The Most High Rules

I came to the book of Daniel prepared to preach Christ from the heroic prophetic feats of the title character. Surely he is the great type of Christ in his own book! And indeed, as we will see Daniel consistently acts as prophet and priest throughout his time in Babylon, with parallels to the Son of Man that are not to be taken lightly. But in chs. 2 & 4, much to my surprise, I have discovered that the great type of the Son of Man is not Daniel, but Nebuchadnezzar! The pagan monarch, the Babylonian tyrant, the destroyer of God's temple, the man who surely ought to be a one-dimensional villain — that man is like Christ in numerous ways. We saw in ch. 2 that he is called "kings of kings" and that he is the "head of gold," a description that overlaps the description of the Beloved in Song of Solomon 5. But those parallels are small potatoes compared to the narrative arc of Daniel 4, in which we see humiliation and exaltation, a cosmic tree cut down and then regrown. Yes, clearly Nebuchadnezzar is not Christ. But he is like Him in some key ways, ways that mark out the Babylonian as a foil character whose flaws highlight the perfections of the lion of the tribe of Judah. Particularly in his humiliation and exaltation, Nebuchadnezzar reminds us of the humiliation and exaltation of the Son of Man, and teaches us the lesson he learned: conformity to Christ requires humility.