The Night God Shut the Lions' Mouths

King Belshazzar was killed the night the hand wrote on his wall, and by morning Babylon belonged to a new king, Darius the Mede.

Darius chose a hundred and twenty governors to run his kingdom. (That is enough governors to fill two school buses.) Over them he set three leaders, and one was Daniel, an old man by now. Daniel worked so well that Darius planned to put him over everything.

The other leaders could not stand it. They checked his work and counted his coins and found nothing wrong.

"We will never catch Daniel," they grumbled, "unless it has to do with the law of his God."

So they went to the king. "King Darius, live forever! For thirty days, let nobody pray to any god or any person except you. Anyone who does gets thrown to the lions!"

Darius signed it, and a law of the Medes and Persians could never be changed, not even by the king.

Daniel knew. He went home anyway, opened his upstairs windows toward Jerusalem, his home city far away, and knelt and prayed and thanked God, three times a day, as he always had.

The men were watching from the street. "There! He's doing it!"

Off they ran to the king. Darius put his head in his hands. He hunted for a way to save Daniel until the sun went down, but the law held.

So Daniel was thrown into the lions' den. "May your God, the one you serve every day, rescue you!" the king called after him. A great stone was rolled over the opening, and the king and his nobles sealed it with their rings.

Darius did not eat or sleep that night. At first light he ran to the den. "Daniel!" he cried, and his voice cracked. "Servant of the living God! Has your God been able to rescue you from the lions?"

Up from the dark came a voice. "O king, live forever!"

(Even after a night with lions, Daniel remembered his manners.)

"My God sent his angel, and he shut the lions' mouths. They have not hurt me, because God knows I have done nothing wrong."

"Pull him up!" Darius shouted. They lifted Daniel out, and there was not one scratch on him, because he had trusted in his God.

Then the king had Daniel's accusers thrown into the den, with their wives and children, and the lions killed them before they reached the bottom. Kings in those days often punished a whole family for one man's crime, but God's own law said children must never die for their fathers' wrongs.

Darius wrote to every nation: "Tremble before the God of Daniel! He is the living God, and his kingdom will never end."

Daniel came up into the morning. But he was old, and one day he would die, and no angel would shut the mouth of the grave. Darius died too, and the Persian kings after him. Still God's people watched for the king Daniel had once seen in a dream, whose kingdom would never end.

Daniel was a good man, but even Daniel prayed, "We have sinned." Then came a man who never needed to pray that. His enemies searched him for a fault and found none. A governor who wanted to set him free handed him over anyway. He went where the lions never took Daniel, into death, and a great stone was sealed across his tomb.

At first light on the third morning, women who loved him came to that stone, the way Darius had hurried to the den. It had been rolled away, and Jesus was alive.