And we may well believe Daniel’s interest in this great king, when we consider how teachable Nebuchadnezzar showed himself under God’s education of him, so proving that there was in him the honest and good heart, which, when The Word is sown in it, will bring forth fruit, thirty-fold or a hundred-fold, according to the talents which God has bestowed on each man. This first lesson we read in the first chapter of Daniel. He dreamt a dream. He felt that it was a very wonderful one: but he forgot what it was. None of the magicians of Babylon could tell him. A young Jew, named Daniel, told him the dream and its meaning, and declared at the same time that he had found it out by no wisdom of his own, but God had revealed it to him. Nebuchadnezzar learned his lesson, and confessed Daniel’s God to be a God of gods and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing that Daniel could reveal that secret; and forthwith, like a wise prince, advanced Daniel and his companions to places of the highest authority and trust. But Nebuchadnezzar required another lesson. He had learned that the God of the Jews was wiser than all the planets and heavenly lords and gods whom the Babylonian magicians consulted; he had not learned that that same God of the Jews was the Creator and Lord of heaven and earth. He had learned that the God of heaven favoured him, and had helped him toward his power and glory; but he thought that for that very reason the power and glory were his own—that he had a right over the souls and consciences of his subjects, and might make them worship what he liked, and how he liked. Three Jews, whom he had set over the affairs of Babylon, refused to worship the golden image which he had set up, and were cast into a fiery furnace, and forthwith miraculously delivered, and beheld by Nebuchadnezzar walking unhurt and loose in the midst of the furnace, and with them a fourth, whose form was like the form of the Son of God. So Nebuchadnezzar was taught that this God of the Jews was the Lord of men’s souls and consciences; that they were to obey God rather than man. So he was taught that the God of the Jews was no mere star or heavenly influence who could help men’s fortunes, or bestow on them a certain fixed destiny; but a living person, the Lord and Master of the fire, and of all the powers of the earth, who could change and stop those powers at His will, to deliver those who trusted in Him and obeyed Him.