An Uncompromising Life

God calls us to separation, and unless we are living a separated life, we are destroying our worship and we are destroying our service to Him. There must be a purging and a purification in our lives. That's what God calls us to. Have you ever been tempted to fudge some numbers on your tax return or embellish the truth on a job application? No big deal. Everyone cuts corners now and then.

Pretty much standard practice, right? But the question you cannot ignore is this. What does God say about compromise? John MacArthur is going to help you answer that question today on Grace To You as he kicks off a compelling series from the book of Daniel titled An Uncompromising Life. Now, you know, John, there really is something powerful about a man or a woman who refuses to compromise, either big ways or small.

Of course, powerful doesn't necessarily mean popular. Sticking to principle often means paying a price, doesn't it? Yeah, you know, it's a sad time we live in. You see it like I see it everywhere.

The hypocrisy of our culture, the hypocrisy of pastors whose sin is exposed, the hypocrisy of church leaders and church members whose sin is made known, the hypocrisy of people in leadership. This is a society of liars and deceivers. I mean, it reaches a place where who do you trust? You virtually can't believe anything anybody says. Because, hey, there's no premium on telling the truth. This is a culture where you can make up whatever story you want to make up. You can say you're a woman when you're not. You can say you're a man when you're not.

It doesn't matter. It's whatever you want to say in a world full of lies, in a world full of compromise. An uncompromising life is a rare, rare reality.

And we're going to be looking at a study of a model of an uncompromising life. And that life is the life of Daniel. Daniel in the Old Testament. Compromise and temptation all around us.

And it was all around him. And it's possible to compromise and destroy your testimony in all kinds of ways. But Daniel never did that, and he sets a model for us.

And I don't want you to miss a day of this series that starts right now. That's right, friend. If you apply principles from this series, you will stand out in this sin-cursed world, helping the people all around you to see that there is something different about your life and the God you follow, and that becomes a platform for the gospel. So with that, here's John to show you the path to an uncompromising life. We live in a day of compromise. In fact, I believe that from the time we begin our life in the world, we pretty well learn the art of compromise. All the way along our life, we go the line of least resistance. We hold a conviction until it gets in the way of our comfort or our ease. We have a standard as long as it doesn't violate something we wish to do.

If we can get by with a little less than our best, we'll do it. If we can cheat a little on the divine principles or even the principles we say we believe, we'll do that too, in many cases, if it accomplishes our goals. And that is a very personal approach to life that finds itself a very world perspective on life, because all of us as individuals living that way make a whole world of compromise. Frankly, expedience is the ruling standard of human life. We worship the great God pragmatism.

I suppose our motto today could be, if it works for you, do it. We are pragmatists more than anything else. And since in our society today we have abandoned any moral standard, we have cut ourselves completely loose from Christian principle, we no longer are concerned for a biblical morality, we could care less about what God has to say, at least for the most part. We are left with only the philosophy of expedience or pragmatism.

Whatever works, whatever accomplishes your goal, whatever gains your end, that's what you do. And so we easily give up our consciences, we easily give up our convictions, we easily let go of our standards to gain some practical end. And the amazing part of it is that our society seems to have little conscience left, little sense of guilt or remorse at all. And compromising standards and compromising truths has found its way into the church. In fact, we have compromised with the world so repeatedly, we have compromised with the world so often, that frankly, folks, I think we don't even understand what the compromises are anymore.

Whenever the world comes up with something, we invariably will follow along. We have so long compromised with the world, we have become so engulfed in its materialistic viewpoint, in its economics, in its style of life, that there is little possibility that we can even understand what an uncompromising life really means. We fight to be separated from the world, and yet we are unable to define what that separation means because we've been so brainwashed by the system. We've accepted the world's thought patterns, we've accepted the world's value systems, we've accepted the world's attitudes, in so many cases we have accepted its economics, we are indulging ourselves, we have accepted its morality, and again we are indulging ourselves, and even though we know the Bible teaches something, if we feel we want to do it, we go ahead and do it anyway.

Recently we had an occasion to have some people come in for counseling who desired to be married, and we found no biblical justification for their marriage, counseled them that they really had no right to get married, which didn't faze them in the least, they simply went down the street, got married, and showed up here again the next week. Compromise. An inability to deal with the biblical data as God intends us to deal because we are overwhelmed with our own personal desires. And so we substitute ourselves as the one to be pleased rather than God, and we learn well the art of compromise.

We indulge ourselves in the world's priorities, we take stock of the world's entertainment, and on and on it goes. Scripture calls upon us to do just the very opposite. And we could spend a lot of time just studying this from a theological perspective. We could go through the Old Testament and we could study the very call of God to be separate from the world. We could go into the gospels and see what Jesus said.

We could go into the epistles and we could study it there. But it doesn't really need to be done other than to simply say from one end of the Bible to the other, the whole approach of God to His people is that we are to live apart from the world. It's just the whole message of God to His people. When God designed the nation Israel, He built right into their very daily living, the way they dressed and the way they ate and the way they conducted themselves in a daily routine. And the calendar for the year, He built in safeguards to prevent them from intermingling as it were with pagans.

He's done the same for all of His people. We have a standard that really can't be compatible with the world. And yet how easily do we compromise? How easily do we abandon our absolutes? How easily do we allow our character qualities to become faulty as we seek to please ourselves?

under the pressure of the system in which we live. God calls us to separation and unless we are living a separated life, we are destroying our worship and we are destroying our service to Him. There must be a purging and a purification in our lives. That's what God calls us to. That's the standard by which we are to live. There's no better example of the character of an uncompromising spirit than Daniel.

So let's look at him. Daniel was a great man, a righteous man. We're going to see why in the first eight verses as we look at it. Beginning in verse 1 and 2, we find the plight, the plight.

The book begins on a very sorrowful note. What we find there is the first of three movements in the Babylonian captivity. The northern kingdom has long gone into captivity and now Judah, the remaining people of Israel, have been unfaithful, disobedient, and so their judgment has arrived. Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, who now for all intents and purposes rules that whole part of the world, comes against Israel or Judah, besieges it, and takes away the captives. So in this series of three deportations, the first one occurring during the time of Jehoiakim, the captives are taken off to Babylon.

And so the book begins with a sorrowful note. You can't help but think back how many times God had warned the people. He warned them in three ways. Number one, He warned them through the prophets, constantly preaching.

If they didn't repent, they'd be judged. Secondly, He warned them by the Assyrians who invaded their country and put tremendous pressure. And each time God delivered them, but they got a little taste of what it would be like to be under foreign oppression. But they never heard the prophets and they never learned from the Assyrians. And finally, God warned them by taking the northern kingdom into captivity.

They should have learned when they saw what happened to the north, but they didn't learn from any of those things. And so they continued in their sin and God was patient and merciful and gracious as long as He could be. And the same God who said in Genesis 6, My Spirit shall not always strive with man stopped striving with Judah and brought judgment and they were taken to captivity. Now in the first deportation came Daniel, his friends, and another whole group of young men that are indicated in the passage.

But the whole idea here is to set the scene. Daniel is taken captive. The whole nation hasn't gone into captivity yet because God wants Daniel there to get him set up for when the rest of the people show up. Now verse 2 tells us, just an interesting note, that when Nebuchadnezzar did this first siege and actually defeated Jehoiakim, and it might be interesting to add this point, that when he defeated Jehoiakim, he never dethroned him. He had seen that in the past Jehoiakim had been a willing vassal to Pharaoh in Egypt, so he figured Jehoiakim was a weak enough person to just leave him there. And that he would be intimidated enough not to do anything. So he just left Jehoiakim alone.

Let him kind of sit it out. But in order to prove his power, he stole all of the vessels of value out of the house of God. He literally robbed the temple, took all the things of value.

Why? Because if you could steal things from the god or gods of a foreign power, you could prove your greatness. If their god couldn't defend them any better than to hang on to the stuff in his own temple, you didn't have to worry about it. So conquerors that conquered nations invariably gathered all the riches of the temple of the gods of that nation and called them back to their own country to affirm their power over false gods, foreign gods. And so Nebuchadnezzar gathered all of this up and it says he took it into the house of his god. There are so many names for who his god was that it's almost impossible to know, but it seems as though the main gods are related to the god Bel, which is also related to Baal.

It sometimes comes under the name of Merodach and sometimes under the name of Marduk and it just goes on and on. They could never get their theology straight and they were always scrambling everybody up anyway. Whoever his god was into the treasure house of his own god, he took the vessels of the temple.

Now the reason I think this is indicated to us is to show how total the coming doom was going to be. God wasn't even defending Judah anymore. God's own temple could be robbed and God didn't put up a fuss. The defense of Judah was over. God had defended them against the Assyrians.

God was no longer defending them at all. You know, this must have been a hard time for Daniel too, even, oh, 70 years later after Daniel's deportation. 70 years later in the 6th chapter and the 10th verse when Daniel prayed, he faced Jerusalem.

70 years later his heart still longed for the city of Jerusalem. You can imagine what must have gone on in his heart at the very time he was taken captive. So the plight, a captive people in a foreign land.

Now let's look secondly at the plot, the plot, from the plight to the plot. Verses 3 to 7, this is absolutely one of the most fascinating parts of the book and it sets the stage for everything that's going to come to pass in Daniel's life there. And the king spoke unto Ashpenaz, the master of his eunuchs, that he should bring certain of the children of Israel and of the king's seed and of the princes.

Now he wanted hostages and he wanted hostages right out of the royal family and hostages right out of the princely nobility of the land of Judah. By the way, the word spoke and the king spoke in Hebrew is actually the word commanded. The word Ashpenaz some people feel is a proper name and this is a man named Ashpenaz. Other people feel that this term means a title, referring to somebody who is a master or somebody who is a leader or somebody who is an overseer. Whether it is a title or a name is not really important. For our sake, we'll just accept the fact that it's a name.

It's a lot easier to deal with in those terms. So the king commands this person Ashpenaz and it tells us that he is the master of his eunuchs. Now every king had people who worked for him or served him. In the court of a king there were eunuchs. Basically a eunuch was a person of whom Isaiah says it could be said that he was a dry tree. In other words, he had gone through a surgical emasculation to render him a eunuch. Those kinds of people were then placed in the control of harems, in specific duties within the royal setting. It also is true, and we want to stress this so that you'll understand it clearly, that because commonly eunuchs served the king, the term eunuch became used for a lot of people who served the king who were not necessarily surgically made into eunuchs.

The word then could refer to somebody who had had that physical operation or it could refer to someone who just served the king. In fact, Potiphar is indicated as a eunuch in Egypt and we know that he was married and had a wife because we happened to have an encounter with Joseph and Potiphar's wife. So in the case of Potiphar, he may have been designated as a eunuch who was not really a eunuch physically. But Isaiah's definition does indicate the physical part of being a eunuch. Now whether Daniel was actually a eunuch physically or not is difficult to know. It would seem to me, and I think I mentioned this in the past, that it's very likely that the king would render these young men eunuchs when they enter into his service and that might explain in some fashion why Daniel never married, there's never an identification with the family all his life, he finds himself serving the king. Whatever the case, this man Ashpenaz was the master of the people associated with the king. Eunuchs in a physical sense, eunuchs in the sense of service to the king. So this man then is told, and we want to get straight who he is because we're going to meet him again. This man has an important office.

The word master literally equals the word prince. He is to collect these young men. Now some historians have indicated that there were somewhere between 50 and 75 of them at least. There happens to be apparently some data that they can put their finger on to indicate that it was a relatively large group.

Fifty to seventy-five may be a good guess. Young men, notice they were the children of Israel. That doesn't mean the northern kingdom because by now those in the north, some of them had migrated to the south from the ten tribes before the holocaust in the north so that all of Judah really embodied the seed of Israel. So some of the children of Israel who are of the king's seed and the prince's, royal family and nobility, he wanted the best for hostages in order to make sure Jehoiakim didn't do anything he shouldn't do. Secondly, now watch this, Nebuchadnezzar also wanted to train these young men in his courts, in his palace to assist him in administering Jewish affairs because already in his mind he had concluded that he would be making Judah a vassal state to Babylon. He was going to capture the world and he was going to have to know how to handle these Jewish people. And so he wanted some well-trained Jewish boys that he could literally melt down and reform into Chaldeans but who had a Jewish background so that he could use them in the manipulations he felt would be necessary to administer his rule among the Jews.

Look at verse 4. It says, Not only were they to be of the king's seed, and that would be the royal family itself, and the prince's, that would be the nobility in the court, but they were to be youths, yeladim in Hebrew. And it's very hard to define this word exactly, but most commentators agree that they could be no older than 17 years old and probably no younger than 13 or 14. And so Daniel at this time is a teenager.

We know that 70 years later he is still ruling. He is still leading in Babylon, and so he must have been very young at this time. These are young men then, somewhere between the ages of 13 and 17 or so, and it's likely that Daniel maybe was either 14 or 15 years old. No older than that. Hang on to that because that's a fantastic thought. This is just a kid, just a teenager. Now I want you to see the kind of boys they wanted.

Really interesting. Verse 4, In whom was no blemish. The word in the Hebrew is mu'um, and it means a physical blemish. They didn't want anybody who had any physical handicap. They wanted a flawless physical specimen. It's talking there about the health of the individual. Secondly, notice it says well favored. Now that had to do with their face, their good looks. They were looking at the physical characteristics. This is typical. When Israel went to choose a king, which one did they pick? The tallest and the handsomest guy in the country, Saul, and what a loser he was.

It's typical. Looks get us the best looking, the best shaped, well formed, virile, handsome young men. We don't want anybody with a blemish physically or facially. And not only physically, but how else does the world evaluate people? First, their physical features and secondly, their brains.

The physical and the mental, that's really all the world has to go on, and so that's where they go from there. Skillful in all wisdom. They have four intellectual qualifications here.

First, skillful in all wisdom. That means superior intellectually, highly intelligent, with an ability to make distinctions, ability to make decisions, the ability to apply truth to situations. They wanted guys who were really superior intellectually. Secondly, under the mental, gifted in knowledge.

That means superior in education. They had the right data. They had the right learning. The literal Hebrew says, knowers of knowledge, those who had information, who were good students, who were well educated. So they wanted those with education and those who knew how to apply that in terms of making distinctions and decisions. Thirdly, they wanted those who understood science.

And apparently this Hebrew term has the idea of the ability to correlate. First, to know facts. Secondly, to apply facts. And thirdly, to correlate facts.

To bring lots of things into harmony and make decisions. In fact, that's essentially what science does, doesn't it? Science draws conclusions from the correlation of data. They had to be able to think in terms of correlation. Finally, and who had ability in them to stand in the king's palace. Now this had to do with a third dimension of the things they were looking for. First was physical, no blemish and well formed. Then was mental, skillful in all wisdom, gifted in knowledge and understanding science. And third was social.

They had to have the poise and the manner and the social graces to stand in a king's palace and not come off like a klutz. Now I'm telling you, this I'd never make it. In the first place, I'd get disqualified in every category.

But if I ever did get past the first two, which couldn't happen, I would never make it in the third one. Because whenever I get into some very important situation, I always do the wrong thing. I remember when I was in Dallas, Texas, and someone called up and said, we want you to have lunch today with such and such a lady. She appreciated your message.

She wants to meet you. And we're going to be having lunch at the top floor club for the oil men of Dallas. And you're to be the guest of this lady. And I said, terrific. And Sam Erickson was with me and I said, come on, Sam, and you can come too. And I didn't realize what a big deal.

And here I'm bringing Sam along, you know, like it's my party. So anyway, I was busy during the day and I just threw on a sweater. I'd been studying and just threw on a sweater and went out the door.

I was just going to have lunch with this nice lady. And we went in this elevator and we kept going higher and higher. I thought maybe we got in the Rapture in the middle of the ride.

Finally we got to the top floor and I walked out and I'm telling you, this place was something else. And you just feel funny immediately. You feel conspicuous, like your shoes are bad and your pants are wrong. And there's something really bad.

Your hair, you know, your ears aren't in the right place. You just, you feel, you feel funny because everybody's staring. And there was a lot of, yes sir, were you looking for someone? Yes, I'm supposed to meet and I gave the name and the guy just kind of looked me over. And this dear lady came out and she said, oh, it's nice to meet you.

And I didn't know what was wrong. Well, I found out that you can't go up that elevator without a coat and tie. And so the man went in the back closet. He said, I think we have a coat you can borrow. And he went in the back closet and got me a 48 short.

That's true, I looked at the label. It was up to here and out to here. And I mean, I think it had been, it had so much stuff spilled on it, it was incredible. I sat through that whole meal in the middle of this oilman's thing with my 48 short coat, trying to pretend that I had social grace. Man, was I out of my element.

Give me McDonald's at the best Carl's, you know. I wouldn't have made it. The world looks for people to fill its bill, it looks at their physical, their mental, and their social definition. That's it, because that's all they can understand. They didn't know anything about character. They didn't know anything about spiritual quality. They didn't know anything about virtue. They didn't know anything about morality. They said get us the smartest and the best looking and the most suave young guys you can find and we're going to melt them down and remake them into Chaldeans.

That was the whole plan. That's Grace to You with John MacArthur. Thanks for being with us. Today John began a series from the book of Daniel titled An Uncompromising Life. Now friend, this study has such practical truth for glorifying God and deepening your faith and strengthening your witness in a dark world. To help you dig deep into these rich truths from Daniel, I encourage you to pick up the study guide for this series.

It's brand new. To order An Uncompromising Life, the brand new study guide, contact us today. You can place your order weekdays from 7 30 a.m. to 4 o'clock p.m. Pacific time by calling 800-55-GRACE. That's 800-554-7223. Or use our website, gty.org.

Perhaps you've noticed your church or a Christian family member veering from biblical truth and becoming more like the world and you're not sure what to do. The study guide on An Uncompromising Life could be a big help. The price is $850 and shipping is free. Again, to purchase the new study guide called An Uncompromising Life and maybe a couple more copies to give away, call 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org. That's our website, gty.org. And while you're there, be sure to check out the many study tools available there. A suggestion, look for the devotionals tab where you'll find helpful daily readings written by John as well as each day's selection from the MacArthur Daily Bible.

All of that and much more are available at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Be here tomorrow when John shows you how to honor God's word in a world that constantly pressures you to do otherwise. It's 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace To You.