July 22, 2011
Preached as Daniel
Dear friends in Christ.
If you’ll permit me, I’d like to tell you a story this morning. It is a story filled with danger, struggles, hardships, and yes, even a little adventure. It is a story with which you are very familiar, because it is a story that you learned when you were just little children, and it is a true story, which makes it all the better. For the story I want to share with you this morning is the my story—my story of the things I endured as I sought to remain faithful to the Lord my God.
The year was 605 BC (roughly 400 years before the Savior would be born) and the time for Israel’s captivity was at hand. The captivity which the Lord had promised through prophets like Jeremiah, Micah, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah began as King Nebuchadnezzar invaded the land of Israel, bound King Jehoiakim with bronze shackles and took him to Babylon. (2 Kings 23:36-24:7; 2 Chronicles 34:5-8) But not only did he take the king into custody, but he also took gold and silver articles from the Temple of the Lord, along with some of the young men from the royal family and 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.” (Daniel 1:4, NIV84)
I was one of those men brought to Babylon where I was trained for three years before I entered the King’s service, and where, from the moment I arrived in Babylon, I was challenged as to how I was going to remain faithful to the Lord. For you see, Babylon was the city that Nimrod had founded some years after the flood. It was a great city in the very area where the Lord had confused the languages of the people after they had tried to build a tower to their glory so that they would not have to follow the Lord’s decree to spread out over the earth. It was a city and an empire filled with all sorts of wealth and riches, peoples and nations, pleasures and diversions, and even though the name Babylon carries the meaning of “gate of god” it was clear that the Lord God was not worshiped in this city. Rather people were “lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power.” (2 Timothy 3:2-5 NIV84)
Interesting, isn’t it that the people of my day fit the very description of people that Paul spoke about in his letter to Timothy. Yet the truth is, the people of my day were no different than the people of Paul’s Day nor than the people of your day. It was because of this that I determined that I would do everything within my power to remain faithful to the Lord my God, and from the very moment that I determined to remain faithful to the Lord, I faced one challenge after another. If I had time today I could take you through each one of them and show you just how the Lord blessed me as a struggled to remain faithful to him. But since we don’t, let me take you through the story that has so often been called, Daniel and the Lion’s Den.
The year was 539 BC. 66 years had passed since I entered into the service of the Babylonian government. The Babylonian empire had recently been taken over by the Medes and the Persians, who quickly set about establishing their empire in the place that the Babylonians so recently ruled, and it pleased King Darius to appoint 120 satraps to rule throughout the kingdom, with three administrators over them, one of whom was [me]. The satraps were made accountable to [the administrators] so that the king might not suffer loss. Now [I] so distinguished [myself] among the administrators and the satraps by [my] exceptional qualities that the king planned to set [me] over the whole kingdom. (See: Daniel 6:1-3, NIV84)
This was something that just stuck in the craw of the other satraps and administrators. They couldn’t stomach the idea that a foreigner, a Jew, no less, someone who did not worship their god Bel or any of the other gods of the Babylonian Pantheon, could possibly be placed in a position of authority over them. They plotted and the schemed, and finally they came up with the plan to trap me in my faithfulness to the Lord. They persuaded the King to sign a decree, a law if you will, stating that no one could pray to any god other than the king for the next 30 days. They did this because they knew my heart, and they knew that I would not listen to the decree or pray to the king let alone other gods. They knew that I would remain faithful to the Lord. Now, I cannot say that I wasn’t tempted to stop praying in my normal way, when I learned of the decree. After all, the punishment was death by lions. But even though I was tempted to be less than faithful to the Lord, the Lord gave me strength and the ability to remain faithful. So, I simply did what I had always done. I went upstairs to my room where the windows faced east toward Jerusalem, and I got down and prayed like I always did. This time, as I expected, I was “discovered” by the others and tossed to the Lions.
You know how it happened. You know how the Lord sent his angel to close the mouths of the lions and protect me, but the truth is, it could have gone the other way. The Lord could have decided to let me be devoured by those lions, and allowed me to die in his name. If he would have allowed me to die there, I was ready to go because I trusted in the Lord my God and knew that the Lord my God had the power to rescue me from the lions, and even if he didn’t I would remain faithful to him because I knew that he would carry me to his side where I would live with him forever. Though the lions were not able to make a meal out of me, they made a very delicious meal out of those who sought to be rid of me when the King ordered that they take my place in the den and before they even reached the ground they were overcome by the lions.
Now, why am I telling you all of this? I am telling this to you because my story is not all that different than your story. Just like me, you live in a great city and a great nation filled with all sorts of wealth and riches. You live in a nation filled with all sorts of pleasures and diversions. You live in a nation that though it was founded on Christian principles and values, it is quickly becoming more and more godless. You live in a nation where shrines and temples to false gods cover the landscape. I’m not just talking about those religions that are obviously false and have absolutely no connection to the true God; I’m also talking about those churches that are supposed to be Christian, but no longer teach a Christ centered message. You live in a nation where Atheism, which is the belief that there is no god, and Agnosticism, the belief that one cannot truly know if god exists, are becoming more and more popular. You live in a nation that has blessed you with the freedom of religion, but certain groups are working very hard to make sure that this becomes a nation that establishes the freedom from religion. You are living in a nation that is not that much different from ancient Babylon and the Lord your God is calling on you to remain faithful to him.
But how do we do that? The answer is simple! We remain faithful to the Lord by remaining in his Word, for it is only through the Word of God that our faith is strengthened and our faith grows. Just think about how your faith grows when you are regularly in church and you are regularly hearing the Word of God. Just think about how your faith grows and how it is easier to avoid certain temptations when you are regularly partaking of the Lord’s Supper. Just think about how your faith grows and how you are better prepared to remain faithful to the Lord when you are reading his Word for yourselves on a regular basis. Just think about how your faith grows when you do these things, because you are convicted of your sins, and assured forgiveness from Jesus Christ your Savior. Just think about how the Lord works in your hearts and how the Holy Spirit strengthens your faith and gives you that stronger conviction to live for your Savior, simply because you have been in the word.
These are but a few of the blessings that the Lord gives when we remain faithful to him. He blesses us with the assurance of the forgiveness of sins. He blesses us with the assurance of life and salvation. He blesses us with the assurance that not only are our prayers heard, but they are also answered. He blesses us with the power for Christian living. He blesses us with the association of fellow Christians who are facing similar struggles so that we can encourage each other and build each other up as we remain faithful to the Lord. He gives us the ability to stand up against temptations through Jesus Christ our Savior, and when we feel that we cannot stand up he assures us that we can hide ourselves in our Savior who will fight for us. Though there are times when we do fail to remain faithful to the Lord and we fall into sin that one sin is never the end, because when we turn to the Lord in repentance, he forgives us. He washes us clean. He lavishes his grace on us, and he enables us to stand faithful once again.
Though remaining faithful to the Lord was not the easiest thing to do in Babylon, it was a very important thing for me to do. Not only was it important for my own salvation, but it was also important that I remained faithful to the Lord to encourage my fellow Israelites who had also been brought to Babylon. The same thing is true for you today. Because you are living in a world where your Christian beliefs are being challenged, it is all the more important that you remain faithful to the Lord. Because you are living in a land where Atheism is becoming more popular, where sexual sins are becoming normalized, where sexual perversions are thought of as alternate lifestyles, and where certain groups are seeking to do all they can to legislate Christianity to the point of nonexistence, it is all the more important for you to remain faithful to the Lord your God. Though you may not have been threatened with lions because of your faith, we all face different kinds of persecutions because of our beliefs. Yet, it is the Lord who delivers us from those persecutions. Though sometimes he uses them to help us grow in our trust of him and someday he might allow those persecutions to take our lives as he did with so many of the heroes of faith in his Word, we know that when we remain faithful to the Lord it is the Lord who blesses us. We know that no matter what we face in this life, heaven is waiting for us. We know that no matter what hardships the Lord brings into our lives, he is the one who will deliver us from them, either in this life or in the life to come by his side forever.
This is why it is so important for us to remain faithful to the Lord our God, because the Lord is our salvation. Though I know you know my story so well because you learned it as little children, I hope that it has been a blessing to you. I hope it has been a blessing to you and an encouragement to you to remain faithful to the Lord who always remains faithful to you.
Amen.
Pastor David M. Shilling
