DANIEL IN THE LIONS' DEN.

(Daniel vi:10-23.)

I. The Analysis.

1. The prayer of Daniel (verses 10, 11). The words, "as he did aforetime," are significant. They speak of the power of habit. We say much concerning the power of evil habits —not enough of the power of good habits. Many a young man going from his country home into the temptations of city life has been carried through his dangerous first year by the inveterate habit of church going.

2. The foolish law (verses 12-15). The unchangeableness of the laws of the Medes and Persians was but a codification of that worship of consistency, which, as Disraeli said, is the ''virtue of feeble minds." No one but a fool never changes his mind. Wider knowledge, deeper experience, larger vision—these constantly change both opinion and conduct.

3. The permitted peril (verses 16, 17). Over such providences we write a wistful "Why?" Daniel was the best man of his time; God's most faithful servant—why the den of lions for him?

4. The delivering God (verses 18-23). ''Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but out of them all the Lord delivereth him."

II. The Heart of the Lesson.

It is not easy to say what is most surely central in this lesson. Most obviously we have here another striking instance of that truth which was before our minds when we were with Jeremiah in the dungeon, the permitted afflictions of the good, and the permitted power of the wicked. Why is "truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne?" It is the problem of Job; it sorely troubled Asaph (Psalm lxxiii). The mystery of the sufferings of the godly is indeed in this lesson, but it is also everywhere in Scripture and therefore cannot be distinctively the core truth before us to-day.

I think we shall most surely find it in the king's question at daybreak: "O Daniel, servant of the living God, is thy God, whom thou servest continually, able to deliver thee from the lions?" Form out of this a phrase, "the God of Daniel," and find the heart of the lesson therein.

The whole Bible, nay, the whole creation, is but a method of the self-revelation of God. He is ever seeking manifestation, for He knows that the one supreme need of the world is really to know God. "This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (John xvii:3).

Now, among the various means used by the unseen God for His self-revelation is His association with certain human lives. What does He mean, for example, when He says, "I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob?" This, evidently: "I am the God who revealed what manner of being He is by associating myself with the lives of three men, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." These men, though closely related by blood, were men of diverse characters, and circumstances. The God of Abraham is a God who calls men out—out of idolatry into true worship; out of small things into great things; out of barrenness into marvellous fruitfulness. The God of Isaac is the God who does not despise negative and commonplace men—for such Isaac was—but so deals with them as to pass down and carry out the great purposes which had their beginnings in larger souls. The God of Jacob is the God who transforms character, who takes up a mean trickster, a ''supplanter," and so deals with him that at last He makes him an Israel, a "prince with God."

Who, now, is this God of Daniel whom we have before us in this lesson? Very obviously He is the God who is able to deliver. Surely, in such a world as this—a world in which the lions of temptation and of destructive lusts crouch in every pathway, a God who was not able to deliver, would be a lacking God—a God weak at a vital point.

A missionary saw a heathen neighbor one morning throw his favorite idol to the ground and then proceed to kick it out of his compound. When the missionary asked the cause of such treatment, the heathen explained that the god had no power to deliver him. A powerless god is an object of just contempt. If the one living and true God, the God of Daniel and of Paul and of all the tested saints in all the ages had not shown Himself mighty to deliver His people, no one would to-day believe on Him. Our God—the God of Daniel, is "able to deliver."