King Darius In Daniel Essay, Research Paper

Have you ever found yourself being a little too proud of your

accomplishments? I know, being a performer in a Christian singing group,

that it is easy to think that I am all that and a bag of chips. I usually get

punished or humiliated by God in some way. God works funny like that. It

seems that every time I think that I performed well someone tells me that

our performance was not all that it was cracked up to be. This is

extremely humbling and when looked back upon embarrassing.

King Darius in Daniel chapter six was full of himself. His administrators

conned him into writing a law that said that everyone had to worship the

King and no one else. The King thought that this was a very good idea

since he was the one that everyone would be worshipping; so he signed

the law. This was such a good idea, he was thinking, until one of the

administrators tricked him into writing the law. After writing the law one of

his administrators told him that Daniel, one of the Kings most trusted

administrators, was praying three times a day to the God of Abraham,

Isaac, and Jacob. When King Darius realized what had to be done, (that

Daniel was going to be thrown into the lions den) he mourned for an

entire day. After finding no possible solution Darius gave the order to

throw Daniel into the lions den. As the story goes, Daniel comes out of the

den untouched and the king praised the God of Daniel. He then made a

new decree saying that everyone in the kingdom should tremble with

fear before the God of Daniel.

King Darius is a lot like myself. He was very quick to be pridefil and it

caused much grief, but in the end God intervened. I find that when I feel

too proud something bad happens and I don’t mourn, but I am

saddened by the bad that has happened. I always know that in the end

God will change my heart and I hope that my own selfish nature will not

outweigh my love for my God. It is amazing to me that God knows the

particular ways to shoot down your pride. It does not matter if you are a

believer or not, God knows just how to push your buttons if he needs to do

so. He is not going to mess with doing something that will not affect you.

He wants to make a point and get to it as fast as possible. For me, the

approval of others is what drives my ambition to perform music for

people. God knows this, and he will strike my pride with a harsh comment

at the end of a performance or have someone write a letter to our

director pointing out specifically what went wrong. This also hurts my

pride, but I know that my pride, in the long run does not really matter. I

know that self gratification is not going to matter for long. I mean how

much time to we actually spend thinking that we are the best at

something, or that we have done a perfect job. Not much! And if we do

it is only for a brief few minutes of our lives. I would much rather spend my

few minutes reflecting on how God has blessed me with the talent that

he has given me instead of dwelling on how well of a performance that I

managed to pull off with God’s help.

The greatest thing about God is that he is all knowing but also that

he forgives endlessly. There is nothing I can do to repay my debt to God,

and there is no way that I can forgive myself for my sin, but God can do

all these things. And the best part is that he does so freely. It is so

amazing that through scripture God reveals that not everyone is perfect

even if they are in the Bible. The only perfect person to ever walk the

face of the earth is Jesus.

God used King Darius’ pride to form a stronger relationship with him.

The king obviously did not see the God of Daniel as the greatest, until he

saw that one a servant spared by God’s grace. Darius was looking for

some way to undo the wrong that he had created when he wrote the

law, but he found out that the problem was in God’s hands. After the

incident was over, the king realized that there is no one better than God

to solve problems. He also realized that his pride was an issue that he

needed to place in the hands of God and in the end that’s just where he

put it.