[SPEAKER_00]: Well, good morning, everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so good to be with you well done, Sarah, for wrestling through all of those strange Babylonian names.
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember when I was in Sunday School, I learned along with Beltel's desire, which I've never quite figured out how to say properly.
[SPEAKER_00]: We learned to say, Miss Chadwark, Miss Shaq, and a bednego with the phrase, shake the bed, make the bed, and into bed we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that one's for free.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, as Sarah said today, we are starting a new series in the book of Daniel that will take us right through turn three, that we are calling, resisting Babylon, faithfulness in an age of decadence and death.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do hope that this series will be as epic as the image on the screen suggests and the title suggests.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, we did have some help with AI to make the image.
[SPEAKER_00]: But actually, most of it comes from an etching by the artist John Martin who produced this work in 1831.
[SPEAKER_00]: So obviously it didn't have a modern city in it at that time.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we've added the modern city in the background and the reason for that addition is because
[SPEAKER_00]: The purpose of this series really is to look at what the story of Daniel, that was set like 2600 years ago, in ancient Babylon, in a culture that may seem so completely foreign to our own, what can it actually teach us about how we are called to follow the Lord, to follow Christ in our world today?
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we'll see, actually as we go through this series, there are many surprising similarities between the cultural world that Daniel has been thrown into and our own world, our own culture and our own city that we inhabit now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're going to try and tease out some of those similarities and dig into the theology of the book, especially in the coming weeks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today though, what I mostly want to try and do is understand or help us to understand what has happened to Daniel.
[SPEAKER_00]: and to explore just for a little bit what kind of person Daniel is what motivates him and his three friends what gives them courage to resist the culture of Babylon and to live faithfully for the Lord even when their circumstances may have seemed so overwhelming and their resistance probably felt so futile.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is of course how many Christians feel today, the prevailing culture around us can seem so powerful and so pervasive and so enticing that the resistance we are called to can often feel pointless and trivial.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean what difference does one person really make?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, there is much that we're going to learn about what faithfulness looks like as we go through this series.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel is going to teach us a lot about these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Daniel,
[SPEAKER_00]: Regardless of how small he would have felt, I mean, it's the kind of violent, idolatrous and decadent culture and empire that had enslaved him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not take the view that his resistance to it, no matter how insignificant or pointless, it may have seemed to the other people around him.
[SPEAKER_00]: was trivial or unimportant to God.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was not the view that Daniel took that his resistance was trivial or unimportant or unseen by God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And while there's a lot of different things going on on the book in the first half, there's the famous scenes that many of us would have,
[SPEAKER_00]: learned in Sunday school, the fiery furnace and the lion's den, and then there's that freaky disembodied hand that writes judgment on the wall, which is where the phrase the writings on the wall comes from, by the way, if you didn't know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the second part, you know, there's Daniel's visions of the great beasts and there's prophecies about the future and the spiritual warfare and there's angelic powers and clashes of empires and all of that going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, the consistent theme through the whole book is this, how are we to live faithfully for God in a world that is often opposed to God when our beliefs and therefore our values and behavior do not or should not align with the spirit of the age, especially if it's costly or even deadly to resist, how will we find the courage to live by faith regardless of what is going on around us?
[SPEAKER_00]: First, though, we have made a bit of a discovery while researching for this series, which was an actual call of photograph of Nebuchadnezzar, if you can believe it, definitely not AI.
[SPEAKER_00]: Darren made that, so I just couldn't resist, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: What are you saying, Darren?
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's just focus on the Lord for a minute and pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, we thank you that we can be here together this morning in your presence.
[SPEAKER_00]: We thank you that your word is life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whoops, your word is truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your word teaches us.
[SPEAKER_00]: OK, hang on a second.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your word teaches us, Lord, how we can live
[SPEAKER_00]: As we keep our eyes on you as we attend to the truth that you have revealed to us and I pray as we go through this series in Daniel that it will be life to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: It will be food for our souls.
[SPEAKER_00]: It will give us courage and hope to keep following you faithfully, no matter what may be going on in the world, Lord help us and teach us through this series.
[SPEAKER_00]: how to keep our eyes on you, just as Daniel did, even when the odds were against him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I pray this in Jesus' name, amen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there are moments in life that sometimes come that people will face when the world that they knew seems to collapse overnight.
[SPEAKER_00]: And life as they had known it will never be the same again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as a pastor, I have had to walk through those kinds of moments with many different people over the years and it never gets easier.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tragedy strikes and suddenly the future that you assumed would be yours has instantly disappeared.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now you find yourself living in circumstances, you did not choose.
[SPEAKER_00]: Carrying losses, you did not cause.
[SPEAKER_00]: Facing questions, you never imagined you would have to face.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is of course very human, very, very human in those moments to ask, where is God in all of this?
[SPEAKER_00]: Has He abandoned me?
[SPEAKER_00]: was everything that we once believed about him to be a lie.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is, I think, the kind of emotional world that we're thrown into right in the very first verse of Daniel chapter one, with war, with defeat, with deportation, with grief, and with unimaginable loss.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jerusalem is surrounded by the armies of Babylon.
[SPEAKER_00]: The city is besieged and captured and then it's utterly destroyed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Solomon's temple is burned to the ground, but not before some of the sacred vessels are removed and then carried away to reside now in the temple of some Babylonian God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the brightest young people in Judah, along with many, many others, are forcibly taken from their homes and their homeland and transported 1,500 kilometers away, a journey that would have taken about 50 to 60 days on foot.
[SPEAKER_00]: from everything that they have known, from family, from nation, from language, from culture, from religion, to serve now the foreign king who has just conquered them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the surface it would appear as though, whatever it was that God had promised in His covenants with Abraham and with Moses, and with David, well, now all of that was over.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's done, it's finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: God's promises to Israel have ended.
[SPEAKER_00]: Israel is just another nation absorbed by one that's more powerful and they'll be assimilated.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just the lore of the jungle, the strong eat the weak.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is, of course, the view we would take if we had no framework for belief in God.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is just what our empires do.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is just what power does.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, even in the midst of all this tragedy, the very first chapter of Daniel insists that these appearances, what is happening on the surface,
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the truth of what is actually going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nebuchadnezzar may be on the throne of an incredibly powerful empire.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most powerful empire the world has known to this point.
[SPEAKER_00]: Babylon may have defeated Jerusalem, but it has not defeated God, and it has not defeated God's promises.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel may have been taken into exile,
[SPEAKER_00]: but God has not been exiled from Daniel, and Daniel knows that despite what has happened, these events are not the end of God's promises.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it happened because of God's promises.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where Daniel's faithful resistance begins.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not first by what he does, friends, but first by what he sees.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's in how Daniel sees and understands the purpose of these events that have taken place because he is interpreting them from the point of view of Scripture.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is what gives him the hope and the courage.
[SPEAKER_00]: to keep trusting God even when it looks like everything is lost.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you ever been there in a season in life where it feels like everything you've put your hope in has been taken away or the life that you imagine for yourself has been suddenly disrupted tragically.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you hold on to God?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you keep trusting God even when it looks like everything is lost?
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's what Daniel does, and how does he do that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or what do I mean by this?
[SPEAKER_00]: We see it right there in verse two.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you noticed this when we read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It says this, and the Lord gave Jehovah Kim, King of Judah, into his hand, into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, with some of the vessels of the house of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the Lord who has done this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel knows that it wasn't the power of Babylon that has accomplished this, but the only reason this has happened is because God has allowed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that might seem like cold comfort, but I just want you to stay with me here for a minute, because a little bit of background will help us, because if you've read the Old Testament,
[SPEAKER_00]: You will know that this catastrophe did not come without warning.
[SPEAKER_00]: God had sent prophet after prophet, a starting effect with Isaiah, a century before these events, a hundred years before these events took place.
[SPEAKER_00]: God had sent prophets to warn them that if
[SPEAKER_00]: they continued on this path, a path of idolatry and injustice and violence that they had been on, then they were going to end up being judged.
[SPEAKER_00]: And not only Isaiah, in fact, Jeremiah was a coup as a contemporary of Daniel, and given we know that Daniel was raised in the royal courts, may have, in fact, heard Jeremiah preach
[SPEAKER_00]: In person, he heard Jeremiah warning the people over and over again that there are adultery and the injustice that has taken root in Israel among God's people would eventually lead to their destruction.
[SPEAKER_00]: He even told King Hezekiah in Isaiah 39 that a day would come when the treasures of the temple would be carried away to Babylon and some of his own descendants in fact would be forced to serve in the Babylonian palace.
[SPEAKER_00]: but they would not listen and in Daniel 1 that warning has become a reality and that has in fact become Daniel's reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I don't want to brush over this too quickly because there's no doubt the destruction of Jerusalem was horrific and tragic and terrifying.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean the book of lamentations, if you've ever read that, is just all about this and it gives us some sense
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the Boney M version, also gives us one of the roaring expressions of grief.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you, Sarah, that we have in the Bible.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the rivers of Babylon, we sat, and we wept.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we remembered Zion, there on the poplar's, we hung our harps for our captors asked us for songs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our tormentors demanded songs of joy.
[SPEAKER_00]: They said, sing us one of the songs of Zion.
[SPEAKER_00]: And mockery.
[SPEAKER_00]: But how can we sing the songs of the Lord while we're in the foreign land?
[SPEAKER_00]: I could feel like it's finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's over.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you know that, by the way, you'll know, and I didn't want to read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you'll know it ends with a truly horrible, horrible cry for revenge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's raw, it's honest, it's deeply, deeply human.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just because these have these things that have happened have been ordained by God or have been caused as an act of God's judgment doesn't make it easier and it doesn't mean we're not allowed to grieve.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the Scriptures also tell us,
[SPEAKER_00]: that this judgment was not just the random cruelty of a capricious and uncarrying God, but rather the severe mercy of a covenant keeping God who refuses to let his people destroy themselves forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what's behind this.
[SPEAKER_00]: His purpose in the exile was not annihilation, but in fact restoration.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not to erase Israel, but in fact to call Israel back to her true identity and her true purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's clear that Daniel knows this.
[SPEAKER_00]: That Daniel understands this.
[SPEAKER_00]: He obviously knows the scriptures.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's been raised with a brilliant education in the law of Moses and the royal courts.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has heard the prophets preach.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he knows that Israel's idolatry or rather Judas idolatry, the Southern Kingdoms, since the Northern Kingdoms have already been taken into captivity by a Syria, but Judas idolatry, it's that which has brought her to this point.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over and over again, God has warned his people that if they worship the gods of the other nations, then they will become like the other nations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then they won't be ruled over by the law of the Lord, but the only law that will apply is the law that the other nations understand, and that law is that might make right that power is the highest good and that the winner takes all.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that is not the world as God imagined it, but that is the world that has become the reality, the experience that many people live with,
[SPEAKER_00]: when God is rejected.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in a sense, God's judgment really has just consisted in God giving His people what they really want.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they want to play the game of thrones, then God will let them, but he'll also let them suffer the consequences of it as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the prophets also promised that this has happened not to destroy Israel forever, but as I said, to bring it back to her senses, to restore Israel to her true destiny.
[SPEAKER_00]: And ultimately, to be the means, as the prophets say over and over again, through which the Messiah will come and through whom God is going to heal and restore all creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the beautiful chapter of Isaiah 40 says, that not only promises the end of the exile, but is also a promise about the coming of the Messiah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Comfort, comfort my people says your God, speak tenderly to Jerusalem and proclaims a her that her hard service has been completed.
[SPEAKER_00]: that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord's hand, double for all her sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then we get this, which of course we know is in reference to Christ, preached by John the Baptist, a voice of one calling, in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord, make straight in the desert, a highway for our God.
[SPEAKER_00]: which means friends that even here in the midst of all of this tragedy, God is still working and God has not forgotten His promises.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Daniel, who knows the Scriptures, knows this to be true.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Even so, try and put yourself in Daniel's shoes for a minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel didn't cause this catastrophe.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was not Daniel's fault.
[SPEAKER_00]: As far as we can tell, Daniel has
[SPEAKER_00]: Try to, at least judging by the rest of the way he lives his life, live to righteous, upright, holy, devoted life.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's lived a good life.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did not cause this catastrophe.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not his fault.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet he is suffering the consequences of it anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if he was anything like me,
[SPEAKER_00]: That could have made him completely bitter and angry toward God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe even cause him to give up his faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet he doesn't do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reality is, all of us will face things in our lives that are unfair.
[SPEAKER_00]: things that are not our fault, that are not of our making, that we didn't cause, and when that happens, and it will, we will have to make a choice.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll have to make the same choice that Daniel had to make, because how we choose to respond to those circumstances, especially when life is unfair, will determine our destiny.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't say this lightly, friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been a past along enough, and I've seen this too often, what bitterness and unforgiveness does to people, what it does to their hearts and to their minds.
[SPEAKER_00]: It destroys them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like for many people, the choice they make is to live.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rest of their lives,
[SPEAKER_00]: under the shadow of that unfair and unjust thing that has happened, and let it define the rest of how they will live, and it just sucks all the joy and the purpose out of their life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we cannot control everything that happens to us, but by the grace and the power of God, we can decide what will allow those circumstances to produce in us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you believe that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have that kind of agency?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, you do, because you've been made in the image of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel could have allowed Babylon to make him better.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like he could have concluded that God had failed him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could have surrendered inwardly before he kind of gave up and surrendered outwardly, but he refused to let the worst thing that had happened to him become the defining truth about him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or how?
[SPEAKER_00]: How did he do this?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because Daniel knew the scriptures, because he knows the word of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knows, or he knew, that God had warned his people about this, but he also knew, therefore, that God had a purpose in mind for his people on the other side of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is why Daniel Lund says, the Lord delivered Jehovah, came into Nebuchadnezzar's hand.
[SPEAKER_00]: That does not make Nebuchadnezzar righteous in any way.
[SPEAKER_00]: It does not make the violence good.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't make the circumstances any less tragic.
[SPEAKER_00]: What it means is that even Babylon's power exists only inside the largest story of the sovereign purposes of God in human history.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is true of every nation, empire, Babylon, system, ideology, whatever it is that might be going on in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is true of all of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything ultimately exists within the sovereign purposes of God for human history.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Daniel knew that was also true for his life,
[SPEAKER_00]: Just as that is true for your life, God has a sovereign purpose for your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has made promises to you that He will not break, that He will keep, and because He knew the scriptures, Daniel, therefore, knows that God is faithful to His promises, and therefore Babylon would not have the final word over Daniel's life, even if it killed Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would not have the final word ever God's purposes for his people, even if it appears at this point that it has destroyed them, and that is true as I said for all the Babylonians of this world, they will not have the final word because the story of history does not belong to Babylon, it belongs to God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even death is a defeated foe for that's what the resurrection of Jesus means, but even through death we are held firm forever, forever he'll get us through it, and that is the hope of our salvation.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, turn to the person next to you and say, well, that was good, that was good.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even if Daniel doesn't understand what versus three and four mean in Isaiah 40 about the Messiah, he doesn't understand that yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet he knows the Scriptures, and so he chooses not to view Scripture through the eyes of his circumstances.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead he chooses to view his circumstances through the eyes of Scripture.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me say that again, because Daniel knows the Scriptures and the one who wrote them, who stands behind them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He chooses not to view Scripture through the eyes of his circumstances, but he chooses to view his circumstances through the eyes of Scripture.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does not interpret God based on what's happened to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He interprets what's happened to him according to who God has revealed himself to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is what we all have to do, and that is what he gave Daniel the courage to resist, I believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Daniel and his friends had an eye on Michelle and Azariah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Come from the world family, we're told, or from noble families in Jerusalem, they were impressive, intelligent, well-educated, and they were most likely teenagers between the ages of about 13 and 15.
[SPEAKER_00]: since we know from ancient sources that that was the age of this kind of education that they're going to go through in Babylon took place.
[SPEAKER_00]: When someone reached about 13, and if they were destined for kind of a career in the royal courts, that's when they would go through this kind of education program.
[SPEAKER_00]: But of course, so I mean get that into your heads for a minute, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel is in the middle of all this as a 13, maybe 14 or 15 year old.
[SPEAKER_00]: I certainly couldn't have done what he did when I was that age.
[SPEAKER_00]: not a chance, like he's an impressive young man, but the reason he's so impressive is because he's already received a serious instruction in Israel's scriptures and traditions for the whole of his life.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's grown up reading, studying, and meditating on scripture.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that has what has formed in him, the kind of character that has given him the ability to live as he does, even as a 15 year old, in the midst of overwhelming odds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything's been taken away from him, and from his friends, everything that was familiar to them, and they've been enslaved and forcibly removed, taken off to Babylon, and that's when their program or a program of assimilation and reeducation begins.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Nebuchadnezzar strategy is subtle and sophisticated.
[SPEAKER_00]: When it comes to boys like this,
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not terrorised, doesn't terrorise them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not brutalised, in fact, they're treated very well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for three years, they are immersed in Babylon's language, and literature, and stories, and culture, and religion.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they've fed the best food from the royal table.
[SPEAKER_00]: They live in a palace.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're being prepared, quite literally, for an incredibly high-ranking royal career.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, they've actually been given an incredible opportunity that would have only come to a very few people, but they are also given new names.
[SPEAKER_00]: As you would have noticed, Daniel Hanna Naya, Michelle and Azariah all had names that testified in one way or another to the God of Israel as you'll see on this slide.
[SPEAKER_00]: But now their names are connected to various Babylonian gods
[SPEAKER_00]: So despite the fact that they're being treated well, the message that they were expected to learn by all of this was very clear.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your old identity is over, that's gone, Jerusalem is gone, your God has been defeated, your religion is now on the wrong side of history, you now belong to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is almost always how Babylon, and in fact, all the idolatrous principalities and powers of this world operate.
[SPEAKER_00]: they tell you who you are, before they tell you what to do,
[SPEAKER_00]: They first tell you who you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: They redefine your identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Babylon always seeks to subvert the way Scripture defines what it means to be human.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to give you a new story, a new vocabulary, a whole new set of desires, and a new definition of what is true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need to tell you that's what's going on in the world all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what's happening to Daniel.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's happening in our culture as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's why a teenager can grow up in church.
[SPEAKER_00]: and then head off to university or enter the workplace, you know, these days actually just happens when they get one of these.
[SPEAKER_00]: And suddenly they find themselves surrounded by an entirely new account of reality and of what is true and good and beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's confusing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the pressure to conform to that new account of reality is overwhelming.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's not always done by overt persecution.
[SPEAKER_00]: That might come later.
[SPEAKER_00]: But before that happens, it is always the steady suggestion that the Christian faith, or that faith in God, is intellectually embarrassing, is morally harmful, and is socially obsolete.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like who could really believe that kind of stuff?
[SPEAKER_00]: or that your God is holding you back from living your best life, that your meaning is whatever you decided to be, that freedom is the real freedom, you know, it's just the absence of limits, that pleasure and self-expression are the real path to salvation, however you wanna define that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as Jesus teaches us in the end, that path that broad, wide road leads only to death and to destruction to the loss of self,
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I want you to notice how Daniel responds to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel's example is not anti-intellectual and he doesn't just reject everything about Babylonian culture like he doesn't embark on some kind of culture war.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the contrary, he actually devotes himself to excelling with excellence, performing with excellence in his Babylonian education.
[SPEAKER_00]: but he's also very alert to the spiritual purpose of the program that he's in and he also brings then the very best of his intelligence and his creativity and his understanding to figuring out how to navigate this new world over which he has almost no control.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, he's not just going, oh well, whatever will be will be, or he's not saying I'm just going to reject everything about Babylon.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not saying everything in Babylon is bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: What he is doing is applying himself with intelligence and creativity, to figuring out how to carefully navigate with discernment, the culture that he's now found himself in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is not something that we're taught to do very well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Often in the church, the reaction is either just rejected outright, reject the culture outright, or we give in and we assimilate.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there is a third option, which is creativity, intelligence, prayer, discernment, seeking the help of the Lord studying and meditating on Scripture so that we can navigate these difficult things with faith and faithfulness.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, Daniel is under no illusions here.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knows what Babylon wants, that it will not be satisfied with just his service.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, Babylon wants to consume his whole identity.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that remains, I think, the central question for every disciple of Jesus throughout all of history.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is this, who gets to name me?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who gets to decide what my name is?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who gets to tell me what is true?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who gets to tell me what is good?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who gets to tell me what my life means?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the core question we have to wrestle with.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what naming means.
[SPEAKER_00]: It means to define what is true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is the challenge that Daniel faced and we faced.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even though Daniel's been renamed, but Telscher's are, or however you pronounce it, I've never been quite sure how to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though he's been renamed by the powers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even though he has, you know, he has so little over what he can troll.
[SPEAKER_00]: and he cannot like refuse the education program he's in, he cannot go where he likes, he cannot refuse this name he's been given, even so Daniel has not forgotten his real name, his true identity that God, as it says on the screen, is the judge of his life, that he does not belong to Babylon despite appearances he belongs to the Lord and he'll be
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's I think a beautiful irony of history that we now know Daniel, not by his Babylonian name, but by his Hebrew name.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know him as he was intended to be, despite everything that's been thrown at him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that leads him to embark on one small act of resistance, maybe the one small act of resistance that was available to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: In verse 8 it says,
[SPEAKER_00]: with the royal food and wine.
[SPEAKER_00]: So why the food?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, if you hear last week, you might have some idea of why the food is so important.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the text doesn't just give us one reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's several involved here I think, but there's an interesting connection to what we looked out last week in Acts with Peter and Cornelius.
[SPEAKER_00]: So of course, some of the food, if not all of it, would have been offered in violation of Israel's dietary laws.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The meat and the wine, especially the meat and wine, served to the king, would have almost definitely been associated with offerings that had been made to the various Babylonian gods.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this food was almost certainly the product of idolatry.
[SPEAKER_00]: but also, and this is probably one that's easy to miss, eating from the royal table would also symbolise for Daniel.
[SPEAKER_00]: him kind of giving up, giving over himself with complete allegiance to the king, because that's what's sharing a meal in the ancient world meant.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't just sharing food, it was about connecting yourself to someone in relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so by eating the king's food from the king's table, Daniel is in a sense kind of giving himself over to the king of Babylon in a way that he was not prepared to.
[SPEAKER_00]: As they say, there's no such thing as a free lunch, so Daniel knows that to accept the King's food would be a kind of willing and complete act of submission and surrender and allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the King might own Daniel's body, and that was entirely against Daniel's will, but to eat the King's food would mean Daniel is giving himself willingly to the King.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever that combination of things is, Daniel understands that this is one place where participation would cross a boundary that he cannot cross, because the food's not merely food, it is an issue of worship and identity and allegiance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you get that?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what's going on here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we saw last week, Israel's food laws were not just arbitrary regulations about nutrition.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were part of a whole way of life that marked Israel out as the people of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every meal reminded them, we belong to the Lord, we are God's people, we are not like the other nations.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's why Daniel draws the line here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it may not look to us like it's a big deal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's just one small decision.
[SPEAKER_00]: But friends, as you probably know, all great acts of faithfulness begin with small decisions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every great act of faithfulness begins with small decisions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel does not begin his life of resistance, you know, by immediately standing before the fiery furnace or being thrown to the lions that comes later, he begins here at the dining table.
[SPEAKER_00]: He begins here with smaller beadients.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if he hadn't started here, I think then he would likely not have had the moral courage to resist later when the danger was exponentially worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: Character friends is always formed quietly through a thousand hidden obedience as what we watch, how we speak, how we use our money, what we do with our bodies, what we do online, what we do with our phones, whether we tell the truth, whether we pray in a devoted to the Lord, where no one else is around to see us raise our hands in worship.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel's public courage in the later chapters, I think grows first from his private courage, even in this act that may seem so trivial to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel is being offered the best food in the empire.
[SPEAKER_00]: At one level, there's nothing wrong with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not necessarily a sin to enjoy good things, but after all the trauma and deprivation that he's experienced, the royal table might have even looked like kindness.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've lost your home, Daniel, but don't despair, we can give you comfort.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've lost your future, but we can give you a career bed and anything you would have had in Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've lost your status, but we can make you more powerful and successful
[SPEAKER_00]: You've lost your God, but don't despair, we have many others that are far more permissive than the God you worship.
[SPEAKER_00]: The offer is always the same in Babylon.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is always initially an offer or a desire for a life of decadence and luxury and ease, but in the end what Babylon really wants is to own you, body and soul.
[SPEAKER_00]: But since Daniel knows that ultimately it is God who will be His judge, that's a treaty cannot make.
[SPEAKER_00]: As Jesus would go on to say, do not be afraid of the one who can kill the body, but cannot kill the soul, rather fear the one or serve the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
[SPEAKER_00]: And despite the fact this is a very dangerous request that he makes, especially for this steward.
[SPEAKER_00]: Notice that he doesn't respectfully, he's respectful about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not throwing, he's not trying to throw his way to round.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's respectful, and the chief unit agrees, and God makes a way in it pays off.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they end up looking far better than all the other boys.
[SPEAKER_00]: So maybe it's telling us that vegans really are superior to all of us after all.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think friends, the point here is that this small act of obedience is what sets up the rest of Daniel's life really.
[SPEAKER_00]: As we'll see through the book, he actually becomes one of the most revered and powerful men in Babylon, which is a great irony considering where he starts.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he would never have gotten there if he had rejected the Lord forgotten his God and forgotten his name.
[SPEAKER_00]: So don't despise friends that day of small beginnings.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if we can show that we're prepared to be faithful in what is little to trust God in the small things and in the small obediencees, then God will entrust us to be faithful over much.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now as I draw this to a close, I want you to just notice one other little small detail that is easy to miss in this story.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're told that Nebuchadnezzar carries
[SPEAKER_00]: some of the vessels from the temple in Jerusalem into the treasure house of his God, which of course was meant to be an active religious propaganda.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the ancient world, conquest was always understood to be about conquest contests between gods.
[SPEAKER_00]: So by placing the sacred vessels in a Babylonian temple, Nebuchadnezzar is proudly declaring that his god Marduk has defeated the god of Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's boasting that the sacred objects set apart
[SPEAKER_00]: in the Babylonian victory, but Nebuchadnezzar is a fool.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does not realize what he has done.
[SPEAKER_00]: He might be a powerful leader, a brilliant military commander, but in this regard, his pride is going to be his downfall.
[SPEAKER_00]: He thinks he's brought evidence of God's defeat into Babylon, in reality, all that he's done is brought the signs of God's holiness and presence right into the center of his empire.
[SPEAKER_00]: presence of God that has come into the center of His empire that will ultimately be the downfall of His empire.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the thing is in this story, the golden vessels from the temple that are now in a temple in Babylon are not the point.
[SPEAKER_00]: The point that this is trying to make is that the real vessels of God's presence
[SPEAKER_00]: The real ones who have decided to set themselves apart and be holy for the Lord and carry his power within them are not the vessel sitting in a treasury house somewhere in one of Babylon's temples, but they are Daniel and his three friends because they're devoted to the Lord and the midst of overwhelming odds yet they don't give up faith and then God is going to use them powerfully by his carriers of his presence, his spirit, his word, his truth to bring down the lies that Babylon is telling.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is what God is going to do through these four men, boys, really, who have decided to make themselves sacred vessels for the Lord.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason this is so important, I think, is because this is exactly the same thing we are called to.
[SPEAKER_00]: As one Peter says, you are a chosen people.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are a holy nation.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are God's special possession, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That you made a clear the praises of Him who has called you out of darkness into His wonderful light.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, that's not where it ends.
[SPEAKER_00]: Peter goes on to say, dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles exactly like Daniel and his three friends to abstain from sinful desires which wage war against your soul live such good lives among the pagans that they accuse you of doing wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: They may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day that he visits us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, we have something that not even Daniel had.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have the Spirit of God, dwelling within us who has made us these things, holy, royal, God's special possession, vessels of His presence and power.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that means just like Daniel, called to be faithful in the midst of the Babylonian empire, the gods of this world.
[SPEAKER_00]: So are we.
[SPEAKER_00]: So away, but if we'll trust the Lord, I think we'll see God do unimaginable things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Things that right now, at this moment in your life, you might consider impossible.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what might God want to do through you?
[SPEAKER_00]: You may feel small.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel was just one displaced teenager enslaved in the greatest empire of the age.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet a consecrated life is never insignificant to God.
[SPEAKER_00]: A consecrated life is never powerless or pointless.
[SPEAKER_00]: The presence of God in one person prepared to walk by faith can shadow the illusion that the Babylonians of this world are unstoppable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And therefore, friends, we have such hope, because this is what we're called to, because in fact, Christ has already defeated the greatest Babylon there is through the cross, through his death and resurrection, and now a revelation 11, 15, declares, one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible, the kingdom of this world has now become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever.
[SPEAKER_00]: The devil offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world all he had to do was bow down and worship him.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are being offered the same thing every day as we deal with the reality of this culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: But just as Christ resisted so will we, so can we because greater is He who is in me, in Christ Jesus than He who is in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wonder what your small act of resistance might
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps it's just five minutes in the word and in prayer when you get up in the morning before you do anything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps it's an act of forgiveness or kindness towards an enemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not despise the small decision of faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: If a plate of food can become an altar of worship, then one quiet and respectful act of resistance could lead you to a lifetime of courage.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why Jesus said, take heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't give up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't give into fear.
[SPEAKER_00]: For I have overcome the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why don't you stand with me?
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, I thank you for this.
[SPEAKER_00]: incredible story that we get to sit in over the next few weeks, I thank you for what you did through Daniel, but also Lord I thank you for what you are planning to do and will do through each of us as we walk with you by faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we may seem so small and insignificant in the grand scheme of things and yet with you and before you, our life is not insignificant, our life is not unimportant, and our acts of faith on us, and obedience and worship are not unseen by your Lord.
[SPEAKER_00]: you hold it all as precious and have more worth than God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so help us Lord, as we sing this final song and as we think about the example that Daniel sets for us, how this might be challenging us where we live and how we live and the decisions we're making and give us courage, Lord, to live into all that you have called us to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: In Jesus' name, we pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.