Can Christians disagree and still be Christian? Let's talk about it on this edition of Key Light. Hello, this is Mike Kelly. You are now listening to Key Light, where the Bible becomes relevant to your daily life. If you have a Bible, get it. And here is our teacher, Steve Brown. Thanks Mike. If you have your Bible, you say, I know, I know a ZQ. No, no, no. And we finished a ZQ. In fact, I fought with great profundity and sophistication and prowess as a teacher. And if you believe that, you believe anything. But we did finish a ZQ yesterday. I thought we might go through the week, but decided to go ahead and move on with Daniel. So as we continue with our Old Testament survey, we are moving to the next book in your canon. Canon is a word that means measurement. It means the entirety of all the books of the Bible. We're moving to the next in the English Bible, which is the book of Daniel. And if you've ever read the book of Daniel, if you get beyond the first few chapters, and you weren't confused, then there's something wrong with you. I mean, this is a confusing book. If you think revelation is hard, you don't know nothing. Daniel is really hard, and I'm not going to fix it for you. I'm not going to be able to resolve all of the difficulties and the disputes, but we're going to talk about some of it and some of the issues that are involved there. Now the book of Daniel is found in the third section of the Hebrew Bible. Now that's known as the writings, and it's the third section of the writings since Daniel is obviously a prophet and is called a prophet by Jesus. Some have asked why Daniel is not included in the section of the Hebrew Bible called the prophets. Well, the answer to that is simple. Those books, which have been called the prophetical books, relate to men who held the formal office of prophet. Daniel was not a formal prophet in that sense, in the sense that he fulfilled the office. He was a prince from the princely family, and he held government office. So he is, if you will, dare I say it, a politician. He was from a princely family, and a political, a political, and he was a leader who had received a revelation from God. Could be said that while he had a gift of the prophet, he did not occupy the office of the prophet, and therefore his book is not included in the section title, the prophets. And I know that you have been staying awake at night, worried about that, and you finally had somebody to give you an answer. Now I'm going to give you some facts about the book of Daniel, some basic facts, and then I'm going to tell you why some of these facts are indisputed. You know one of the things really difficult today that I see in a lot of places is Christian correctness. How am I going to say this without offending everybody? But we all get kind of upset with political correctness, the PCs. There are college campuses, and they talk about free speech, but they mean their free speech. David Horowitz has been going around doing these campus meetings, and he's been everything except stone, because free speech, but not your free speech, and so they've shouted him down, they've thrown things at him, and you know that irritates all of us about, I mean go to a college campus and stand up in class and announce that you have thought about this subject for a long time, and you believe that homosexuality is an improper and simple lifestyle. And see what happens, man. You're going to be a serious, a threat cause a political correctness. There are certain views that are accepted and acceptable, and there are certain people who express those views, who are accepted and acceptable, and if you don't hold those views, you're not accepted and acceptable. Well, that happens in the church too, by the way. And so we begin to fight too much, and that's not good, and it's not God. What did Jesus pray in the 17th chapter of John, the High Priestly Prayer, the real Lord's Prayer? He said that they might be one. What did he say in the Gospel of John? This is the commandment you've got to love each other, is I have loved you. Are we always going to agree of course not? Good heavens. You ought to see some of the letters I get. I mean people just sure that, that ought to be ruled out of the Kingdom of God, because I believe to an infant baptism, or I believed in whatever, and we can't do that, guys. The pagans are lusty and materialistic, and they're out to eat your lunch. So as Christians, we've got to learn to love each other, even when we disagree about things, not as certain basic things. And we'll talk about that a little bit later on, that we ought to agree on, and if you don't agree on those, then probably not call yourself a Christian, but those are relatively few, those are fundamental, they're important to the Christian faith, and God calls us to think, and we're created differently. I believe one of the reasons for denominations, and their sin involved too, but one of the reasons is, because we look at things differently, and I was recently at a wonderful church, a faith church in Cincinnati, with my friend Ed Barnwell, and I just had a wonderful time there. They are kind of charismatic, and they wave banners during their services. You know, I'm a Presbyterian, I want one time said in a book that I wrote, that if you want to know the difference between Pentecostals and Presbyterians, is that the Pentecostals break all the rules the Presbyterians made, but you also need to know that we Presbyterians made those rules 200 years before, and we've been doing it the same way ever since. So you've got to know that I was a little bit uncomfortable in this church, I don't have any banners in my church. We don't wave, and we don't talk. We don't raise our hands above our belt buckles, we just don't do that. But I did it there, and I had such a wonderful time. I mean, I love that church, and I love those people, and I thought, boy, we really are one. We're part of one another. And it's important that we understand that. So Christians do disagree about some of the things in Daniel, and that's okay. Tony Campolo and I don't agree on anything, but Jesus, but we love each other. That's why we did that television program. That bottom line was the reason that we did it, so that we could demonstrate to the world, to other Christians, that you're going to have two guys who profoundly disagree about things, and they still love each other. And during the year when that broadcast, that television broadcast was on, one of the comments that I heard over and over again from people around the country was, Steve, you and Tony really do like each other, don't you? Yeah, we really do. We had an interesting thing happening at our faculty retreat recently. The guys started yelling at each other. And then one of the men said, look, I can deal with this. We're in the Orthodox Presbyterian church, and we fight all the time, then we go out and have coffee. That's really not a big cause. That's Jesus way. Well, the reason I'm saying that is because we're going to be talking about some of the places where there is disagreement. You remember from our previous studies, and I will test you on that material, that the first deportation to Babylon took place in 605 BC. You will also remember that in that deportation, Nebuchadnezzar, deported the cream of the crop of Jewish society. Daniel was a young man of Judean nobility, and he was among those who were taken away in that first trip to Babylon. Daniel's world absolutely fell apart. His name, which means God is my judge, must have been a strange choice, as Daniel saw everything he loved fall apart. Now, let me tell you something. When you go through hard times, when it really hurts tragedy, we'll do one of three things to a man or woman. It'll make him or her bitter. It will make him or her bored, or it'll make him or her better. I sound like Robert Schuller. That's good. Now, in Daniel's case, he became a man of God, because of the tragedy he went through. We're going to see more about that later on. Daniel and his ministry lasted some seven years from the height of the Babylonian empire to its fall and finally to the rise of the Mead and Persian empire. He was a government official, as I said, a politician. He was an advisor of kings. He was above all things, a man of God, a man even as he rose to the heights of power, a man faithful to God. Do you know what y'all to pray about your president? And I genuinely believe that President Bush in America is a Christian brother that he'd be faithful to God. You know what y'all to pray about your prime minister? That he'd be a godly man. Well, that's what, as Daniel rose to the heights of power, he remained faithful to God. Now, the time covered in the book of Daniel is 605 before the birth of Christ to 536 before the birth of Christ BC. The book was probably written somewhere toward the end of that period. Now, there's some dispute about that. But we'll talk about that later too. Daniel was known and referred to by the prophet Ezekiel two tyrants in the book of Ezekiel. And I suspect they shared in exile. I suspect they were friends. That's about it for today. But sometimes, there's a late at night when I'm thinking about what I'm going to be teaching on this broadcast. I think about Ezekiel. And I think about Daniel. And I wonder if they were friends if they encouraged each other. If they lifted each other up, if they reached out to each other. I suspect they disagreed about some things. You know, politicians can agree on anything. One was a prophet, one was a politician. And sometimes I think they knew each other. And I think one of the reasons for the greatness of Ezekiel was Daniel and one of the reasons for the greatness of Daniel was is you think about that? I'm in. Hey, we'll talk more about Daniel and Ezekiel and their friendship next week. Hey, if you don't have a catalog, I'd love this entity. 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