The greater the leader the more likely they are a problem solver. Read Daniel 5:10-16.

Babylon had gone through a change of leadership. King Nebuchadnezzar had died and his son Belshazzar was king. Early in his reign he threw a party “for a thousand of his nobles and drank wine with them” (5:1). As the party got more ruckus, Belshazzar tried to impress his guests by serving wine in the gold and silver goblets taken from the temple of God by his father when he captured Jerusalem. This prideful, brazen insult to the One True God went too far and “Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall…” (v. 5). The party was pretty much over, Belshazzar went white as a sheet and started looking for someone to interpret the handwriting on the wall.

I heard once that if the communication is fuzzy from the leader it will be foggy for the team. Effective leaders work hard at communication skills. Read Ezekiel 1:1-28.

Ezekiel was a prophet appointed by God to serve the Jewish people in exile in Babylon. He was taken into exile approximately 10 years before the fall of Jerusalem. God used Ezekiel as a watchman. He called Ezekiel to warn the exiled Jews in Babylon that their exile was not a fluke but in the plan of God and that the city of Jerusalem would still fall to the Babylonian army. God had Ezekiel communicate the future through extraordinary mysteries, visions, symbolism, parables, and allegories that were meant to stretch the minds of the listener. The book of Ezekiel is a complex collection of prophetic messages offering significant ways to grasp God’s future plan for salvation and righteousness on the earth.

A team can consider good leadership a blessing from God. Read Jeremiah 30:10-22.

God had allowed Babylon to take some of the people from Judah and Jerusalem into exile to Babylon while others still lived in the land. Between the time of those first exiled and 586 BC, the time when Babylon destroyed Jerusalem, Jeremiah wrote these words of hope to the current captives and those who would join them later, “’The days are coming’, declares the Lord, ‘when I will bring my people Israel and Judah back from captivity and restore them to the land I gave their forefathers to possess says the Lord’” Jeremiah 30:3.