Insanity n., 1. Persistent mental disorder or derangement. Unsoundness of mind.
Insanity: I’ve heard it said that insanity is doing the same things over and over again expecting a different result then what you are getting.
In the Book of Daniel we have an insight into the court of the Kingdom of Babylon at the height of its power. Under the kingship of Nebuchadnezzar the City of Babylon became the greatest military power on earth. They destroyed Jerusalem, destroyed the Assyrian Kingdom, and invaded Egypt. Daniel had a very close relationship with the king and has given us an inside glimpse of the king’s personality. It is a unique and intimate picture of Nebuchadnezzar, including a very embarrassing incident that occurred in his life–his insanity.
” The king spake , and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honor of my majesty? While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee. And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until thou know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will.“
“The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws. And at the end of the days I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me….” (Daniel 4:30-34)
We don’t have an historical account of this event, other than the Book of Daniel, but then again, why would the Babylonians keep a record of the humiliation of their greatest king? But we do have a more modern example of a king experiencing a period of insanity, and then, after years of imbecility, regain his sanity. King George III (The king of Revolutionary War infamy) experienced a period of insanity for one year in 1788-89. “In November of that year, he became seriously deranged, sometimes speaking for many hours without pause, causing him to foam at the mouth and his voice to become hoarse. George would frequently repeat himself and write sentences with over 400 words at a time, and his vocabulary became “more complex, creative and colourful”, possible symptoms of bipolar disorder.” (“Was George III a manic depressive?”. BBC News. 15 April 2013.)
One of the purposes of Daniel’s account is to give us an example of us how important humility is and the destructiveness of pride. We learn that pride leads to debasement and forced humility. We also learn about the power and glory of God to manage events in the world. There may, however, be another purpose for this account in Daniel.
The Book of Daniel contains many prophesies about the latter days which have yet to be fulfilled. Could Daniel’s account of the insanity of Nebuchadnezzar also contain a prophecy for some future event? We know that Babylon is the pattern in the Bible for a great kingdom that will exist in the last days that will oppose the kingdom of Heaven. Could it be that the the insanity of King Nebuchadnezzar will also be a metaphor, a pattern that will repeat, but in a grander scale, a national scale? Is it being repeated right now? I kind of like the way Jonathan Cahn might phrase it. I picture him writing a book about “The ancient mystery of the insane kingdom”.
With that idea, let’s do a thought exercise. What if Babylon represents the greatest kingdom on earth today. The United States is the greatest military power on earth in modern times. It has been the greatest economic power for 150 years, and the greatest military power for 110 years. If you add up all the military power of every other nation on earth today the combined forces would not add up to the military and economic power of the US. Yes, I am including China and Russia. China has no blue water navy, maybe two aircraft carriers with a third being built (each of them half the size and a quarter of the fire power of a US Carrier) and a technology gap of decades with the US and Europe. And let’s establish that the US has a greater influence on the world then any other country. It has successfully exported its culture of Levi jeans, tanks, guns and planes, Hollywood, cell phone culture, McDonalds, banking system, and technology through out the far reaches of the globe. Its influence and power is the very definition of the great end times mercantile and worldly power of Babylon portrayed in the Bible. It is the modern day daughter of Babylon described by Isaiah (Isaiah 47:1), the city that God will send a destroying wind (Jeremiah 51), and the great mercantile city Babylon that falls in one day in the Book of Revelation (Rev. 14:8). Although Babylon did not fall during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, it was conquered by the Persians and Medes during the reign of his son, Balthazar. It fell in one night. The Babylonians went to sleep at night thinking they were the mightest powerful city on earth, and woke in the morning finding they had been overtaken by their enemies.
If the United States is Babylon, then what happens to Nebuchadnezzar is representative of what happens to the people of Babylon and by prophetic metaphor, to the nation of the United States and its people. Do you think perhaps that our culture and its people have gotten a little crazy in the last two or three years? I kind of think our country has gone insane with an unhealthy accentuation of racism, defund police movement, wokeism, mandating that children are wiser than their parents, the abominations of desolations that are inherit in gay marriage, and sex changes offered to anybody including giving mandated hormone blockers to children children, institutionalizing homelessness in the cities, crimes against women and children becoming more frequent and heinous, crimes allowed to take place with abandon in the cities without consequences to the perpetrators, the utter refusal of political parties to work with each other, and the tearing down of cultural moralities that have been a stabilizing factor in our country for 250 years? Have we gone insane? Don’t people realize where this madness leads? And then there is the de-Christianization of the American people. While more than 50% of the population believe in a supreme being, less than 40% align with a Christian church.
I also have come to believe that the creation of a national debt to the tune of $32 Trillion (as of August 2023) is one of the strongest indicators of a mass insanity and gross self deception existing among the people of this nation. In all of history, a nation has never survived having this much debt, except perhaps as a consequence of war where a nation’s survival was at stake. In those cases of extreme debt, where the nation that came out victorious in war, had survived because there was an element of largesse and virtue among its people that was able to see the nation through its crises. But the debt that the US has accumulated is the result of self delusion and the inability to live within its means. The Government has no intention of paying down its debt, indeed, has no will to ever do so, because the people have become, in the words of Isaiah, “drunk, but not with wine“. We are addicted to the debt that pays for our affluence, and will never tolerate the economic belt tightening that would come with reducing the debt. Is this not a symptom of insanity, thinking that we can continue to borrow more and more for ever, without consequence?
Before Nebuchadnezzar was struck down with insanity, he had a dream that portended what was going to happen. He saw a great tree with branches reaching into heaven and then he saw the tree cut down. He asks Daniel to interpret the dream for him. After some agonizing over how to answer the king, Daniel came right out and told him that the tree was the king:
“It is thou o king, that are grown and become strong: for thy greatness is grown and reacheth unto the heaven, and thy dominion to the end of the earth. And whereas the king saw a watcher and an holy one coming down from heaven, and saying, Hew the tree down, and destroy it; yet leave the stump of the roots thereof in the earth…” (Daniel 4: 22-23)
Is this a prophetic announcement of what will happen to the greatest and most powerful nation on earth in our day? Our greatness has literally reached into heaven. Jeremiah chimes in with this pronouncement: “...though thou shouldest make thy nest [think Space Station] as high as the eagle, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord” (Jeremiah 49:16). America’s ability to project its dominion anywhere in the world at a moments notice is also noted by Daniel.
So like every great nation that has come before us, Americans take their great advantages for granted and begin to practice an expansive degree of hubris and utter disregard for morality, sound reasoning, and decorum. The reason we can trust the prophesies of Daniel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah regarding us is because we have the precedents of multiple powerful civilizations that have gone the same route before us, and they have all tumbled to dust. And like what is prophesied for us, they have gone through their periods of hubris and insanity before destruction.