefully between grass and weeds, and on inquiry from the attendant the writer was told the diet of this patient consisted exclusively of grass from hospital lawns. He never ate institutional food with the other inmates, and his only drink was water…The writer was able to examine him cursorily, and the only physical abnormality noted consisted of a lengthening of the hair and a course, thickened condition of the fingernails.” (Harrison, Introduction To the Old Testament, 1116)
We don’t know for sure.
Not surprisingly, psychologists have long been intrigued by the case of Nebuchadnezzar. Cognitive psychologist Henry Gleitman (b. 1925) speculates that Nebuchadnezzar exhibited features of an advanced syphilitic infection (Gleitman, Psychology, 219).
Famed psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) addressed Nebuchadnezzar in many of his works. He diagnosed the arrogant ruler with a “classic case of megalomania” (Jung Collected Works, volume 8, ¶ 163). Jung analyzed Nebuchadnezzar’s dream writing that it was “easy to see that the great tree is the dreaming king himself. Daniel interprets the dream in this sense. Its meaning is obviously an attempt to compensate the king’s megalomania which, according to the story, developed into a real psychosis” (Jung, Dreams, 37). This reading views the dream as an exemplar of a compensatory dream, a dream by which the dreamer offsets a disproportionate sense of power. Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of the tree being cut is what his psyche deemed must happen for him to achieve any semblance of wholeness. Whether or not one consents to Jung’s interpretation, his summary of Nebuchadnezzar’s condition is seemly – “a complete regressive degeneration of a man who has overreached himself.” (Jung, Analytical Psychology 123).”
Whatever the malady is, the real issue is the fact that it was a unique inhuman bestiality that was a direct judgment of God, brought on by his pride and relieved, as we will see, by his repentance.
God is the true king and to defy God is always madness.
Asaph notes in his struggle with envying the wicked and their carefree, enjoyable life, that he realized when he was embittered against God for not blessing him in like way, that he was “brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you” (Psa. 73:22), He was keeping his eyes only upon those around him—occupied with man instead of with God, with the things of this life rather than heavenly treasures, with the here and now rather than future realities. It wasn’t until he entered the tabernacle that his vision was changed heavenward, and to future realities (Psa. 73:17). Our lives can change dramatically depending upon where we are looking.
I like the New International Version’s translation of verse 26: “your kingdom will be restored to you when you acknowledge that Heaven rules.” Notice the exact moment when Nebuchadnezzar ceases to be insane: when “I raised my eyes toward heaven, my sanity was restored.”
How do we stop the madness of pride and the insanity of sin? We halt it by lifting our eyes toward Heaven and by realizing that we are nothing and He is everything, and that the universe is not about what pleases us, but what pleases God.
I believe the most important thing we can do each day is to remind ourselves of who God is, to go through a litany of His attributes to remind ourselves that it is this great and glorious God who rules in heaven and on earth and will be with us throughout the day.
Iain Duguid comments: “It is worth noticing where Nebuchadnezzar’s eyes are directed at the beginning and end of his time of judgment. At the beginning of the episode he is on a lofty perch, the rooftop of his house, from where his eyes roam sideways and downwards, comparing his glory to that of other men and glorifying himself. He thought of himself as the center of the universe, the tree from which everything else receives its sustenance. This is exactly what pride does: it locates the self at the center of the universe, glorying in its own achievements, and putting everyone else in second place. Its eyes are aways directed sideways and downwards, comparing ourselves with others, and endlessly trying to outdo them. In its very nature, pride has to be cleverer than someone else, or more attractive than other people, or a better cook, or a faster runner, or a more skillful gardener, or whatever. Pride is never satisfied in what has been accomplished because its essence aways lies in defeating others, not in achieving the thing in itself. The eyes of pride are thus always fixed on myself and my performance, in a way that leaves no room for looking upwards to God” (Daniel in Reformed Expository Commentary, p. 70).
In his book Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis writes more about pride.
“I have heard people admit that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice [pride]. There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. Christians are right: it is pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But pride always means enmity — it is enmity. And not only between man and man, but enmity to God” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), p. 109, 111).
Nebuchadnezzar needed to be taken down a peg. He needed to be reminded who really was the king of the universe.
Again, C. S. Lewis wrote, as Nebuchadnezzar had to learn:
“In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that — and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison — you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you” (C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), p. 111).
We can be thankful when God knocks us off our pedestals. When we come crashing down, we will then have no place else to look but up.
“Seven years. At the end of the seven years of his insanity, the king would recognize who God is. At the end of the seven years of Jacob’s trouble, or the tribulation, Israel will recognize Jesus, the One they pierced, as the Messiah and will find salvation. And at the end of those seven years of God’s wrath, the unbelieving world will recognize the sovereignty of the God they rejected. But for them, it will be too late” (Amir Tsarfati, Discovering Daniel, p. 92).
Grace Still Amazes 