Leading Like Nebuchadnezzar

Okay I admit it. I really wanted to type the name Nebuchadnezzar.Not the only reason for the post, but one of many.

I'm reading through Daniel these days and I found something bewildering about leadership in chapters 2 and 3. Nebuchadnezzar has a dream, and wants someone to both tell him what his dream is and what it means. No one can, except Daniel. I'll probably talk more about Daniel in later posts, but I want to focus on Nebby right now.

Yep, we're that close. Only the inner circle calls him Nebby.

Daniel interprets, Nebuchadnezzar comes out well in the end ("the head of gold") and ends up worshiping Daniel and only giving some lip service to Daniel's God. The king then does something very strange, he has a huge gold image built.

Gold head = gold image? See the connection. He builds a big statue of himself. No one will like you if you go around building statues for yourself. What's worse, he commands EVERYONE in the kingdom to worship the statue whenever they hear music. I'm assuming that excluded the pre-teen group Hanson. I'll check the Hebrew.

As leaders, how often does it happen that we hear encouragement or experience success and find ourselves either implicitly or explicitly leading like people should treat us differently due to how "gold" we are. Nebuchadnezzar gets good news, somewhat, about his kingdom and focuses on it (ignores the ruin of the next few generations, by the way) and takes that dream and makes everyone else worship it.

If we lead, God's blessings to us in our work and love and serving are just that - God's blessings. They are not our mandate to call others to bless us the same way. It's impossible, unfair, sinful and in the end leads to our undoing.

Just some thoughts for today. Be well friends.