Daniel’s training in Babylon
1 In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. 2 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.
3 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 – 4 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. 5 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.
6 Among those who were chosen were some from Judah: Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. 7 The chief official gave them new names: to Daniel, the name Belteshazzar; to Hananiah, Shadrach; to Mishael, Meshach; and to Azariah, Abednego.
8 But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself in this way. 9 Now God had caused the official to show favour and compassion to Daniel, 10 but the official told Daniel, ‘I am afraid of my lord the king, who has assigned your food and drink. Why should he see you looking worse than the other young men of your age? The king would then have my head because of you.’
11 Daniel then said to the guard whom the chief official had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, 12 ‘Please test your servants for ten days: give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. 13 Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see.’ 14 So he agreed to this and tested them for ten days.
15 At the end of the ten days they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. 16 So the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead.
17 To these four young men God gave knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning. And Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds.
18 At the end of the time set by the king to bring them into his service, the chief official presented them to Nebuchadnezzar. 19 The king talked with them, and he found none equal to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah; so they entered the king’s service. 20 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.
21 And Daniel remained there until the first year of King Cyrus.
G’Day and God’s grace and peace be with you. My name is Mark and I’m here live with a few other people on tech, we all have permitted worker permits, I never thought I’d have a work permit to come into this building but here we are, welcome to August in Melbourne. My job today is to help us have a look at one of the most powerful examples for us right now of faithful living in lockdown. His name is Daniel, not Daniel Andrews I’m very thankful I don’t have his job at the moment, it doesn’t matter what your political persuasion is if you think you’ve got it rough spare a thought for what he’s having to do every day, but we’ve just heard about an ancient Daniel in the Bible who was from Jerusalem, and he is a model of extraordinary faith and resilience for us.
But to get us started, a few questions to think about
What do you hunger for right now? Melbournians, what do you miss right now? Perhaps put in the chat, what’s something you long for right now, another coffee, a drive on the great ocean road, kids to go back to school, vaccine, a birthday party, What’s the first thing you react with when you hear the question, What do you need right now? What do you have a hunger for? My first gut reaction is a three week holiday in Queensland with my family. How good does it sound to not be staring at a computer screen, walking around in shorts and t-shirts, kids having a great time. Now, that’s not happening AND it won’t be happening for a very long time.
So we’re in this mode of coping. We’re dealing with the challenge of a month and a bit in stage 4 isolation, we’re in ISO-life, so there’s another question, how are you coping? What measures have you put in place to survive, maybe you’re aiming at thriving, maybe just aiming at surviving, what do you feel like you need to do to get through this period of time.
Barefoot investor, Scott Pape, bought a weighted blanket, they’re all the rage, it’s a blanket that weighs like 10kg, he says it makes a big difference and gives him a great night’s sleep, and it’s helping him cope at the moment. Then he had to issue somewhat of a retraction because a medical professional said they can be dangerous, especially for children and definitely not to be used for sleeping.
So there’s two questions there, what are you craving and desiring, what do you really miss right now, what emptiness have you noticed opening up inside you. And then how are you dealing with that vacuum, what are you filling it with. Those two movements are a normal part of human life, they happen inside us whether we are aware of it or not, and you can do these movements in a destructive, damaging, unhealthy way, the most obvious example of this is substance abuse, I feel stressed/lonely/empty so I satisfy myself with a feel-good substance like alcohol, it might partially or temporarily satisfy but it brings you back for more and it has all these negative side-effects and it can become a destructive cycle. But that movement of emptiness and filling can be done in a way that is deeply satisfying and constructive, it can bring life and even the fullness of life if it is done in a way that connects you with the source of life, the presence of God.
So this series is called Patterns of the Presence. What are the practices of opening up that emptiness and hunger and the practices of filling us up that help us dwell in the presence of God. There are patterns to the Christian life that help to connect us with God, there are things we can do that deepen our relationship with God. None of these are a silver bullet, they’re not a guarantee that will force God to work in your life but they are things that time and time again, God’s people have committed to and found peace and strength for weary souls. We’ve got two practices to look at each week, you could think of it as a wine and cheese pairing selection for you, there’s a practice that is more of an emptying practice or a letting go practice like the practice of silence, silence is a letting go of our noisyness and creates an audio vacuum. Then there’s a practice that is more of a filling practice, like posting, making facebook posts or posting a letter that is filled with praise. We’ve chosen practices that you can do in the Melbourne stage 4 lockdown and things that might be especially important for us right now
Today I’m not looking at any particular practices but just getting us started and doing some preparation work with Daniel.
What do we see in Daniel? Well we heard in the Bible reading that he was from Jerusalem until the Babylonians came and smashed it, they took some sacred items off them and put them in their own temple, and they took a whole lot of prisoners, including Daniel, away from Jerusalem to live in exile in Babylon. So Daniel went from being one of the best and brightest living in God’s land with God’s people worshipping together in God’s presence in the temple... to being a prisoner under someone else’s heavy restrictions. It doesn’t tell us if he had an 8pm curfew, there’s no mention of face masks or staying a metre and a half from others, but all the archeological evidence would suggest Daniel’s treatment and the treatment of his mates and his people was much worse than what we’re experiencing. There are many reasons to despair and I don’t want to diminish anyone’s hardship in Melbourne, I would say that in a way as Christians in Melbourne we have been exiled physically from the body of Christ, spiritually and electronically we remain connected but we’re enduring a physical exile that gives us reason to despair.
Added to that, we have been trained in the West to fail at this time. We have been culturally conditioned in Western civilisation for quite some time to not be able to cope with restrictions being placed on us like this. Different societies have different ways of viewing the world, some cultures focus on power and fear as the controlling mechanism of society, some cultures focus on shame and honour a whole lot more, the West used to be strong on Guilt and Innocence, now I’m getting all this from David Williams who leads the training of CMS missionaries at St Andrew’s Hall here in Melbourne. And I think he’s right in saying that we’ve shifted out of Guilt and Innocence, we actually have quite an allergic reaction to moral claims about right and wrong and our dominant perspective about life is PAIN AND PLEASURE. We have become a pain and pleasure society, for Australians the highest good is a holiday with fine dining and a massage, it involves as much free choice to enjoy whatever is most pleasing and feel good right now. And the greatest evil is to have that taken away and replaced with painful restriction and difficulty and discomfort. Pain and Pleasure cultures do not do well under stage 4 lockdown.
So we haven’t helped ourselves in preparing for this and it’s hard, but the Jewish exile had it all. They were desecrated, defaced, deformed, destroyed and powerful conquerors had them chained and confined.
We don’t see any record of sadness here in Daniel but if you go to Psalm 137 you may know these words.
By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion. (Zion is the temple mount in Jerusalem)
2 There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
3 for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
They are mocked by the Babylonians, they were forced to sing joyful songs about the very thing they grieved most. They had Patterns of the Presence of God, there was worship at the temple, people made regular offerings to God, the priests interceded for them, sometimes being in the holy, searing beauty of God’s very presence. Part of their patterns of the presence of God included singing joyfully to God, giving thanks for Zion, being overwhelmed with praise. Those very songs of joy are now the songs their captors are forcing them to sing in mockery and defeat. They’ve been ripped away, stripped of their patterns and had foreign patterns forced on them. We heard that the Babylonian king orders the Babylonian chief to train up some of the best and brightest from the Jewish nobility to be slaves of the royal court. They had to learn Babylonian language and literature and eat rations from the Babylonian king’s table. And so we find out about Daniel and his ridiculously good looking mates no longer having patterns of the presence of God to enjoy but being forced into patterns of the presence of the Babylonian king who considered himself godlike.
What did Daniel do, verse 8, “But Daniel RESOLVED not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself in this way”, BUT DANIEL RESOLVED bang, underline it, highlight it, put a circle around it, he made a resolution. He did not despair, he took what was still within his control, he took his reduced sphere of influence and he kept dedicating that to God. Perhaps there were many who gave up on God, perhaps there were many who went into a holding pattern, perhaps there were many who completely lost their identity and blended into the Babylonian world. Not Daniel, he made choices with how he was going to use his time. Four things we see because of Daniel’s resolution
1. Negotiation
People who make a resolution to remain faithful NEGOTIATE in their circumstances. For Daniel the kings rations were defiled, it was food that had been cursed by false worship and he couldn’t bear to participate in it. He asked if he could not eat it, the chief didn’t like that idea because he might get in trouble but Daniel negotiated a way forward, a ten day test eating just vegetables and water. He was committed to a pure life in relationship with God and he made that happen even when so much had been taken off him. If you keep reading through Daniel you’ll see in later chapters that he went beyond negotiation and openly defied government orders. Three times a day Daniel would go to his room with windows opening towards Jerusalem and he would get down on his knees and pray. Then an order came in that you cannot worship anyone but the king which Daniel is not going to obey, he defies the order and that’s how he ends up in the lion’s den. Now, if we got that kind of order in Melbourne then I’m telling you now I would defy it too, but we don’t, we can freely worship in our rooms, and there are very very good reasons for us to physically isolate, but there might be some choices you can negotiate within your household.
2. Endurance
Secondly, endurance. The end result of Daniel’s resolution is that he comes out the other side firm and steadfast in the Lord and a hero of the faith. It’s not about eating vegetables How long was he in lockdown? Not six weeks, the last verse of chapter one says “And Daniel remained there until the first year of King Cyrus”, that is multiple kings later, and even a change of empire, all through that Daniel endures. All the way until his death bed he was strong in faith whilst utterly deprived of what we would call freedom. His resolution and then continued resolve resulted in some incredible endurance.
3. Adaptation
Daniel adapted to worship God under his current constraints. He couldn’t go to the temple in Jerusalem, he couldn’t sing a whole lot of his songs without crying, he couldn’t make offerings to God from the produce of the land. So he found new patterns of worship. He adjusted, he changed, and as I’ve already mentioned he went to his room three times a day and found that glimmer of hope and connection. He had nothing but a snippet, nothing but a vague direction in which to face, but that’s all he needed because God’s presence is powerful. Maybe zoom connect group is not great, it’s glitchy and clunky. Maybe this livestream is just a window vaguely in the direction of gathering as the body of Christ. But it is enough for the powerful presence of God to do his work if only our hearts are open to him and we choose to respond.
4. God’s grace
There’s a lot that Daniel does but time and time again we hear that primary actor in the play, the powerful mover is God who supplies exactly what Daniel needs to survive, to thrive, to stay strong and live a rich and precious life. Every action Daniel takes is simply a deeper reliance on God’s grace and provision. It is not so much that Daniel is strong but that Daniel has a pattern of going to the one who is strong.
So friends what choices are you going to make? Have you started with a resolution to remain faithful at this time. Are you committed to walk in the footsteps of Jesus and find the joy of salvation in him. We’re going to sing a song that is well known to many of us, Christ is Enough, it is an adapted style it’s a bit different, but we’re talking about adapting, and my encouragement is, if you haven’t made a resolution for stage 4 lockdown yet, is that you make this song now your resolution song, Why don’t you pray with me now,
Jesus Through every storm
My soul will sing
Jesus you are here
To God be the glory
Christ Jesus you are enough for me, everything I need is in you Jesus
Amen.