Resolved, Part 2

You ever thought about how easy it'd be to rationalize after you walk through that gate down the boulevard?

Reynolds Showers, wonderful little commentary on Daniel, he teaches and works with friends of Israel. He provoked my thinking with some of his thoughts. He said this, he said, it'd be so easy to rationalize by telling themselves, quote, well, under normal circumstances, God's laws to be obeyed, but these aren't normal circumstances. Or they could have rationalized, God is to blame for this. If he hadn't put us in this awful predicament, we wouldn't have to break his law to survive. Have you ever made excuses or tried to rationalize your sin?

Maybe you were simply going along with the crowd. Perhaps your surroundings made faithfulness almost impossible. It's true that there are certain settings where living for God is hard, but it is possible to remain faithful. Daniel faced tremendous pressure to conform to the pagan culture of Babylon, but he resisted. Daniel was resolved that he would remain faithful to God no matter what. This is a lesson for all of us today. We're going to consider Daniel's resolve.

This is wisdom for the heart and here's Stephen Davey. They would have walked through that gate and down what would open into this main boulevard called the Processional Way. It was 150 feet wide, twice the width of this auditorium, with sidewalks on either side, tiled, paved for pedestrian traffic. And these captives would have walked alongside tiled walls that have also been perfectly preserved and excavated on both sides of this Processional Way, stunning in beauty. They're covered with mosaics of palm trees stretching 30 feet into the air and underneath there's this band of lions marching in single file underneath those palm trees. You take a closer look at the bottom of these tiled walls and you can see how the lions were designed to look as if they're marching along with the pedestrian traffic in all of their strength, all of their splendor. Each lion is seven feet long, set against this backdrop of blue tiles. Excavations actually reveal that their coloring varied somewhat.

Color has faded. Some lions had white fur and yellow manes. Other lions had yellow fur and red manes, all part of sort of this stunning display of the grandeur and the wealth and the power of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar was somewhat obsessed with lions. He collected them, along with other wild animals, to show off his power and he would periodically feed his enemies to them. These lions are going to make an appearance by the way in Daniel's life, although he doesn't know it at the time when he walks through this gate.

They'll come about 70 years later. Can you just imagine Daniel and his friends walking through this massive gate down this tiled processional boulevard? I mean this is not Kansas anymore, is it? This isn't little Jerusalem.

This is Babylon the Great. Welcome to your new world. There's another new thing that's going to happen. Not only a new home, but they're about to begin a new education. Now the king orders Ashbenaz the headmaster to begin this three year university course. It's going to be a crash course. It's going to be taught by the top tutors in the land.

Notice the last part of verse four again. They're to be taught the literature and the language of the Chaldeans. Now obviously the purpose of their education was to transform, to convert these Jews into Babylonians. They would have been inducted into the Babylonian mythologies of creation.

The flood, the origin of mankind, the plurality of gods. They would have been taught by the Chaldeans. They were the cream of the Babylonian caste system.

They were at the top of the heap. These were the wise men of old. This is the priestly caste who trained the king and the kings and crowned them.

They were the diviners, the magicians, and they were also the elite educators, the professors of philosophy and astrology and architecture and agriculture and law and history and linguistics. Their goal here is, again, really simple. To turn these backward monotheistic Jewish boys into Babylonian polytheists. It didn't matter if they were atheists at the end of it, but they were going to be turned away from Jehovah much like the educational system of our own culture which is built on humanism and atheism with many professors having as their chief and the destruction of what they would consider to be a rather crude, ignorant crutch called Christianity. I remember one college student coming up to me some time ago telling me that her professor openly admitted to her that one of his goals was to destroy the faith of Christians in his classroom.

So like Daniel, this isn't anything new by the way. Bombarded with both truths and errors. That doesn't mean you can't get a degree from a secular university, but it does mean that you better learn like you eat cherries. You swallow the good stuff and do what? You spit out the seeds. You got to do that all the time. That's not new. In fact, just last week I watched a program about planet Earth. I love to watch those kind of programs, although you might as well turn the volume down because they don't get the point. But at any rate, the pictures are staggering and this woman is gushing in the program about how amazed everybody is that planet Earth is so perfectly suited to support all kinds of life forms and these different pictures of animals and just glorious stuff. And she's talking about how it's amazing that we're at the right distance from the sun so that we are neither fried nor frozen. And I'm saying, yeah, sister, go on. You go on and keep going. And she then said the amazing thing is that our planet, unlike any other that we've been able to discover, is covered for the most part with water, which is critical to the sustaining of life and all of its form. And I'm going, yeah, go on. And then she said, and we don't know where it came from. Oh, brother, the camera shifted to a guy standing on the bank of a river.

Some educated guy who was explaining the likelihood that millions of years ago, I'm not sure how many throw a few million in there, but millions of years ago, Earth was bombarded by thousands of asteroids, each of them carrying water, which filled up the lakes, rivers and seas. That's great. I love it. Well, don't fault them. I mean, frankly, when you think about it, you've got to come up with something, right?

We know you get nothing out of nothing. Something had to happen. See, Daniel has been taught creationism from his childhood.

Now that's all going to be changed. The Babylonians could actually say to him, look, we've got our theories, too. They did. They could even say we have our tree of life. And they did.

They could say, we've got our view of a flood. And they did. We've got our pantheon of gods and from them we came. And it wasn't one God.

It was many. Why in the world do you think that all of this could come from one God? And our gods, boys, are obviously superior to your God because you're here. A new world, a new education. They're even given thirdly new names. This is all part of the psychological and the mental reprogramming.

This is a clever tool. Look at verse 7 here. We're told that the commander of the officials assigned new names to them. And to Daniel, he assigned the name Belteshazzar to Hananiah, Shadrach, to Mishael, Meshach, and to Azariah, Abednego. Now these original Hebrew names had been given to them at birth to reflect the glory of God in any number of his names provided.

It was going to now change to remind them every time their name is called, your God is history. So Daniel, Daniel from Elohim, means God is my judge. His name is changed to Belteshazzar, Bell being one of their chief deities.

You're now the prince of Bell. Hananiah means God is gracious. And we're going to change that to Shadrach. That means illumined by the sun God. Again, this is designed to directly contradict the meaning of their original name.

Under the gracious care of God. No, now you're under the gracious care of the sun God. Mishael's name had the meaning who is like God. We're going to change that to Meshach. Who is like Venus? Some believe a derivative of Ishtar, the goddess of sensual love. Every time his name is called, who's like my God now?

Who's like this pagan goddess of sensual love? Imagine how that stung his ears every time he heard it. Azariah's name, which means the Lord is my helper, is changed to Abednego, I worship Nego, Nebo, the god of wisdom. And wouldn't these boys be wondering now? I mean, were our old names for real? Was it all make believe? Is our God really gracious and all wise and capable of caring for us and all powerful?

It doesn't look like it, does it? Imagine the pressure to just kind of throw it all away in this new world, being tutored in new ways, daily reminded that Jerusalem and Jehovah are relics of the past every time they're called by their new name. There's another I want to point out to you. We'll just simply call this new temptations.

New temptations. Because they were. They hadn't encountered this before. In fact, the rest of chapter 1 simply details this one issue. You could say it this way, to eat or not to eat, that is the question.

I mean, basically that's what they've got to struggle with. Are they going to eat the king's food, drink his wine or not? Now, the key to understanding what happens is what really provides us with a theme verse for the entire book. In fact, if you're looking for a verse that speaks of Daniel, it would be verse 8. You get that verse, you get Daniel. Notice there. But Daniel made up his mind that he would not defile himself.

And then you can just add anything you want on the end of it. But at this point in time, that would mean he's not going to eat the king's choice food and he's not going to drink his wine. In other words, Daniel and his friends are going to meet these new temptations and guess what they're going to do?

They're going to come up with a brand new resolution. Resolved. Never to defile ourselves with a king's food or wine. Well, what's wrong with that?

A couple of problems. First, the food would have been unclean meat, non-kosher meat. The Jews were forbidden to eat under the existing laws of Moses. They never had to say no to that stuff before. But now can you imagine? Their first lunch banquet, the buffet line, it would have rivaled Golden Corral.

Probably would have exceeded it. I mean, it's all there. Imagine pork products and shellfish and meat offered to idols and surely in this new world it's okay to dig in because if you notice, everybody else is digging in except Daniel and his friends and I can just hear, you know, hey Daniel, you got to try this honey baked ham. This is great stuff.

You got to try this shrimp salad. Is God good or what? Historians tell us the king's wine was poured out first as an offering to their gods. So libation to drink was to participate in their pagan feast. So Daniel and his three friends are sitting there and they will not touch it and they're hungry and this is the meal and they're sitting there with their stomachs growling in protest, arguing, I'm sure with their minds. Brand new. They'd never had to turn any of this stuff down before.

Think about it. They'd been walking through Jerusalem and they smelled bacon frying in the air. Somebody was in deep trouble, right?

They never had to say no to a ham sandwich. This is brand new and they resolved to say no. Maybe you're facing a brand new temptation. Maybe it's just surfaced recently. Maybe it's power and some promotion. You're tempted now in the way you treat others. Maybe it's unexpected flattery and it's a new temptation or maybe undeserved criticism. Perhaps it's money or laziness or bitterness or lust. As Spurgeon wrote this week in his devotional, you look out a window and a brand new corruption springs into existence.

Brand new. These boys resolved to say no, which now throws the high school principal or the college, I should say, university president into a flurry. He can't have four starving students on his hands. You know, sons of nobles, the king's going to have his head. This is when Daniel offers a compromise to the headmaster. Look down at verse 12.

Please, again, very respectful. He's not trying to burn down the cafeteria. You know, get rid of the headmaster. Just please test your servants for 10 days and let us be given some vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then let our appearance be observed in your presence and the appearance of the youths who are eating the king's choice food and deal with your servants according to what you see. Here's the test.

And man, is this a test or what? Give us vegetables to eat for 10 days. Vegetables and water from the word zera'im. Plants from the garden. I mean, this is lettuce. This is lima beans. You know what they are? Sawdust covered with cardboard.

Give me 10 days of that and I'll die. This was a plan that I would have never conceived of. Green peas. You know how I love those. It's been a while since I've mentioned it. You might be new.

My wife would slip a little can of green peas into a casserole and at the end of dinner, the casserole would be gone and the little pile of green peas would be right there. They were not raptured up. They are unbelievers. I left them right there.

She didn't think that was funny either. But at any rate, can you imagine? These guys are teenagers. They're always hungry. They don't eat.

They graze, right? You raise teenage boys, two, three gallons of milk a week. Now my wife and I buy a quart and it spoils before it's gone. After the third day, they're probably saying to Daniel, what were you thinking? I mean, why not 10 days of breadsticks and alfredo sauce or 10 days of lasagna or 10 days of spaghetti or something?

Why in the world? I want you to notice something miraculous. Maybe this is why God superintended his thoughts and he said, let us just have raw vegetables, maybe cooked, just plain. Give us a salad.

Look at verse 15. At the end of 10 days, their appearance seemed better and they were fatter than all they used. Wait a second. You go on a salad diet so that you can what? Lose weight. You don't gain weight eating carrots. You don't gain weight eating salad.

You at least stay the same but you lose weight. It says here, don't miss this, and they were fatter. Literal Hebrew means they were fatter. They were fatter. They gained weight.

That was miraculous, which was the point. You see, God is distinguishing these four because did you notice the tragedy of that statement? They're fatter than all the other Jewish boys. That had discarded their faith at the Gate of Ishtar. See, God is at work vindicating their resolution. Verse 17, if you're wondering, tells us that God clearly was giving them knowledge and intelligence in every branch of literature and wisdom. I mean, here they are thrown into this university system and they're getting A pluses.

It wasn't for them to get all swelled up about it just like for any of you. Whatever talents, whatever gifts, whatever intelligence quotient, what you got on your SATs, yes hard work, yes discipline, yes study, and then God gets the glory. Made you adept at those subjects because he has a reason, a purpose for all of that. Graduation day arrives now. Verse 18, notice that. Then at the end of the days, which the king had specified for presenting them. In other words, three years now are up. This is popping circumstance.

The band is playing. Here they come marching. They're going to get a personal interview with the king because it tells us, verse 19, the king personally talked with them. He questioned them.

And out of them all, not one was found like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. So they entered the king's personal service. You know what that means? They graduated and the king personally hired them into his cabinet. They resolved. And in that collaboration, God vindicated. Why? Because he had a reason. These boys are now inside the system.

And are they ever going to shine? Let me make three quick observations from this example before we dash out of here and go to Olive Garden and eat something we shouldn't eat. Let me give you three very quick ones. Number one, resolving to follow Christ means that you refuse to allow your culture to rewrite your character. You ever thought about how easy it would be to rationalize after you walk through that gate down the boulevard? Reynolds Showers, wonderful little commentary on Daniel. He teaches and works with friends of Israel. He provoked my thinking with some of his thoughts. He said this. He said it would be so easy to rationalize by telling themselves, quote, well, under normal circumstances, God's law is to be obeyed, but these aren't normal circumstances. Or they could have rationalized. God is to blame for this. If he hadn't put us in this awful predicament, we wouldn't have to break his law to survive.

It's his fault. Or they could have said, if we disobey the king, it might cost us our lives. And in God's value system, the preservation of life is of greater consequence than obeying them. Sounds like great theology. Or they could have just justified their sin by saying, I like this one, if we eat the king's food and drink his wine, enter into the pagan festival, we'll be placed in government posts and think of the great testimony and impact we could have for God in such an influential position. Pass the ham.

Dig in. And all of them did. Except these four. I love Jonathan Edwards' Resolution Number 61 that directly countered this idea of justifying our sin and rationalizing. I love the way he put it, he said it this way, resolved that I will not give way to that which I find relaxes my mind from being fully fixed on my conviction, whatever excuse I may have for it. Didn't that cut right to the heart of who we are? I mean, we can justify anything. We can even make our compromise sound spiritual.

Not Daniel and his friends. And maybe you would think, come on, I mean, if we were there at a council, it's just food. It's just food. It's just a little thing.

I mean, a little shrimp salad for goodness sake. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus Christ never said whoever can be trusted in big things can be trusted in little things? No, he said whoever can be trusted in little things can be trusted in big things.

They passed the test. Resolving to follow Christ means you refuse to allow your culture to rewrite your character. In other words, a new home does not have to create in you a new heart. Secondly, resolving to follow Christ means that you choose to follow God without guarantees. And I don't want you to miss this.

There's no voice whispering in Daniel's ear. Daniel, look, you follow me and I'll make sure you get hired by the king. You follow after Jehovah and you'll graduate valedictorian.

You'll get the promotion. You follow after me and I'll make sure your life works out. Guess what happens? You follow God and life doesn't work out. And then you wonder, like they would have wondered, is our God really the true and living God? No voices from heaven, no angelic messengers in the clouds, no guarantee preceding this resolution. In fact, they didn't know if they wouldn't be executed. Don't ever forget, Daniel will never return home again. He will die in Babylon in his 90s. Number three, resolving to follow Christ means that you refuse to make the multitude your model. For the most part, Daniel and his friends are going to stand alone.

They refuse to be conformed to their world, to follow the crowd. It's interesting to me, though, as I have read and reread verse 19, the implication that these four young men were the only ones to receive a government post. They made a resolution, God determined their occupation, and instead of being changed by this impressive capital, this empire of Babylon, they will change Babylonians from the king all the way down for the glory of God. That was Steven Davey, the pastor of the Shepherd's Church in Cary, North Carolina.

Today's message is called Resolved. It comes from Steven's series on the life of Daniel entitled The Original Wise Man. You can learn more about us if you visit our website, which is wisdomonline.org. Once you go there, you'll be able to access the complete library of Steven's Bible teaching ministry. Steven's been teaching the Bible for over 36 years.

In that time, he's preached hundreds of sermons. All of those are posted to our website. You'll find that collection of sermons organized by Book of the Bible. If there's a particular book that you want to study, and if Steven has preached through it, you can listen or read each message. All of that content is available to you free of charge.

You can access it anytime at wisdomonline.org. December is fast approaching, and with that comes the celebration of Christmas. Think about the last few Christmas seasons.

Does the busyness of the holidays distract you from the true meaning of what you celebrate? We have a resource to help you lead your family in an intentional Christ-honoring activity. It's called the Advent Event. This is a fun, easy and enriching family activity to help focus attention on the birth of Jesus while discovering the big picture of God's plan through the entire Bible. Kids of all ages will enjoy the craft, the stories, the sounds and the motions that make up the Advent Event.

And best of all, it fits easily into your busy family schedule. But it's important that you sign up for this free resource in November. It begins December 1 and has a family activity for each day in December. All the information you need is at wisdomonline.org forward slash advent. Let me give you that again. It's wisdomonline.org forward slash advent. Do that right now then join us back here next time on Wisdom for the Heart.