Daniel 4: The Insanity of Pride - Darren Rowse
Picture the most powerful man alive standing on the roof of his palace, looking out over a city he is convinced he built. The walls below him are so wide you could drive chariots along the top of them. There are terraced gardens climbing into the sky, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. A processional way tiled in blue glazed brick leads to towering gates covered in bulls and lions and dragons. It is genuinely beautiful, and he knows it.
He says one sentence out loud, and he never gets to finish the thought. The next time we see him, he is not on a roof. He is in a field on his hands and knees, eating grass, soaked with dew, his hair grown long like feathers and his nails like the claws of a bird. So how does a man travel from the roof of a palace to a field? The hint is in where his eyes are.
At One Church, Darren Rowse continued our Resisting Babylon series with a message from Daniel 4, a chapter about ambition, achievement, and the particular kind of madness that creeps in when we start believing we are the authors of our own lives. You can watch the full message in the video above, or listen to the audio version below.
A king who had already met God twice
Daniel 4 does not arrive out of nowhere. In the first three chapters we meet King Nebuchadnezzar conquering Jerusalem, looting the temple, and marching God's people into exile. Twice in those chapters he runs headlong into the God of Israel: first when Daniel interprets a dream no one else can, and then when Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego walk out of a blazing furnace unburned. Both times Nebuchadnezzar says something remarkably true about God. He even appears to praise him.
And yet by chapter four, nothing has changed.
You can recognise things about God, and even declare things about God, without being changed by him. That is one of the quiet warnings sitting underneath this whole chapter.
Chapter four is also unusual because it is written in Nebuchadnezzar's own voice. It reads like an open letter from the most powerful man alive to his own empire, telling them about another encounter with the Most High God. He begins by telling us he is at home in his palace, contented and prosperous. Then he has a dream, and the dream terrifies him.
God looks at what this man built and calls it beautiful
In the dream Nebuchadnezzar sees a tree. Its height is enormous, its top touches the sky, and it is visible to the ends of the earth. Its leaves are beautiful, its fruit abundant, and there is food on it for everyone. Wild animals shelter under it and birds live in its branches. Every creature is fed from it.
Hold onto that picture for a moment, because it is a picture of beauty, abundance, provision and shelter. And it is God's description of this man's life.
That is not what you would expect in a chapter about judgment, and it is certainly not what you would expect about a violent pagan king who ransacked God's temple. It is not a grudging assessment either. God does not say "yes, he built a nice city, but." The dream lingers over the beauty of it.
Darren quoted John Lennox, whose book on Daniel has shaped this series:
There was something positively glorious about Nebuchadnezzar's achievements, and it seems that God approved of them, at least on some level.
This is not God endorsing the Babylonian empire. Babylon was an imperial machine built on violence and idolatry, and we will come to who actually laid those bricks. But underneath the empire, God recognises something he himself put in human beings: the capacity to build, to cultivate, and to make something good.
Notice too what God calls beautiful here. It is not a sacred site or a religious act. It is a city. Walls, roads, gardens, a food supply chain. Right back in Genesis, God is a builder, a maker, a creator, and he hands people a garden to work and to cultivate and to be fruitful in. So your eye for art, your desire to plant a lovely garden or make a beautiful home or write a piece of music, is not something God merely tolerates in you. He put it there. The urge to make something that lasts is not a distraction from him. It is one of the clearest places you look like him.
Darren shared where he learned this himself. He trained for ministry in his twenties and worked in church contexts for ten years, then left ministry in his thirties. It felt like the right thing at the time, but it also felt like a demotion, and a few people suggested he had sold out and put building something for himself ahead of God. He carried a low level guilt about it for years. What shifted it was a group of Christian entrepreneurs who asked him a question: what if God put that entrepreneurial spirit in you? What if the itch to build something is not the thing pulling you away from your calling, but for this season it actually is your calling?
There is more than one way to build something beautiful for God. If God only endorses the work of people employed by churches, then most of us are spending most of our lives on things that do not really matter. That is not the God of this chapter. God is not standing off to the side of your life with his arms folded, waiting for you to get to the real stuff. He looks at your career, your side hustle, the house you have renovated, the garden you have planted, the children you have poured into, the friendships you have built, and he is not against any of it.
So we can put one thing to bed. Whatever went wrong in this story, and something definitely went wrong, it was not ambition. It was not building. It was not success or beauty. It was something else.
A contest of altitude
Which leaves the harder question. If God admired the tree, why did he cut it down?
Trees are never just trees in Scripture. Psalm 1 gives us a beautiful, fruitful tree describing a person living well. But there is something different about this tree. Look at verse 11: its top touched the sky. Some translations say its top reached to heaven.
We have heard that language before. In Genesis 11 a people said, "let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves." That is the tower of Babel. And where is Babel? Babylon.
There is another tree in Ezekiel 31, a towering cedar with birds in its branches and nations living in its shade, used to warn a different king. The language is almost identical to Daniel 4, but Ezekiel says two things out loud that Daniel only implies. First, God says he is the one who made the tree beautiful with abundant branches. Nebuchadnezzar says precisely the opposite: I built it, by my power, for my glory. Second, Ezekiel gives the reason the cedar comes down. It towered over the foliage and it was proud of its height.
Pride. It sits front and centre in Ezekiel, and it is the word Nebuchadnezzar himself reaches for at the very end of Daniel 4 when he finally names his own problem. The tower of Babel, the cedar in Ezekiel, the tree in the dream: all of them reaching for heaven, all of them proud, all of them cut down.
With that in mind, notice the phrase Daniel 4 repeats more than any other. God is called the Most High six times in this one chapter, having appeared only once in the first three chapters combined. Something is being said to us. While the king is busy getting taller, the text keeps reminding us of the one who is already highest and always was.
There is only room for one Most High. You cannot have two.
Who actually built Babylon
Daniel does not just diagnose the problem, he offers a way out. In verse 27 he says: renounce your sins by doing what is right, and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed. It may be that your prosperity will continue.
That is God's analysis of this man's life delivered to his face, and it comes down to three things.
Do what is right. Nebuchadnezzar was very good at building cities and very bad at building his own character. He was not a good man.
Be kind to the oppressed. This is a pointed word for anyone who is proud, because pride only ever sees itself. Who actually built Babylon? Not Nebuchadnezzar. He may have laid a ceremonial brick or two. It was conscripted labour, slaves, captives, prisoners of war, and among them the people carried away from Judah. He was literally standing on the work of other people and calling it his own.
And he put his name on it. Archaeologists digging in that region have found the bricks, and they all have one thing stamped into them: the name of Nebuchadnezzar. He did not just build a city, he signed it, one brick at a time. Then from the roof he signed it again with his words. I built it. My power. My glory.
That is where the insanity is in this story. Not in the city. In the attribution. Because who gave him the mind that could design it? The health to finish it? The years, the empire he inherited, the family he was born into, the clay in the ground, the water of the Euphrates that made the bricks? It certainly was not him.
And before we file this away as an ancient story with no relevance, notice that our world tells us to do exactly what Nebuchadnezzar did. Aim high. Build something big. Put your name on it. Make yourself look good. That is not 570 BC. That is the water we are swimming in.
Pride is amnesia about grace
Pride is a word we use in a few different ways. There is the pride you feel watching your child walk across a stage to collect a certificate. There is the satisfaction of looking back on a good hard day's work. That is not what this chapter is talking about.
There is another kind of pride, and it is more insidious. Most of us have seen it in someone else. A person whose sense of their own importance has tipped over into something not quite sane, where the gap between how they see themselves and how things actually are has grown so wide that they seem to have lost touch with reality. That is the language this chapter is reaching for.
Pride is amnesia about grace. It is claiming authorship of a life that has always been on loan.
Tim Keller called pride cosmic plagiarism, taking credit for someone else's work, which is exactly what is happening here. C. S. Lewis called it the great sin, the one we always notice in others and almost never see in ourselves. Lewis also wrote that a proud person is always looking down on things and people, and as long as you are looking down you cannot see what is above you.
Which means pride is not only a moral problem. It is a perception problem. The more impressed you are with yourself, the worse you get at seeing what is actually there.
Twelve months later
Daniel gives the warning. Renounce your sins. Be kind to the oppressed. There is still time. And then come perhaps the saddest three words in the story: twelve months later.
A whole year goes by and nothing changes. Nebuchadnezzar simply goes back to being contented and prosperous, exactly as he was the night the dream terrified him.
So how does a man get from the roof of a palace to a field? Slowly. It was a drift. He went from terrified to complacent. Nobody drifts on purpose. It is just a long run of ordinary life, and gradually the centre of gravity shifts, and you could not tell anyone the moment it happened. Then twelve months later you are on the roof of your own palace, marvelling at your own glory.
Look at where his eyes are. On his city. On his work. On himself. And while the words are still on his lips, a voice from heaven strips him of his authority and drives him out to live like an animal until he acknowledges that the Most High is sovereign over all the kingdoms of the earth.
Here is the irony of the chapter. Pride does not make you superhuman. It makes you subhuman. The man who believed he was above everyone ends up below everyone. The man who reached for the sky ends up on all fours in a field. As one commentator on Daniel puts it:
A man who thinks he is a god must become a beast to learn that he is only a human being.
The field did not make him a beast. The field made visible what was already happening on the roof.
He raised his eyes
That is not the end of the story, and the whole thing turns on one simple movement. At the end of that time, Nebuchadnezzar says, I raised my eyes towards heaven and my sanity was restored. Then I praised the Most High, and honoured and glorified him who lives forever.
He looked up.
Everything in this chapter has been a contest of altitude, and this is the only upward movement in the story that actually works. He is not climbing. He is not building. He stops trying to be high and simply looks at the one who is. He lifts his eyes and his sanity is given back to him, not earned. He lost his mind by looking at himself obsessively, and he got it back by looking at the Most High God.
Before we go further, one careful word. Not every hard season is God correcting you. Some of us have been cut right down like that tree and it was not a verdict on our character. The diagnosis that came out of nowhere. The battle with mental health. The death of someone you loved. The relationship that ended. The year that took everything out of you. Nebuchadnezzar's humbling was tied to a named sin that a prophet put to his face twelve months before he ignored it. If you cannot name it, please do not manufacture it.
But if the picture in this story for you right now is not a flourishing tree but a stump, there is a promise here for you. Go back into the dream, to verse 15, and the oddly specific instruction from the heavenly messenger: let the stump and its roots remain in the ground.
The tree was cut down, but it was not dug up.
Anyone who has ever cut down a tree and left the stump knows what comes next. Give it a season or two and there are green shoots pushing up around the edges. Cut down is not the same as finished. You may not get back exactly what was taken, and trees rarely grow back the same way twice, but there is life in those roots. God has form for this. The most famous stump in Scripture is in Isaiah 11, where David's royal line has been cut back to nothing, and the promise comes: a shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a branch will bear fruit. That is a prophecy about Jesus, the one who draws life out of stumps.
Daniel 4 gives us the key to finding that life, and it is lifting our eyes to the Most High.
Paul says the same thing in Colossians 3: since you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. Notice what Paul says before he asks anything of you. You have been raised with Christ. This is not something you climb to. It is something that has been done for you.
Then he says it twice, slightly differently. Set your heart on things above. Set your mind on things above. Your mind is the word this whole chapter has been circling. Nebuchadnezzar lost his by looking at himself, and got it back the moment he looked up.
There is only room for one Most High. He is not far off, he is not against you, he went to the cross for the pride in you, and he is no stranger to the field either. He came looking for you in it.
We are healed by looking up.
One way to live it out this week
If pride is amnesia about grace, then it starts to come undone the moment you remember. So pick the thing you are most proud of. Your career, your kids, your business, your ministry, the thing you are the best in the room at. Then ask Nebuchadnezzar's questions of yourself: who gave you the mind you work with, the health to see it through, the years, the time and place and family you were born into, the people around you who contributed to your success? Sometime this week, deliberately acknowledge the work of others and the work of God in that thing. Do not just say thanks for everything, God. Be specific, sit with it, and glorify him in that moment. It sounds like nothing, and it is the one thing Nebuchadnezzar never did until the very end.
A prayer for your week
Most High God, we acknowledge that you are Most High.
Thank you that you made us in your image, that our instinct to build and make and create comes from you, and that you take an interest in what we do with the gifts you have given us.
We confess that things drift. Too often we build for our own glory in our own power, and we forget the grace that put every good thing in our hands.
Make us people who build for you, not in the patterns of our world, but imitating Jesus who came in humility and whose way was the way of the cross.
And for those of us who feel like the stump in this story, chopped down and dead on the outside, we turn our eyes to you. Thank you that you are the God who brings dead things back to life. Draw new life out of our roots.
Amen.
Personal Reflection
Where are your eyes at the moment? When you look at your life, what do you find yourself looking at most: your work, your achievements, other people, or God?
What have you built that you are genuinely proud of, and when did you last thank God specifically for the gifts and people that made it possible?
Is there an area of your life where you have drifted from being deeply affected by God to simply being contented and prosperous? What did that drift look like?
Small Group Discussion
Read Daniel 4:10 to 12. What stands out to you about how God describes the tree? Does it surprise you that God speaks this well of Nebuchadnezzar's achievements?
Darren said "you can recognise things about God, and even declare things about God, without being changed by him." Where do you see that risk in your own life or in the church?
Compare the tree in Daniel 4 with the tower in Genesis 11 and the cedar in Ezekiel 31. What do these three have in common, and what does that tell us about what God actually opposes?
The chapter calls God "the Most High" six times. Why do you think that title is repeated so often in a chapter about a king who wanted to be high?
Daniel's advice in verse 27 is to do what is right and to be kind to the oppressed. Why do you think kindness to the oppressed is the specific antidote offered to a proud man?
Pride was described as "amnesia about grace" and as "claiming authorship of a life that has always been on loan." Which of your gifts or opportunities do you most easily forget were given to you?
Nebuchadnezzar drifted over twelve months without noticing. What practices help you notice a drift before it becomes a roof top moment?
Is anyone in the group feeling more like the stump than the flourishing tree at the moment? Spend some time praying for one another, that God would draw new life out of the roots.