Daniel

Iain M. Duguid

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781596384538
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

Daniel gives us more than moral lessons and a prophetic timetable. The book of Daniel points us to Christ, both as the servant and as the heavenly Son of Man.

1

WHEN THE WORLD DOES ITS WORST

Daniel 1:1–21

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 this way. (Dan. 1:8)

There is a fascinating genre of literature that goes by the name “Alternative Histories.” These novels imagine what life would be like if history had turned out differently from the way that it did. In the alternative history novel SS-GB,¹ Len Deighton imagines, “What if Adolf Hitler had focused all of his attention on invading Britain in 1940 and had not started a second front against Russia?” Very possibly, he would have made a successful assault, and the result would be a very different face for Britain and Europe today. In all likelihood, people in those countries would have grown up in a repressive police state, living in constant fear of the authorities.

For some Europeans, of course, that is not such an alternative history. I regularly teach in a small seminary in Latvia, and the young men in this country know precisely what it is like to grow up under a repressive regime. After having a brief spell of independence between the two world wars, their small country was annexed by the Russians in 1940 and spent most of the next fifty years under alien rule until they were finally able to regain their freedom in 1991. It was a time of terror and intense suffering for all Latvians, and especially for the church, as their world was overrun by enemies who were determined to stamp out their culture, their language, their identity, and their religion. Anyone who was a potential leader was either executed or exiled to some distant part of the Soviet empire.

Can you imagine what it must have been like to be exiled from home to a foreign city, to be alone and scared, a long way from familiar surroundings? How would you cope in such a hostile setting? What truths could you cling to? Would you remain faithful to your former identity or simply be assimilated into your new surroundings?

THE EXPERIENCE OF EXILE

This is not entirely an imaginative exercise for us either, however. Even though our Western experience of the hostility of this world is certainly not normally as extreme as that of postwar Latvia, it nonetheless remains true for all of us that we are exiles here on earth. As citizens of heaven, Christians live as aliens and strangers in a land that is not their own, and there are times when the world’s enmity to the people of God becomes evident. The hostility of the world is often shown in the efforts it makes to squeeze us into its mold. It wants to make us conform to its values and standards and not to stick out from the crowd. The pressure is on us, in school and at work, to be like everyone else in the way that we dress and the language that we use. We are expected to laugh at certain kinds of jokes and gossip about certain kinds of people. If we want to get on and be promoted in the world of business, we are pressured to leave our values and religious beliefs at the front entrance and to live a lifestyle entirely assimilated to the business community. We are expected to value the things the surrounding culture values, to pursue passionately its glittering prizes, and generally to live in obedience to its idols. We have to choose daily whether to be part of this world in which we live, or to take the difficult path of standing against it.

How do you cope in the midst of the brokenness and alienation that is life here on earth? What truths can you cling to when the jagged edges of existence are twisting against you and cutting into your flesh? What do you need to know to live a life of faith in an alien world, a world that is frequently a place of sickness and pain, of broken relationships and bitter tears, of sorrow and death? These are the questions to which the Book of Daniel will give us the answers. It is a book written to God’s Old Testament people, Israel, when they were experiencing the brokenness and pain of life in exile, far away from home. It was designed to encourage them in their walk with God, who was with them in the midst of their pain.

GOD’S FAITHFULNESS IN JUDGMENT

Daniel’s own story of exile began like this:

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.

Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring in 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. (Dan. 1:1–5)

To live faithfully in exile, we first need to know God’s faithfulness. This is not altogether as comforting a truth as you might imagine, since the first aspect of God’s faithfulness that we see in this chapter is God’s faithfulness in judgment. 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 in the late seventh century B.C. As Daniel 1:2 makes clear, the exile came upon Judah because the Lord handed King Jehoiakim over to the power of Nebuchadnezzar. God gave his people into the hand of their enemies.

The Lord had warned Israel of the sure consequences of their sins in the Book of Leviticus. 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 (Lev. 26). If they served the Lord faithfully and kept the terms of the covenant, then they would experience his favor and blessing (26:3–13). However, if they abandoned him and violated his covenant, they would experience his wrath and disfavor (26:14–39). Their crops would be ruined and they would become prey for wild animals and for their enemies (26:19–25). If they persisted in their disobedience, the Lord would scatter them among the nations and they would waste away in exile (26:33, 39). This was exactly Israel’s fate as it unfolded. Because of their persistent disobedience and rebellion against God over many generations, the Lord finally handed them over into the power of their enemies, and so they went into exile.

Yet the fate of Daniel and his friends in being dragged off into exile was not merely a fulfillment of the general covenantal curse of Leviticus 26. It was also the specific fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah in 2 Kings 20:18. 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 the prophet Isaiah.

Why was the Lord so upset with Hezekiah? What was the problem with giving the envoys from Babylon a royal tour of the palace? The answer is that in the world of ancient diplomacy, nothing came free. When Merodach-Baladan sent envoys and a gift to Hezekiah, it wasn’t merely a friendly gesture of goodwill on his recovery from sickness. Rather, he was soliciting Hezekiah’s help and support in his ongoing struggle against Assyria.² So when Hezekiah showed his envoys around his treasure houses, he was responding positively to Merodach-Baladan’s overtures of alliance and seeking to show him that he had the resources to be a useful ally against Assyria. In spite of the Lord’s miraculous deliverance of Jerusalem from the surrounding armies of Sennacherib and the Assyrians in the previous chapter of the Book of Kings, Hezekiah was now looking to political means for solving the Assyrian problem, through alliances with Babylon. Politics had replaced trust in the Lord.

This is not merely an ancient temptation. Modern people too may be tempted to place their hopes in political alliances rather than wholeheartedly trusting in the Lord. The cost may be the loss of our distinctive spiritual voice as the church becomes just one more political action committee. Alternatively, we may invest our career hopes in adopting the world’s methods of getting ahead, only to discover much later the cost of these methods to our homes and families.

Isaiah’s word of judgment on Hezekiah’s strategy was specific and severe. Because Hezekiah sought to preserve his treasures by trusting in Babylon, the Babylonians would come and carry off everything in his palace (2 Kings 20:17). Far from assuring the security of his line, his foolish spiritual alliance would result in some of his own offspring being taken off to become eunuchs in the palace of the Babylonian king (20:18). It is this specific word of judgment that is fulfilled in the opening verses of the Book of Daniel. Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and carried off treasures from the temple of God to put in the house of his own god (Dan. 1:2), and he took some of the royal family and nobility—the descendants of Hezekiah—and put them under the charge of Ashpenaz, the chief of his court officials, or eunuchs (1:4).³ God’s judgment upon the line of Hezekiah had been faithfully carried through, just as Isaiah had said.

JUDGMENT AND HOPE

Yet the recognition that their fate came from the hand of God as a faithful act of judgment was itself an encouragement to the exiles. Their future was not controlled by Babylon or its gods, but by the Lord, the God of heaven (Dan. 2:19). The one who had sent them into exile had also promised to be with them there, and ultimately to restore them from exile after a time of judgment. An implicit parallel is drawn between the sacred articles stolen from the temple and the people who were taken by Nebuchadnezzar: the young men are described as “free from defect” (me’um), a word more commonly used of sacrifices (1:4).⁴ Just as the Lord allowed Nebuchadnezzar to carry away the temple vessels, he also allowed him to carry off some of the best of his people. That parallel further implies that just as the temple vessels would inevitably eventually make their way home (see Ezra 1:7), so too would his exiled people.⁵ God will not abandon what is his own.

This is an important point. During its hardest moments, life often seems out of control. Our fate may sometimes seem to lie in the hands of hostile people, or in the outworking of impersonal forces of one kind or another. Yet the reality is that our every experience in this world, from the apparently coincidental at one end of the spectrum, to the determined acts of wicked men and women on the other, lies under the control of our sovereign God. The sparrow does not fall to the ground without his permission (Matt. 10:29), which demonstrates that even the most trivial of events are within his view. At the other extreme, though, even the most wicked act of all time, the crucifixion of Jesus, was also the outworking of God’s predetermined purpose (Acts 4:28). No sinful act ever catches God by surprise or thwarts his sovereign will. Everything that we experience in life, no matter how difficult or apparently meaningless it may seem, is God’s purpose for us. For believers in Christ, each circumstance is the Lord’s means of furthering his sanctifying goals. He has not abandoned or forgotten us. On the contrary, he will walk through these trials and preserve us through them by his grace.

RESISTING REPROGRAMING

So it was that in the will of God, Daniel and his three friends found themselves exiled in Babylon: “Among these 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” (Dan. 1:6–7).

The four were probably still only young teenagers at the time, and in Babylon they were to be exposed to an intense program of reeducation. First, their very names were changed. In place of their good Hebrew and Yahwistic names, Daniel (“God is my judge”), Hananiah (“the Lord is gracious”), Mishael (“Who is what God is?”), and Azariah (“The Lord is a helper”), they were assigned pagan, Babylonian names: Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (1:7). These Babylonian names invoked the help of the Babylonian gods, Marduk, Bel, and Nebo, rather than Israel’s Lord.⁶ The four young men were also instructed in the language and literature of the Babylonians, so that its myths and legends would take the place of the Scriptures as the source of their wisdom and worldview (1:4). Third, they were to be royally supplied from the king’s table, with a daily allowance of food and wine, so that they would become accustomed to a life of dependence on their new master (1:5). At the end of this three-year initiation process, with their previous identity fully obliterated, they would enter the service of Nebuchadnezzar (1:5).

This provides us with a picture of the world’s strategy of spiritual reprograming. At its most effective, it consists of a subtle combination of threat and promise, of enforcement and encouragement. Those who are totally recalcitrant may be sent to prison camps or gulags if necessary, but the majority of the population are far more easily assimilated if they are well fed and provided for. After all, more flies are caught with honey than with vinegar. The fundamental goal of the whole procedure, though, was in one way or another to obliterate all memory of Israel and Israel’s God from the lips and the minds of these young men, and to instill into them a sense of total dependence on Nebuchadnezzar for all of the good things in life.

Isn’t this how Satan still operates 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 that 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 r...