I have a real life illustration this morning of the big idea that Daniel’s been presenting to us in a variety of ways.  You recall what that idea is, don’t you?  Let me refresh your memory.

In his early teens Daniel was torn from his family and taken 600 miles away to live in Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon.  To this adolescent and his three friends it might have seemed that no one was in control of the world in which they lived.  But they decided to trust in the God of their parents anyway, and as the years rolled by they received one indication after another that this God controlled not only the course of human history, but also the affairs of their individual lives.  As we shall see this week in chapter 5, He demoted Babylon after only 70 or so years of its glorious existence and promoted another empire in its place.  He also preserved Daniel through that chaotic time to counsel the new administration, as it were.

Here’s the real life illustration.  Scott Friesen is the lead pastor of Berean Bible Church (in our 3 Rivers District of Berean churches) in Grand Island.  Sunday afternoon he received a call from his brother that his dad, just 61 years old and living in Lincoln, had been taken by ambulance to a local hospital after complaining of not feeling well.  In the hospital the medical personnel determined Mr. Friesen had not had a heart attack, but did have some severely blocked coronary arteries.  They wheeled him down the hall to “clear out and open up any blockage,” saying they’d be back in a half an hour.  Scott’s dad’s final goodbye to his family was a wave from the gurney as it disappeared from view.  Moments later he was in the presence of Jesus, while Scott was en route on the Interstate.

Two weeks ago on Sunday our own Sam Schutte had an eerily similar experience, but with a different outcome.  Like Mr. Friesen, he didn’t feel well after lunch.  Like Scott’s father, Sam went to the hospital.  The diagnosis was almost identical.  But Sam not only survived the subsequent surgery, four days later he went home where he is fabulously recuperating even as I write.

There is a God in heaven, the same One with whom Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel had to do, who controls the affairs of our lives, and to whom, in the words of that ancient Babylonian king, no one can say, “What have You done?”  God is sovereign, and in his sovereignty he took Dwight Friesen to heaven and left Sam Schutte on earth.  And he did both for His own glory.

Do you believe this?  If you do, and if you submit to His sovereign authority as Daniel did, you will be prepared, as Scott and his mom and two brothers were, for whatever “uncontrollable” circumstance comes your way.  Here’s what Scott had to say in an email to the 12 fellow Berean pastors in the District:  The sting of death came too fast.  Painful tears and sobs gripped me as a I drove alone down the road…My comfort was in our great Savior who loves and lives and rescues us from all our troubles.  Dad’s heart had gone into cardiac arrest soon after the procedure to clear out his arteries began.  Doctors shocked his heart with the defibrillator and gave CPR, but this was the day ordained by the God who has loved Dad with an ancient love.