In his famed “I have a Dream speech,” Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed: “We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” At these words, Dr. King painted for a troubled nation powerful images of hope and human equality, and forever rooted the civil rights movement in images of justice and the image of God.

The images presented in the book of Daniel are similarly rooted in images of justice and God. In fact, it is for this reason that the sixth chapter of Daniel was a favorite Scripture passage among civil rights preachers in the early 1960s. The story told in Daniel 6 presents a king who loses sight of his purpose as king and the purpose of the law, creating a system void of justice and a law that only hinders and traps its makers. But against the images of lawlessness and corruption, the story portrays a silent but active Daniel clinging to a higher law, bowing before the King of Kings in the midst of persecution, in the hands of his oppressors, and the shadows of the lions’ den. Living within the hopelessness of exile, sweltering under the heat of injustice, Daniel unflinchingly declares the sovereignty and kindness of God, and with faithfulness and perseverance refuses to believe otherwise. “When our most tireless efforts fail to stop the surging sweep of some monster of oppression, we need to know that there is a God in this universe whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man,” writes King. “When we are staggered by the chilly winds of adversity and battered by the raging storms of disappointment… we need to know that there is Someone who loves us, who really cares, who understands.”(1)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Daniel and the Civil Rights Movement →