Against The flow

This world is not our home.  And the reason this world is not our home is that this world opposes God and His values for life.  Therefore, this world is continually trying to eliminate God and His values and squeeze us into its mold. In the business world, if you want to be promoted, you need to leave your Christian values behind and keep your faith private.  In children’s education, there’s an all-out assault to destroy children’s female and male identities. On our College Campuses, Marxist ideologies are being shoved down student’s throats removing any concept of God or His values. And in the media, we are constantly being told that abortion rights and good and that trying to stop women from receiving an abortion is bad. In other words, we are living in world today that is becoming more and more ungodly and openly hostile to the Christian faith. So, I’ll say it again: This world is not our home.

For this world wants you to conform to an ungodly way of living. To value the things it values, to pursue the passions its champions, and live in obedience to its idols.  In other words: This world wants you to abandonyour faith in God and embrace its values and practices – to go with the flow and not rock the boat.

So, what are we to do, how are we to live God honoring lives in a culture that’s continually working to have us dishonor God?  How can we continue to live faithfully in a world that’s not our home? Well, that’s precisely what God’s Word spells out for as we begin our study in the book of Daniel.

So, if you’ve brought your Bible, let me encourage you open it to Daniel 1:1-21, where we’re going to see how Daniel and his friends were able to stay faithful to God in an ungodly culture.  How they were able to live faithfully in a world that was not their home. But before we jump into their story, we need to understand how they found themselves in a world that was not their home – how they found themselves as strangers in a strange land as participants in Israel’s Exile. So, to begin our study, Daniel describes the events that led them to Babylon. In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord delivered Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, along with some of the articles from the temple of God. These he carried off to the temple of his god in Babylonia and put in the treasure house of his god. Daniel 1:1-2

Judah’s exile from the land in Daniel’s time was not merely an accident of fate or the tragic result of the expansionist policies of imperial Babylon. As Daniel 1:2 makes clear, this exile came upon Judah because the Lord handed King Jehoiakim over to the power of Nebuchadnezzar. The Lord God Himself gave His people into the hand of their enemies.  Now the question is why?  Why did God choose to discipline His people this way?

It all has to do with Israel’s continued disobedience to God’s covenant with them. At the beginning of Israel’s history as a nation with God, He made a covenant with them, a covenant that included blessings for obedience and curses if they disobeyed.  This covenant is found in Leviticus 26. If they served the Lord faithfully and kept the terms of the covenant, then they would experience His favor and blessing. However, if they abandoned Him and violated His covenant, they would experience His wrath and disfavor (26:14-39). Then, if they continued to disobey, He would scatter them among the nations, and they would waste away in exile. Listen to what God says in Leviticus of what will happen to them if they fall under His judgment: I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste, and your cities will lie in ruins. Then the land will enjoy its sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate, and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its sabbaths. All the time that it lies desolate, the land will have the rest it did not have during the sabbaths you lived in it. Leviticus 26:33-35

This exile began in the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, that is in 605 BC. And this exile would last approximately 70 years. After that time, God would fulfill His covenant promise to Israel and return them to their land.

However, there’s more to this event than Israel’s disobedience. For this text also tells us that the fate of Daniel and his friends stems from a specific fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy in 1 Kings 20:18, which reads: “And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood who will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.” What happened was this: Judah’s King Hezekiah had received envoys and a gift from Merodach-Baladan, king of Babylon. In response, Hezekiah showed them everything that was of value in his storehouses and all of his treasures (20:13). For this action, he was roundly condemned by Isaiah… …In spite of the Lord’s miraculous deliverance of Jerusalem from the surrounding armies of Sennacherib and the Assyrians in the previous chapter, Hezekiah had looked to political means for solving his Assyrian problem, through alliances with Babylon. So, Isaiah was condemning Hezekiah for this one act: Politics had replaced trust in the Lord.

That is why we are told in this introduction: And the Lord delivered Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, along with some of the articles from the temple of God. These he carried off to the temple of his god in Babylonia and put in the treasure house of his god. Daniel 1:2 This bit of history now makes sense in light of God’s warnings. Israel’s punishment fits their crime. Israel had compromised with immorality, injustice, and idolatry, and now it’s people and its articles of worship are taken into captivity by their enemy: Babylon – the most idolatrous and powerful nation on earth.

Now, before we enter Daniel’s place in this story, it is important to note that in these first two verses lies the theme to the entire book of Daniel. And that is this: God is in control. God is sovereign over the big things like international powers, even the most ungodly and powerful kingdoms, like Babylon.  And God is sovereign over small things like the apparently insignificant lives of teenagers, like Daniel. He is sovereign over all history, and He is sovereign over the future.  And what that means for us today, living in the midst of an ungodly culture is this: No matter how out of control, no matter how ungodly or hostile our world may become toward us, our God is still in control.

For as we are about to see, no matter how bad it gets for Daniel and his friends, God will be with them and bless them in spite of the ungodly culture they find themselves in.  Which leads us now, to the next piece of the puzzle as Daniel and his friends find themselves torn away from their country, their families and everything familiar.  Here now Daniel reveals Nebuchadnezzar’s Plan:  Let’s read the text: Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring into the king’s service some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility— young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace. He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians. The king assigned them a daily amount of food and wine from the king’s table. They were to be trained for three years, and after that they were to enter the king’s service.  Among those who were chosen were some from Judah: Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. The chief official gave them new names: to Daniel, the name Belteshazzar; to Hananiah, Shadrach; to Mishael, Meshach; and to Azariah, Abednego. Daniel 1:3-7 What we have here is the outline of Nebuchadnezzar’s plan to spiritually deprogram the young men of Israel. The goal of his plan was to obliterate all memory of Israel and Israel’s God from the hearts and minds of these young men, and to instill in them a sense of total dependence on Nebuchadnezzar and the culture of Babylon. This spiritual brainwashing was nothing new. For what we’re about to see in these verses is similar to how our world works to distance us from God and to get us to conform to its values and practices.  So, let’s take a look at this plan a bit closer:

The first step in his plan was isolation.  Being brought to Babylon, these four boys would immediately experience isolation from their homeland, their family, and friends. This would have been traumatic and a shock to their systems, throwing their world into a tailspin. Imagine what it would be like to be 14 or 15 years old, and to be separated from all that was familiar.  In their isolation they would be far more susceptible to the “new ideas and new ways of life” they’d encounter. This would increase the likelihood of them abandoning their faith in Yahweh and embrace the worldview of their captures.

The next step was indoctrination. These young men were picked for their aptitude for learning, they were well informed and were quick to understand.  This made them ideal candidates to be indoctrinated in “the Chaldean language and literature.” So, their reprogramming began immediately as they would become fully immersed in the Babylon culture and values for the next three years. Here, in the University of Babylon they would receive a first-class secular education in Babylonian language, philosophy, literature, science, history, and astrology. Religion would have been a big part of their curriculum as well as the mythologies of Babylon, the greatness of their god Marduk, and the importance of the pantheon of polytheistic deities that dominated the ancient Near Eastern world. Dream interpretation and omen reading would also be in their required course load. Nebuchadnezzar’s plan was to squeeze out their understanding of God and His ways and replace this understanding with everything Babylonian.

The next step of their deprograming was assimilation.  By ordering food and wine from the king’s table, Nebuchadnezzar required these Hebrew boys to experience a total immersion into the culture of Babylon. Each was to eat like a Babylonian and drink like a Babylonian. The goal was to entice them with the delicacies and privileges of their new life. Such an immersion would wear them down and eventually win them over.

And to all this, Nebuchadnezzar added one more step: confusion. In verse 6-7, we are introduced to four of the Hebrew royalty who were exiled to Babylon.  Each from the tribe of Judah. But what’s most important to note is that each were named to honor the one true God, Yahweh.  Daniel’s name translates “Elohim is my judge”; Hananiah’s name: “Yahweh is gracious”; Mishael: “Who is like Elohim?”; and Azariah, “Yahweh helps.” Changing names for us today is not that big of a deal. But in the ancient world, it was everything.  For your name spoke to the identity and core of who you are. So, by changing their names, Nebuchadnezzar took another step to obliterate their identity with their God.  Daniel’s name is changed to Belteshazzar. Hananiah’s name is changed to Shadrach. Mishael’s name is changed to Meshach; and Azariah’s name is changed to Abednego. These Babylonian names were meant to invoke the help of Babylonian gods: Marduk, Bel, and Nebo, rather than Yahweh; and to further distance them from their identity with their God.

Now this reprogramming strategy is similar to how Satan operates in our world today:  Listen to how Iain Duguid, OT Professor at Westminster Theological Seminary describes how Satan’s strategy works today: “He may violently persecute believers in some parts of the world, yet often he works more effectively by seducing and deceiving us into forgetting God and thinking our blessings come from somewhere else. He wants us to forget the truths expressed in those Hebrew names, that God is our judge, as well as the one who shows us His grace. He wants us to forget the uniqueness of our God and the help that only He can provide. He wants to control the educational process, so that our children grow up immersed in his worldview and his philosophy of life. If he can further instill in us a sense of dependence upon the material comforts that make up our way of life, or certain pleasures of this world that we have grown to love, then he can far more effectively draw us away from the Lord. His fundamental goal is always to obliterate our memory of the Lord, to reeducate our minds to his way of thinking, and to instill in us a sense that all of the good things in life come from the world around us and from the satisfaction of the desires of our own flesh.”

This is what these teenage boys were facing. Nebuchadnezzar was trying to erase their understanding of God and His values and have them follow the gods of Babylon and their values. He wants them to cease trusting in their God and become dependent on Him. So, what would Daniel and his friends do?  Would they forget their God? Would they embrace the Babylonian way of life, or would they remain faithful to God in a world that was not their home? Daniel provides the answer.

For the next thing we see is Daniel’s resolve:  Look at verse 8… But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king’s food, or with the wine that he drank. Therefore, he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself. And God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs, and the chief of the eunuchs said to Daniel, “I fear my lord the king, who assigned your food and your drink; for why should he see that you were in worse condition than the youths who are of your own age? So, you would endanger my head with the king.” Then Daniel said to the steward whom the chief of the eunuchs had assigned over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, “Test your servants for ten days; let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat the king’s food be observed by you, and deal with your servants according to what you see.” So, he listened to them in this matter and tested them for ten days. Daniel 1:8-14 “But Daniel resolved” begins verse 8. The values, the practices and the pleasures of the Babylonian culture were smothering Daniel and his friends.  And yet, God had somehow given Daniel an awareness into Nebuchadnezzar’s plan to get them to abandon their God.  So, what did Daniel resolve to do? He resolved that he would not defile himself with the king’s food or with the wine he drank. Here Daniel’s resolve meant that he would trust in Yahweh to provide and thereby keep the Babylonian lifestyle from capturing his heart and mind.  He resolved that would live by faith in a world that was not his home.

Now, choosing to live by faith and not cave to the pleasures of Babylon came with a risk. It involved a risk for the chief eunuch. He could lose his head.  And it involved risk for Daniel and his friends as well. King Nebuchadnezzar was not a king to be trifled with. He could order their execution over this one refusal.  But here’s where Daniel chose to take his stand. He refused to compromise… Where did Daniel’s choice to hold his ground come from?  Why did Daniel refuse to compromise His faith at this point?  Did he all of a sudden muster up the courage to say, “Enough!”?  Or did this choice come from somewhere deeper?  I believe it came from somewhere deeper.  It came from his understanding of the covenant promises of God.  It came from his faith in Yahweh, the God who loved Him and promised to be with him, even in captivity.

You see, Daniel and his friends had some familiarity with what was happening.  They would have known the warnings of Leviticus 26, but they would also be aware of God’s promise from Jeremiah: This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.  Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.” Jeremiah 29:10-14 It is clear from Daniel’s analysis of history that he took to heart what Jeremiah said, and so should we. In times of stress and upheaval it is profoundly reassuring to know that God who is ultimately sovereign over global history is not unaware of the ups and downs we face on a daily basis. He is not absent from the spiritual battles we face.  We are not alone. God has plans, individual plans, for all who trust Him.  And this should encourage us when our faith is being tested, when adversity throttles us, or when public threats against our faith begin to hit home. Here’s what we can glean from Daniel’s resolve – to not compromise his faith.  They took comfort in the truth of God’s promises.  Although everything about their life and faith was under attack.  No matter how bad things were, they took comfort that God was with them, and God would provide for them.  And we can do the same.

So, what happened next? Daniel asked the steward who was assigned over them to test them: “Test your servants for ten days; let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat the king’s food be observed by you, and deal with your servants according to what you see.” So, he listened to them in this matter and tested them for ten days. Daniel 1:12-14

So, was their risk worth it?  Did their refusal to compromise their faith pay off?  Yes! God honored their uncompromising faith in at least four ways. That’s what we see in the conclusion of this encounter:  We see God’s Reward to their faithfulness:

First, God blessed them physically: At the end of the ten days, they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. So, the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead. Daniel 1:15-16

Second, God blessed them mentally: To these four young men God gave knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning. Daniel 1:17a

Third, God blessed them spiritually:  And Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds. Daniel 1:17b

Finally, God blessed them socially: At the end of the time set by the king to bring them into his service, the chief official presented them to Nebuchadnezzar. The king talked with them, and he found none equal to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah; so, they entered the king’s service. In every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king questioned them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom. And Daniel remained there until the first year of King Cyrus.Daniel 1:15-21

This world is not our home.  Like Daniel, we are strangers in a strange land.  A land that’s becoming increasingly ungodly and hostile to our God and our values.  But the good news is this: Our God is in Control.  And our God is Faithful.

So, so matter how evil our world may become. No matter how many ways our world may try to get you to abandon your faith and your God. The way we stand against the flow it to remain faithful to Him. That’s what David resolved to do.  And we can do it too.