Themes of the Bible: Exile (Daniel 3)

 

Themes of the Bible: Exile (Daniel 3)

If you did the homework then you already know that this week we will be in Daniel chapter 3. For next week, we’ll be in Daniel chapter 6. Now this one, when you read it, this is going to be a chapter that most of you are familiar with. People inside and outside the church know this account. And that the same with this week. Its a story that a lot of people know, but I want to take it from the realm of Sunday school; what happened, and into the realm of; why did God preserve it for us to read all these years later? So, if you want to flip to Daniel chapter 3 right now, and keep your finger there we will get there I'm going to go ahead and tell you that about half of this message, we're going to be in a different passage, one that I didn't expect you to read, but you need to know if you're going to understand what God is communicating in the 3rd chapter of Daniel. In other words, I'm going to set the stage. Remember last week we talked about God's people of Israel, they have a civil war, we remember this civil war from studying Jeremiah last week, Israel in the north, and Judah in the south. And then the big kid on the block Assyria shows up and Assyria wants to conquer everybody, and they take over Israel and just destroy almost everything, and the people who are left intermingle, intermarry with the Assyrians and you have the Samaritan race, so all that's left of God's people is Judah the southern kingdom. And then Babylon comes along and swallows up Assyria, and is looking towards Judah, if you remember last week that's when Jeremiah is born and Jeremiah begins warning Israel as God's chosen prophet. He begins warning Judah, God's people, as his chosen prophet to lookout because Babylon is on the way. Alright, so that is the stage that has been set, Judah is under threat from Babylon, and eventually, Babylon will move in and take over Judah and that's where we are in the 1st chapter of Daniel.

[Read Daniel 1:1-7]. Look at these young men. They are being brought in to the king of Babylon’s service, and here's what you need to grasp what Nebuchadnezzar is attempting here. This is a total brain washing tactic. Attempting to wash away everything they've known. It's a total indoctrination into a new culture, ‘you used to be a Jew, you are now in Babylon, you are now in exile from Judah, and you are now to learn everything there is to know about Babylon and you are to become Babylonian. This is what the communists did when they take over a country, they remove any reference to God, any religion whatsoever because what is god in a communist regime? The state is. And so, Nebuchadnezzar is telling them to forget everything that you've known in your scriptures and all of that, you are to learn Babylonian history and culture. The things they're to eat, all of this stuff that was forbidden for you to eat as a Jew, you are now to eat in Babylon, you are not that anymore, you are this. Things that God had forbidden them to do in Judah, they are now being told ‘this is what you do in Babylon.’ Even their names are part of this indoctrination. I don't know if you know that, but the names that they were given, originally, Daniel, Azariah, Hananiah, & Mishael, all of those names, had referenced in them to the Hebrew God, if you look at the “EL” and Daniel and Mishael, that is a reference to one of God's Hebrew names, Elohim, and it is a tie to their belief and their faith. Hananiah and Azariah are a reference to God's other Hebrew name of Yahweh. Their names were part of who they were in their identity, in the faith and Nebuchadnezzar says, ‘no more’ and stripped them of that. They are now Babylonians, they're not to be Jews anymore, they are being indoctrinated into this.

So, how do Daniel and his friends respond? The king is making it very clear that for three years, you are going to go through this process of being stripped of what you are and becoming Babylonian. So, how do they respond? Verse eight of chapter 1 says, [Read Daniel 1:8]. This official says, the king’s assigned your food and drink and if he sees you looking weaker than all of those other guys because you aren't eating it, who is he going to come after? He's going to come after me. [Read Daniel 1:9-14]. Can I stop for a second and acknowledge how remarkable this is, there's no reason that Daniel and his three friends should demand this, there's no reason that they should have this allegiance to God, when you stop and consider what they have gone through. If anybody had reason to be angry about their circumstance, about what they've gone through, if any of them had reason to give in to a hostile culture. It's them. How easy would it be to say, ‘well, we don't really want to do this, but we don't have a choice. We're going to be killed if we don't do this, we've got to do this.’ Well, I think that's what a lot of us would say, but not Daniel, not these three guys, no they're going to do this differently. Here are four guys who are worshipping faithfully in Judah. They're being honorable to God, they're doing what God has asked them to do, they're not the reason Judah is being punished, and then what happens? Babylon rolls in, and if you know anything about this culture or have studied Babylonian military tactics you know exactly what they do when they go in and attack. They slaughter, they wipe everybody out and the people that they choose to keep, those men that they wanted in service to the king, they wanted to make sure that those men had no loyalty to anyone or anything besides the king. So, what would they do, they would take their families and slaughter them in front of them, to make sure they understood that now you have nothing else to live for. So, Daniel and Hananiah, and Mishael, and Azariah probably saw their wives and children slaughtered in front of them, and then to make sure that they didn't procreate again, they made them eunuchs. The Bible doesn’t say that’s exactly what happened to these men, but history tells us that’s what Babylon did. Made sure that you have no reason to live, except for the service of the king. So, these guys under these circumstances, you don't think that, at least for a moment they thought, ‘surely this can't be God's plan. And if this is God's plan, who would want anything to do with a God like that, that lets this stuff happen to us?’ You know how often we say things like that? People in our culture turn their back on God or walk away from God because, ‘well, I can't serve a God that would allow this to happen, would allow me to be treated in this way, that's not a loving God.’ What are we doing? Consider for just a second that perhaps our culture is indoctrinating us. Everywhere you go, you are being indoctrinated into Babylon, into a foreign culture, into an idea and a belief system that is not what God has called you to, and how many of us have chosen, while living in exile, the path of least resistance. ‘We're not going to put up a fight against that we're just going to go along to get along in academia, if we put up a resistance and we claim that we believe the Bible is the authoritative word of God, we're not going to be taken seriously. We're going to get bad grades in school, we're not going to be given jobs in academia, we're going to be a laughingstock. So, we go along to get along. I'll just learn what I'm supposed to learn and recite it, but I don't really believe it, but I'll tell everybody that I do so I can survive.’ And, in this culture, we're surrounded by all of this inner decadence, which is not what God has called us to. But we know the world's movies and we watch them, we know the world songs and we sing them, we know them by heart, most often a lot better than we know scripture. That's the culture that we live in, and we defend ourselves and say, ‘well we don't have a choice, and it's just all around us.’ And I may be the most guilty one of us in the room regarding this, but what Scripture makes clear is that we always have a choice for the things that we do. You always have a choice, and it comes with consequences. Every choice you make, comes with consequences and what are the consequences if you choose not to defile yourself with things of this culture? Will it lead to social isolation? Maybe. Depending on the people that are around you, you may become socially isolated you'll be the weird homeschool family that doesn't have any interaction with anybody else. If you are a scientist in any kind of scientific field, you're never going to get published in a peer reviewed journal, what's going to happen to your career, you don't have many options there. In the corporate world, which is clearly going in one direction, and it's whatever direction the winds of culture are going, if you take a stand and say ‘I'm not doing that, I'm not going to have my company do that, you're going to be censured and what's going to happen to your career and your nest egg and all of that stuff?

And then we say things like, ‘Look, I got to go along to get along because if I don't, how can I affect the culture for the kingdom of God?’ That's how we justify it. ‘Well, I'm going to do these things so that I can be intermingled with them and be the salt and the light.’ If we wrap it in biblical language it's great, we're very clever. It’s interesting we might say that, because you know Daniel and Hananiah, and Mishael, and Azariah chose not to go along with the culture just to get along. Did they have any impact on their society or were they totally cut off. Well, let's take a look. Verse 15. [Read Daniel 1:15-20].

So, when the king had a tough decision to make, and he wanted to surround himself with the wisest men, the people who would then be influencing the direction of the entire culture, did he call on those people who had gone along with the culture? He did not. He called the people who had set themselves apart and been rewarded by God because of their faithfulness. That's who was influencing the king of the most powerful empire on earth. What are these men teaching us? These four prove that your refusal to conform to society increases your potency in that society. It's the exact opposite of what we want to justify to ourselves and believe. These four men are proving that when you don't go the way the culture is going, that is when you draw attention, that is when you will influence more people, and it makes sense. If you've got the entire school of fish swimming in one direction, and then you see one little dude swimming furiously the other way, you don't think that some of those fish mindlessly going in this direction are going to stop and say, ‘Where is he going in such a hurry?’ That is what these four are teaching: if you want to have an impact, then separate yourself from the culture that is indoctrinating you. That's exactly what you see Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah do in chapter 3.

Ok, done with the intro, now back to Daniel chapter 3. Every time I read this story, this is what I think: I want friends like that. Those are the people that I want in my life, when everybody else is compromising with the culture and going along, I want these kinds of guys surrounding me. I want those voices in my head every time I read this. When the rest of the culture falls apart and compromises on the authority of God's word so that they can do well in society, I want this kind of a body of believers surrounding me, friends whose faith is so strong, whose reliance and trust in God is so rock solid. We'll walk into the fiery furnace together before we ever bow the knee before an ungodly culture. That's what I want every time I read this story, if you got your Bible look at verses 1 through 7 of Daniel 3. [Read Daniel 3:1-7].

Can you picture this? The plane of Dora, this massive open area and you got all these people of different nations, verse 7 says, All the nations that were under Babylon’s control, and all the languages, that includes exiled Jews. That includes people that went with Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah, and Daniel. Fellows Jews, people who are supposed to be God's followers, on the plane of Dora, and the trumpet sounds, and they all drop. They all bow before this image, and you can hear their excuses, they’d be the same as ours today, ‘we're just saying this to live, we don't really mean it. We're just doing it because you have to do that otherwise they'll throw you into the furnace and we can't really be effective for the kingdom of God if we're thrown into a furnace right, so we're just saying this but God knows the truth. God knows our heart, we're just doing this because we're fooling the ungodly culture, we don't really believe that we're just bowing.’ Right, that's how they justify their cowardice, their unwillingness to stand on the authority of truth that they know. So, the lesson here is that when everyone else around you is worshiping an ungodly culture, be the one that stands there saying ‘what is wrong with you people? I'm not going to do this. We serve a God and that’s not Him.’

Look at verse, verses 13 through 18. [Read Daniel 3:13-18]. King Nebuchadnezzar is not happy when he sees these guys not bowing, but their response is perfect. One of my favorite passages of Scripture in the whole Bible. That should be our prayer, God, give me faith like that, that's what I want in my life, that kind of confidence in the Lord.

Remember what we said when we did the whole message on suffering from the book of Job, the Christ’s priorities for our lives are often different than our own. We oftentimes question God's existence or God's love because things aren't happening for us the way that we think they should have. ‘If God really loved me, he wouldn’t allow this to happen. If God really cared for me, then this would be going well for me.’ Well, what is God and Christ’s top priority? That God be glorified. And sometimes, God is glorified through the good things that happened to us. And sometimes God is glorified through things that are not so good that happened to us, and it's our privilege to be used to glorify God. That is the point of a human being who has surrendered their will to God, it's the point of our existence, and you and I may live long enough to see why it is that God allowed us to go through that difficult time, and we may not. That’s these three guys are saying, we may not live to see it, but we trust that if we go into the furnace and die, God's got a reason for that. He's the master chess player, he's working something here, and he's going to be glorified and we're good with it. These three guys are thinking from God's perspective and not their own. ‘Maybe God will be glorified by saving us, that's how we see this playing out that he saves us, and everybody sees it, and they realize that he is God, or maybe God will be glorified by not saving us, we really don't know, but we're going to trust him regardless.’ That's the attitude of the faithful. That's what I want. That's what I want you to have. That's what I want all of us to exhibit, because you got all these other Israelites laying on the ground out there before a graven image, and then there's these three men trusting in God and worshipping Him alone, regardless of what the culture thinks or says.

I don't know what's going to happen in this culture but the timeline, may well be coming when churches all around us are laying on the ground before the gods of culture, the counterfeit gods. I want us to be standing, saying I don't know what's going to happen to us, but I don't care, because I trust God, and God will be glorified through that. Do we say that? God is strong enough to rescue me, but even if he doesn't, I'm still going to trust Him. God's strong enough to heal me from this disease but if he doesn't, I'm still going to trust Him. God is strong enough to undo this disability that this is crippling my life, but even if he doesn't, I'm still going to trust Him. How about this one: I know that He can save my sick child if he wants to, but even if He doesn't, I'm still going to trust him. Do you have that kind of faith?

Please tell me that you see how this is echoing almost everything that we've seen every week in the pages of God's scripture. We’ve seen Abraham, and what does God say to him? Take Isaac, your most cherished possession on Earth, take him and sacrifice him. Abraham’s response: Because I love you more, I'll still trust you, and if you alone are the only reward for my faith, that will always be enough. I will always love you, the blesser, more than any blessing I could ever be given. How about Job? Take my health, take my servants, take my family, everything that means anything to me on this earth, you are worth more and I'll trust you. How about Esther: take my very life. I'll go before the king to be obedient to you, God, I choose you over all of this earthly wealth. That’s exactly what the Apostle Paul said that “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” I don't need the things of this world if I have Christ.

That's what Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego knew. Do we know? Can we profess to a watching world, that the earth may give way and the mountains may fall into the sea, but, I'm not going to fear, because I know the one who made the mountains and the seas. I know in whom my confidence is placed, and I have nothing to fear. Remember the words of Job 13:15, “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him.” I have no idea why God would want to strike me down, but if he does, I will still hope in him. That's the confidence, that's the faith of a true believer, and it's the kind of faith that these three men had that you read about still to this day.

Lastly, take a look at verse 19. [Read Daniel 3:19-30]. There was a fourth person in the fire with them. Was it an angel, was it the pre-incarnate Son of God? There's theological debate about who that was, but there's no debate about this, Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah truly believed their greatest joy in their life was to bring glory to God, no matter what happened to them. That's what they wanted. It was not to use God to get what they wanted in life, it was to use their existence to bring honor to God and that approach to life, made them absolutely fearless and absolutely faithful.  

So, how do you walk into a fiery furnace? You realize that your life is not your own. Your life belongs to your Creator, and it is your great privilege to offer him everything. That's their example. That's why it's been preserved for us. And may we follow in their footsteps.

Let’s pray.