HOW CRITICS FARE IN THE FIERY FURNACE
Dr. W. A. Criswell
Daniel 3:19-27
In the third chapter in the Book of Daniel, as you know, they put the three Hebrew children, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah…(Meshach, Shadrach, Abednego)…they put them in the fiery furnace. But they were children of the Lord. They were faithful to God. They believed in the marvelous presence of the holy Jehovah in life. And God blessed them.
Now, the critic and the modern rationalist, how will they fare in the white, burning heat of historical truth and spiritual fact? As for Daniel in the Critic’s Den, they seem to have eaten him up alive. Under four great categories does the rationalist and the liberal attack the Book of Daniel.
They say, first, that it is filled with historical errors and inaccuracies, mis-guesses, misrepresentations, full of fiction and imagination. Then second, they attack it, philologically. They say it is full of linguistic language irreconcilables. Then they attack it prophetically. They say it’s full of prophetic impossibilities. Then they attack it doctrinally. They say it’s full of doctrinal aberrations...
...First, it’s in the canon, it’s in the Bible, which meant those old and ancient rabbis believed that it was written before Nehemiah, and in the days of the sixth century BC.
All right, second, it is in the Septuagint, LXX, seventy. The Septuagint, the most famous and most influential of all of the translations in the world is the Greek Septuagint. In Alexandria, in the days of the colonies, some Jewish scholars gathered together, that’s where it gets its name, Septuagint, seventy, there were supposed to be seventy of them, and they translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. And the Septuagint translation of the Holy Bible is the one that the apostles used when they preached the gospel of the Son of God.
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Now the Septuagint was translated in Alexandria about 300 BC. And many scholars say that by 275 BC, that the translation was complete. Yet, these critics say that the Book of Daniel was written in 165 BC, when the Book of Daniel is in the Septuagint, which was supposed to have been translated 300 BC.
...1Maccabees, one of the noblest, one of the noblest pieces of literature in the world. In the first chapter of 1 Maccabees the author quotes the Book of Daniel. And this is the time when Daniel was supposed to be forged. He quotes the Book of Daniel as being inspired Scripture.
And, in the second chapter of the Book of Maccabees, old, venerable, dying Mattathias, the priest who moved in and challenged the Greeks under Antiochus Epiphanes who was trying to make the temple of Jerusalem a part of Jupiter’s temple and offered a pig, a sow, on the altar and spread its juice, took its juice and carried it all over the temple and spread it around to defile it all, old Mattathias, an aged venerable father, dying in the second chapter of the Book of Maccabees, calls his boys around him, and he addresses Judas Maccabaeus, from whence it gets its name the Maccabees, “the hammer”, he addresses his son, Judas Maccabaeus, and Simon and the rest of his brethren, and he urges them to be true to the faith. And he cites, as an instance of loyalty unto God to death the three Hebrew boys named in the Book of Daniel. He cites Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah and he tells the story of Daniel in the lion’s den. That’s in 1 Maccabees, written about the time they say the forgery of Daniel was composed and pawned off.
...When Alexander the Great approached with his great army to destroy the city, he was met with a glorious procession of Jaddua, the high priest and his fellow priests; and then all of the people of the city distressed in pure white. And when Jaddua met Alexander the Great, he had in his hand a copy of the Word of God. And Jaddua opened it at the Book of Daniel and showed Alexander the Great, out of the Book of Daniel, how Daniel had prophesied his coming and his great victories.
...Then Josephus tells how Alexander the Great bowed and then went up to the temple and called on the name of Jehovah God and offered sacrifices in His name. And when was that? 330 BC. Yet the critic said the Book was written in 165 BC, as a forgery. Just following the history of the Book of Daniel. Of course, they say Josephus is a liar. And that this is fiction, too. But this fact remains that can’t be denied, Alexander the Great burned to the ground every city in Syria that was friendly to Darius, the king of the Persians. But he spared Jerusalem and favored honored upon it. Why? There has to be some answer. And the answer is found in Josephus and the story that Josephus told.
,,,Qumran, just a few years ago, they discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in those caves at the north end of the Dead Sea. And the oldest copies that we had of the old Bible were written about 900 AD; and they found there scrolls of the Bible that were written before Christ, which took back the Old Testament Scriptures more than a thousand years. And in the Qumran Scrolls, they found Isaiah. And in the Qumran Scrolls, they found Daniel. And those scrolls date back in their writing and in their copies, you know, when they were copying, those scrolls date back to the time when they say the forgery of Daniel was composed. There it is upon the Word of God.
Allow me one other word by summary. We have had thousands, and we have had thousands of years to see for ourselves whether or not the prophecies of Daniel are true. We’re not shut up to what a critic says. We have thousands and thousands of years to test whether or not the prophecies of Daniel are true or not. Are they true? Daniel said the head of gold is Babylon. And the arms and the breast are Media and Persia; and the thigh is Greece, Alexander and his kingdom; and the legs of iron are Rome, east and west. And thereafter, Daniel says, there’ll never be another world empire. It is broken up into clay and iron in the toes of the image. Is it true? Or is it not? We have had thousands of years to fix it. Is it of God and only God could know the future? Is it or is it not? ...( Please click the link below to read the whole article)
