The Word of God is quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword. I'm Stu Epperson. Honored to present to you our new podcast, Wednesday in the Word. A journey through the word of God to help our leaders of Wednesday in the Word and Women's in the Word that meets on Thursdays. Journeying through the Word of God together.
We'll give you special tools. We'll give you a review and a preview. Of what's going on in our Bible study.
So stay tuned, be encouraged, and be sure you pass this along to someone else and subscribe to the channel Wednesday in the Word. Here we go. The Fantastic Four is headlining the theaters all over America at the sound. and the time of this particular recording. I'm Stu Efferson.
Wednesday and the word is rolling. And there's another Fantastic Four before these Marvel superheroes came on the scene. In fact, another friend of mine, Dr. Greg Hennan, in his commentary on Daniel, calls them the faithful for. Daniel?
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abenego, And these young men Found themselves in the middle of Babylon, a beautiful opulent city With every kind of temptation, these guys were maybe fifteen years old, and there we meet our heroes. In Daniel chapter one. With me is Dr. Sam Horn. Brother Horn, thanks for being a part of this.
What a great book, this book of Daniel. We've just opened. This is our second book. Podcast covering this beautiful timeless treasure of Daniel. It's an amazing book.
You know, even as we were talking just before we got on the air and prayed together, this ancient book, 2,600 years ago, God inspired this book through the pen of Daniel, and it records. 80 years of what he lived for God's glory in a hard place and in a dark space. And I couldn't help but thinking since our last podcast. How relevant this stuff is to my own life. You know, all week long, I've been back in the book of Daniel in my head as we talked last week, thinking, man, I just need Daniel.
I need this book in my life. And that's what I'm praying as we do these things together: that Wednesday in the Word, as we focus on this ancient wisdom. Would bring us to a place where we would live in modern Babel, like modern Babylon, with all the idolatry and immorality and all that's going on, that we would be modern Daniels and modern Shadrachs and Meshach and Abednego because we purposed in our heart to live according to the wisdom that God gave. And that wisdom is in Daniel. Yeah, I hope folks will listen to these.
We're building these podcasts in consecutive order. The original design is for our teachers, our leadership teams at each of the local darios. Big shout out to them. Wonderful restaurant group all over North Carolina. They have 12 different darios, and there are more coming.
But this is to kind of build into our leaders. We have 12 men's groups that meet every Wednesday morning, and we have got five women's groups. One meets on Tuesday morning in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and then the others meet on Thursday morning at different locations. But this is to kind of prepare you, to encourage you as you teach. And anyone that wants to take a journey through Daniel, we start.
Started last week giving some history, some background, and it's important you listen to that because Dr. Horn really gave this, set this up as a book of wisdom. We think of it as prophecy and hot points and 70 weeks and all that, which we're going to get into. But there's so much wisdom of God in this book, and there's so much on process. Prayer.
There's so much on standing for the Lord in hostile times. And there's a real beautiful model of that in some very good biblical narrative in these 12 chapters as well, where we meet our heroes right out of the gate, Daniel and his three Hebrew countrymen there in the middle of what's going on in this book. And so in Babylon, Dr. Sam Horn. Tell us now, by the way, we'll do our review first and then we'll do our preview next.
This week, we're going to cover verses 9 through the end of chapter 1 and just kind of give some sound teaching encouragement and some tools and some. Kind of guidepost for our for our leaders to help them prepare by way of previewing this week. But in terms of review, I'd like you to speak briefly. There's some important prophecies in Ezekiel. And in Jeremiah, And there were some false prophets that Jehoiakim listened to.
And there was the true prophet Jeremiah that he threw in a pit and he cut up his scrolls and was awful to. And so, Daniel's standing against that. Can you talk about kind of how they got here for those that didn't hear all of last week, and also maybe some stuff we didn't talk as much about last week from Jeremiah?
So, so maybe the best way to do that is to kind of set it up by going.
So, Daniel lived really. 600 years. Uh, before Jesus, right?
So, we're, I'm sorry, 400 years before Jesus, so around 600 BC.
So, if you go back to Isaiah, Isaiah lived.
Well, some 200 years before Daniel, we have Isaiah. And so two to 300 years before, and in Isaiah 39. God sends Isaiah to the godly king Hezekiah. And he says to Hezekiah, I want you to listen to the word of the Lord. This is in Isaiah 39.
I want you to listen to the word of the Lord. I'm giving sort of a paraphrase of this. And here's what the word of the Lord to you is, Hezekiah. The days are coming when all that is in your house and that which your fathers have stored up till this day will be carried to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord.
And some of your own sons who will come from you, whom you will father, will be taken away and they will be eunuchs.
Now, the word eunuch there has a certain connotation in our day. Actually, what it's talking about there, they will be high officials. That's the idea behind that term. They will be high officials in the palace of the king of Babylon. Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, Well, the word of the Lord that you spoke is good, for he thought there will be peace and security in my days.
So, in other words, This is kind of a rebuke to Hezekiah because he showed all the treasure of Israel. To the Babylonians or to the Assyrians when they came. And Hezekiah or Isaiah comes to Hezekiah and says, Now, because you didn't trust the Lord and you looked to your wealth. There's going to come a day where all of this wealth And your own descendants are going to go to Babylon, and they're going to be servants to the king of Babylon.
Now Fast forward hundreds of years. And you're reading the book of Daniel, chapter one, and you are seeing the fulfillment of that prophecy. Because all of the treasures of Israel are carried off by Nebuchadnezzar, who comes and takes Jehoiakim captive, and he takes the noble young men, the nobility. back into captivity with them. Isaiah is actually being fulfilled.
And so maybe the best way to do the preview is to look at the first eight verses or seven verses and recognize that there is a historical crisis that is going on. The nation of Israel is being completely decimated. This is the first of three waves of attacks that Nebuchadnezzar is going to bring against Israel over the next 25 to 30 years. And by the time he's done, The temple will be absolutely burned to the ground. The city of Jerusalem will be destroyed.
And the nation of Israel will have either fled to Egypt, been taken captive to Babylon, or been scattered throughout the land. And so there is a historical crisis going on here. And then there's a theological crisis. And the theological crisis is in verse two, when we find out who actually did this. And in verse two, the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand with the vessels of the house of God.
So all of this destruction, this historical crisis that is coming on Daniel and Daniel's family and the families of Shadrach, Meshiach, and Abednego, and on the house of God, and on the people of God, this historical crisis is actually even bigger because now we got a theological crisis. How could God be doing this? How could God give his vessels into the hand of a pagan king? And then thirdly, there's a moral crisis. You know, how could he allow his people to whom he had made promises?
Uh, be delivered into the hand of an immoral, idolatrous king, taken against their land their will to the land of Shinar. You know, when we read the land of Shinar in our text, it's like, I don't know what that is, and we just keep reading. But if you go back to Genesis, You first read about the land of Shinar. In Genesis 10, when you read about this massive tower that people in a city. Called Babylon, or in that region, are building, and they build this tower so they can go up.
And escape from whatever wrath they think God might bring against them.
So, this becomes really the whole place where idolatry and anti-godness comes in the land of Shinar. And here, here in Daniel 1, that term, the Holy Spirit, inspired Daniel to use that term to say, Now I'm taking my people back to that place. And so, there's a moral crisis, and then there's a personal crisis because you've got four men. young young men who are caught up in this crisis beyond their control. They are righteous.
These four men are righteous.
So, whatever is happening to them is happening to them because of the sins of others. And I think about that in our lives. How much. Do we suffer in the will of God because of somebody else's disobedience? I mean, you know, think about.
What would we do as Christians if God chose to bring the kind of judgment on our country? for the same kind of sins that that His people are tolerating that he brought on the land of Israel, his own people. You know, what if God allowed that kind of devastating judgment to come on our country? Would we find ourselves caught up in that same kind of historical, theological, and moral crisis in very personal ways? Yeah, and Pastor, to your point, we see this beautiful redemptive.
Gracious hand of God working through these four young Hebrews. In spite of all the evil that happened to them, in spite of all the sins of their fathers and the sins of their king, King Jehoiakim was a wicked king, unlike his father Josiah, who was a godly king, a reformer. And here you have this king who was wicked. And here, these guys are now in a foreign land. Not under their own control, you know, being told what to do.
But we see, now we will see how God uses them as salt and light, just like in our day, very practically. Many Young people. are growing and they're redeeming. What, like, you know, what did the prophets say, like, you know, that which the locusts have eaten, right? They're, they're, oh, yeah, no, for sure.
Their parents made some bad decisions. And but now they're bringing up a godly seed. They're choosing the path of forgiveness. They're breaking these generational curses of alcoholism and other things. And we see that in these four Hebrews, and we're going to see it even more.
Now, that was a beautiful. kind of historical review of what's happened. We're going to do that each week a little bit because there's so much here, but it's so awesome to see how the Bible is connected. This is a living book. And all these things, everything we see happening in Daniel chapter one, the prophet Isaiah prophesied.
And we find parts of Ezekiel, parts of Jeremiah, and other parts prophesied. Early on, you know, decades before any of this happened, of course, the beautiful prophecies of the Messiah we see all throughout the Old Testament leading to the New Testament. But Pastor Horn, we kind of. Ended on verse eight, a brilliant verse, a verse that just talks about this. Purposing in your heart.
You know, Daniel purposed in his heart. That he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's delicacies, nor with the wine which he drank. And so we kind of ended there this past week in Wednesday in the Word. And what a powerful statement. And as you in last week's podcast reminded us, Daniel purposed in his heart because he had already hidden God's word in his heart before he was tempted with the food.
of the king's court, he was living Not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeded out of the mouth of God.
So he had, while he was in Babylon, As one pastor said on the email link that I send the sermons. Babylon was not in him. Or in Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, will you talk about? The importance of eight as a kind of a hinge point into the rest of chapter one, as now we get into previewing this rest of this chapter for this coming week. Yeah, so it's so awesome that you've couched it that way, because honestly, when you think about a man, Daniel, probably landing in Babylon between 16 and 20 years of age, so a young guy.
And he's going to spend his entire life. 70 years of it in Babylon, right? The entirety of his life. He's probably 80 or 90 years old by the end. And what we find out in Daniel 6 is that he prospered during the reign of Darius, even Cyrus the Persian.
So he didn't just survive in Babylon. He actually thrived in Babylon. And I think it comes back to this verse that we're talking about. And what he set his heart to do, what he fixed his heart to do, was to obey the Torah. You know, David, who lived hundreds of years before Daniel, wrote these words: Thy word have I hid in my heart.
so that I might not sin against you. Yeah. And Moses wrote. A Torah for a wisdom. The word Torah is a word that means learning or instruction, wisdom.
Moses wrote wisdom from heaven so that God's people could know how to live on earth. And Daniel hid that wisdom in his heart.
So here he is as a young man, and he comes in, and he's got all these choices to make, right? I mean, he's in a foreign place. He gets a new name. He's got to go through a whole different educational system. He's got to learn the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans.
He's going to learn all of how they interpret dreams. He's got to learn all of their lore, all of their legends. He's got to become familiar with how they do astrology and astronomy and how all of that works, how to interpret dreams. I mean, we can go back to what we've discovered from Babylon, from the ruins, and we have uncovered dream manuals. In other words, there were manuals that the wise men actually had to understand that taught them how to interpret a dream.
So here's a dream. Here are the parts of the dream. If the dream has this, then it means this. If it has this over here, it means this. There were extensive manuals.
Manuals on dream interpretation that they had compiled over centuries that they had learned. Daniel had to learn all of that.
So here's a young man, and he's in a faraway place.
Sorrowing over being ripped away from his family, grieving over the loss of his identity, struggling to figure out how do I live. In this pagan land, serving this pagan king, and he comes to a place where all of a sudden he's told, you have to eat this food, and he knows where that food came from. That food had been first offered to a god, to an idol. And so, because he hid God's word in his heart, he realized, I can't do that. And so it wasn't so much about the food.
A lot of times people would say, well, you know, there's a whole fad that came out not too long ago called the Daniel diet. And if you just ate like Daniel ate, you would be more healthy. Like the problem was in the composition of the food. Actually, you know, What what happened to Daniel when he got on this diet is he got fatter. He got he got You know, he got more robust if you actually look at the text.
So it wasn't that the diet had anything to do with his physical health. What the diet had to do with: are you going to obey God in a pagan land? Are you going to obey Torah? God told you not to honor pagan gods. God told you not to worship pagan gods.
And part of that was food offered to idols. You remember, all the way in the New Testament, this was a deal for Jewish people. Godly Jewish people did not. Eat food that had been first offered to idols. And God had to correct that in the New Testament.
But in Daniel's day, this was the deal: you don't eat food. Moses said, You don't eat food offered to idols. And so that's what he decided to do.
Now, what happened after that was interesting, right? I mean, the master, he goes and he says, Hey, can we eat? And the master of the eunuch says to Daniel, I can't let you do that. If you do that and the king looks at you, My head is going to be taken off, not just yours.
So you have to eat that food. And then so Daniel comes back a second time. And he said to the steward, hey, would you test us for 10 days? And God gave favor. To Daniel and that, right?
And so, and all of a sudden, now you see that it was God who gave them favor. And then later on, we're going to find God actually gave them health so that they look better. Than the others around them.
So God is orchestrating this and He's rewarding faithfulness. I guess that's the point I would make. No, it's an excellent point. And that will kind of help us as we navigate through this latter half of chapter one. You know, chapter one, verse eight gives a very nice little outline of.
The entire chapter, possibly the entire book. First, you have the godly resolve of Daniel and these young men, where it says he purposed in his heart. And then you have God providing wisdom, which he does, James 1:5, in navigating the minefield. Of, okay, now that I've decided.
So we sang this past week in our group, I've decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, no turning back.
So Daniel basically said, like with Job, who said, though he slay me, Yet will I trust in him.
So, Pastor Sam Horn, he was resolved even to the point of, you know, of shedding blood, like Hebrews chapter 12, you know, where, you know, Jesus is our ultimate model of this. We all mess up. We all wimp out. We all want to take the meal plan, right, that's offered as opposed to doing this and sticking with our convictions, you know. But Jesus is the model of.
The perfect Purposing in his heart. You know, it says his eyes were set toward Jerusalem, toward the cross, you know, like a flint. He wasn't going to turn to the left or the right. He was going to walk in the way of God and fulfill and do what we couldn't do. We couldn't perfectly purpose in our heart.
But Daniel was looking to the one. His Redeemer who could do that. And we look to Jesus.
So there's so many pictures of that here. But the second half of this verse eight, Pastor Sam, you know, it says he he spoke with the requested of the chief of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself and that little phrase there summarizes The what went on, a lot of mitigation, a lot of conversation, a lot of diplomacy. We're believers, you know, and Warren Wearsby made an interesting comment. He said, you know, believers are to be gracious. In we hold to our convictions, but we don't demand unbelievers.
We don't expect unbelievers to hold to our conviction. These advisors of the king, these Daniel's bosses, as it were, his supervisors were probably shocked. Who who are these kids? What are they thinking? But there's a really beautiful thing that verse 9 brings out, Pastor Horn, and you maybe can speak to this, and we're going to try to wind this down, but we just want to.
kind of preview this coming week and give some some uh Some direction and guidance to our wonderful teachers as we look at the rest of Daniel chapter one. And we see this throughout the book, of course. We see it in Moses, we see it in Joseph, where it says God. Here he's in control again. Just like he delivered Judah in the hand of Nebuchadnezzar in verse 2.
God brought Daniel into the favor and the goodwill. Of the chief of the eunuchs. There's a sense of God's favor on Daniel and these Hebrew youth. All throughout this book, but especially right here, and we see it. Fleshed out in this little dietary test, this little food war, like some of these TV shows, you know, and it's beautiful how it works out.
Yeah, no, that's amazing.
Well, so let me just maybe this is a great thing for our teachers to kind of help their people who are working through this to understand. If you think about what's going on in the first eight verses, Nebuchadnezzar has an agenda, and his agenda is really clear. If you read verses three all the way down to verse five, Everything he's doing, he's educating them, he is relocating them, he is retraining them, he is doing all of these things for a reason. And he's doing it so that they would stand before the king. In other words, for three years.
At the end of that time, they're going to be tested. And the whole reason for all this training and all of this preparation is that they were to stand before the king.
Now, that word, stand before the king, means that they were to serve the king as high officials.
So Nebuchadnezzar has an agenda. God has a bigger agenda. He's using this pagan king because he wants to get these four men in the highest possible positions in Babylon so that all of the world, because Babylon was a world power, all the world would know that there is a God in heaven who rules the kingdoms of men. You know, think about it. If Shagrak, Mason, and Abednego had been...
little unknown slaves in the corner of the empire, nobody would have ever known anything about the God of heaven. But because they were high officials in the king's court in the highest places, when they went into the fiery furnace, everybody knew, everybody was watching. And the fourth man showed up and everybody saw. Yeah. Daniel, if he'd have been just a little Hebrew boy that got stuck off in the corner of Babylon somewhere.
Nobody would have ever, ever. Imagined that Nebuchadnezzar would have heard about the God of heaven and eventually become a Christian.
So Nebuchadnezzar had an agenda, and God used that agenda to accomplish his bigger agenda. Wow. Right.
So, so coming back to the verse we were talking about, God gave, God is the one doing all of this. And there are two things I would point out. These men determined to live obediently no matter what. It was more important than their lives. It was more important than anything.
They determined to obey God and they limited their obedience or they focused their obedience on the main things God told them. You don't eat food offered to idols. You don't bow down to a pagan idol and worship. And you don't pray to anybody other than God. All right.
So they lived obediently. But you said it so well a minute ago. They also served graciously. In other words, They served Nebuchadnezzar. And Babylon in every way in the matter of their names.
Okay. You want to name us after your gods? Fine. in the matter of their education. You want us to learn about these dream manuals?
Great. The fact that Daniel knew about the dream manuals puts him in a position in chapter two to say, King. Your men are the best dream interpreters around, but nobody on earth is able to interpret this dream. Not even the experts of your dream manuals, but there is a God in heaven.
So in the matter of their education, in the matter of their language and speech, they learned a foreign language. In their occupation, they became wise men or Chaldeans. in the matter of their dress. I mean, in every way, they served. The king, you say, why is that important?
Because in Jeremiah 29. God said to Jeremiah, I want you to write a letter to all those people, my people that are in Babylon, and I want you to tell them what I want them to do. And here's what I want them to do in Jeremiah 29. I want you to build houses. I want you to live in them.
I want you to plant gardens. I want you to eat of what you grow. I want you to take wives and have sons and daughters and take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage. And so they would have, so you're going to have grandchildren. Multiply there and do not decrease.
Seek the welfare of the city where I've sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, you will find your welfare. And so here are all these exiles under Ezekiel, and they're going, that is not what we're doing. We are not going to build houses. We are not sticking around here. Two years tops.
We're getting our vessels and going back to Jerusalem. But there were four young men who said, Listen, God told us to build houses. In chapter 6, Daniel has a house. Peace. He prays in that house.
He prays for the welfare of the city. He serves Nebuchadnezzar when Nebuchadnezzar goes mad for seven years. Guess who holds the kingdom together? Daniel. I mean, this is a man who listened to God even when God said things that were hard.
It's so When you come to this verse, verse eight and verse nine, they are massive. It is not just about food. It is about an entire posture. Here's a man, a young man, 18, 19, maybe 20, who said, no matter what. I'm going to purpose in my heart.
To do what God said. You know, there's another young man who came out of Babylon we don't normally think about 80 years later. King Cyrus writes an edict. Daniel helps him write it. 80 years later, or 70 years later, rather, he writes this edict and he says, I want.
the Israelites to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. and rebuild their city.
Okay. And he hands that edict to a young priest, a young scribe named Ezra. And in chapter 7, verse 10, we read this. Ezra purposed in his heart. He set his heart.
to seek the law of the Lord. To do the law of the Lord, to practice it. and to teach it.
Well, who do you think mentored Ezra? The Bible doesn't tell us, but you know what I think? I think he was mentored. By an older brother who set his heart at 19, 20 years of age. 70 years earlier.
To do the law of the Lord. It's an amazing connection if you stop and think about it between Daniel and Ezra. Wow. And both of them set their hearts. And here's the point: you and I have to make that decision.
Remember what? I think it was you who mentioned last time: remember your creator in the days of your youth, Solomon? Here is a man. in his youth who aligned himself with his Creator. Familiarized himself with his word and purposed to obey it no matter what.
And God honored him. And he mentored another young man. And that young man went home and rebuilt the temple and reestablished the worship. And set the scriptures before the people of God until the time of the Messiah's arrival. It's a stunning story if you think about it.
So I would just encourage all of us, myself included. We really have to take this ancient wisdom and hide it in our heart and do it. Yeah, and this is exactly what Daniel had done. And verse 21, the last verse of chapter one says, thus Daniel continued until the first year of King Cyrus. And you just helped us, you kind of backed into it by helping us unpack, you know, all those decades.
Daniel could have been 80 years old, you know, at this time. He was there all this time. We're going to see this whole swath of his life across the 12 chapters and all the different things that happened. But there, his influence on Ezra. In Ezra's faithfulness.
To the Lord and Ezra's taking, opening the books, right, and reading the word of God, and how the word of God just cut to the heart. And so God's in full control.
So, the big picture, the big themes of this first chapter, of course, a lot of historical, important, prophetic fulfillment to get. Israel into exile, right here. And then you have this beautiful picture of the favor of God. You have this. I love that verse in Proverbs.
When a man's ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies be at peace with him. There's a favor of God. You know, Joseph grows all the way up to Potiphar's house, in the prison, then into the land of Egypt, second in power in the whole land of Egypt. You know, God raised up Moses in the same way, and there's a favor of God. And if you have.
The Lord Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. If you have the Holy Spirit of God living in you, Pastor Sam, we have that same favor, don't we? We can walk confidently. We can walk, you know, like Proverbs says, but we can be bold. The righteous are bold as a lion.
Because we serve the God of Daniel. We serve the God of the living God. I think one of the main themes in chapter one is divine sovereignty. Everything happens in this chapter is controlled by God. Human history.
Meets divine sovereignty. Human authority, man, Nebuchadnezzar, I'm doing this. I got the best of the best, and they're going to be my. And God says, actually, divine sovereignty, I'm actually moving those men in those positions. You think you're going to, you think you're getting them to serve you.
I'm actually getting them in those positions because they're going to serve me. Wow. And then, you know, human faithfulness and affliction meets divine sovereignty. All through chapter one, you have divine sovereignty. And that sovereignty is always working for the glory of God and the good of his servants.
Always. Yeah, so we don't want to look at every part of this book, but we don't want to be. too caught up in the lions or the fire or in the vegan diet. And I'm not knocking the vegan diet. And I'm not but we also don't want this to become an infomercial for Ezekiel bread.
You know, we want to we're saying all of it's important, but it wasn't so much those details as it was these men, Fully trusting God. 2 Chronicles 16:9. I just tweeted that verse last night. The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth, seeking to show himself strong on behalf of those whose hearts. are fully his.
And so these men trusted God. Though none go with me, I still will follow. God gave them favor. We see the interaction in these verses. Each one of these verses 11 through 19 and 20 are really, really important.
We see the response. We see the favor. We see how God gave them knowledge, verse 17, and skill in all literature and wisdom. And Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams. The best business people should be Christians.
The best marketers should be Christians. The best radio. I'm in radio. I tell our team we should be doing radio better than anyone because we serve the king. We march to the tune of a different commander, right?
And so there's an excellence. And so this is also an encouragement to all these marketplace ministers who are serving Christ. May they feel alone. Pastor Sam, I know we got to go, but I want to, you know, I'm reminded of this. Story about the late Howard Hendricks, a great Dallas theological professor who mentored so many godly men.
And he had a kid come up to him in class, after class one day, a seminary student. And he was very upset, very, very just, you know, had a had a heavy heart and was really struggling. And Dr. Hendricks said, What's wrong, young man? He said, Dr.
Hendricks, you got to help me. I got to get out of this. I got to get a new job. I've got to get out of my job. I have to have the money because it's paying for my seminary.
It's a struggle. He said, Well, what's the problem with the job, young man? He said, Sir, he said, I've got 400 people that work at my plant. I'm the only believer. No, it's 500.
He said, I'm the only believer in a plant with 500 people. And Doctor Hendrix said, Son, Hold it right there. He said, you mean that the living God would entrust you With 500 lost souls to reach with the gospel? Are you kidding me? He said, get back there and shine the light of Christ and serve and pray and watch what God does.
And that's just a perspective sometimes. We look at, you know, and I tell you, I got to read this Wearsby. You know, you always got to throw a little Wearsby in. This is his commentary: Be Resolute. And I want to share this with everyone, wherever you are in your life.
You know, he says, when it comes to solving the problems of life, man, there's a lot of problems in life. We must ask God for courage. To face these problems humbly and honestly, wisdom to understand it, strength to do what he tells us to do, and faith to trust him and do the rest. Our motive must be the glory of God and not finding a way of escape. The important question isn't.
How can I get out of this? But the question is, what can I get out of this? Yeah, well, he says the Lord used this private test to prepare Daniel and his friends for the public test they would face in years to come. The best thing about this experience wasn't that they were delivered from compromise, as wonderful as that was, but they were. Developed in character.
No wonder God called Daniel three times later in this book greatly beloved. For he was very much like his beloved son.
So there's a God's working on us. He who began a good work in us. Philippians 1:6 will be faithful to complete it in us.
So, Pastor Sam. Give us a final word on this first chapter and give us on these food wars and on the Fantastic War, and then give us a prayer as we get out of here, will you? Yeah, so my final word.
Sort of anchors us in chapter one, but it gives us a little direction as we head next time into chapter two. But in verse 20, we read: And in every matter of wisdom and understanding, They were found ten times better. And what I want to make sure we catch about that is that this wisdom and understanding, remember we said Daniel is a wisdom book?
So this is the first time in the book. We read about wisdom and understanding being given to these four men. And it isn't just that they. They took the earthly wisdom and got really good at it. What this is pointing to is they have access to a wisdom that nobody else on the scene has.
Nebuchadnezzar doesn't. The wise men of Babylon don't, nobody else has access to the wisdom. that God gives these men because it is wisdom from above. And that's what we're going to see in chapter two. When you bring human wisdom to the table, it can build hanging gardens, it can build a magnificent city, it can win wars.
But it can't answer life's deepest questions. When you get to that level, you need an entirely different kind of wisdom, a wisdom that you can't find on earth. And that's what God gave to these men. And so, as we read chapter one, it isn't just about what they did. It isn't just about.
Uh, as you said, the diet, it isn't just about you know their stand, it is about the fact that they immerse themselves in a wisdom that came from God. In the hand of Moses, through the pen of David, through the pen of Isaiah, through the pen of Jeremiah. And they used that wisdom on earth, and it changed everything for them. And that's really our place, right? We have that same wisdom.
We actually have more wisdom in our day than Daniel had and his. We got 66 books of it. And so there is great hope and great encouragement for us, no matter how dark the place or how hard the space where God puts us, we have Daniel's wisdom. And if we take the wisdom that God gave us and use it the way Daniel used it. I would be shocked to see if we don't see some Daniel-like results in our lives and in our ministries.
And that's what I want to pray for as we close out.
So let me pray here. Lord, we're so grateful. That you have given us a wisdom from above that is perfect, it is full, it is complete, it is life-giving, it is sin-dismissing, it is freedom-granting, it is liberating, it inspires us, it cleanses us, it transforms us. And Lord, as we live by that wisdom, it preserves us and it gives significance to our life and to our death. And we pray as we study this wonderful book that is part of that wisdom, that it would produce in us what it produced in Daniel, a determination to love you and to serve you.
And to live in ways that make you beautiful in the eyes of others. And we'll thank you for it in Jesus' name. Amen. Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. I'm Stu Everson.
Thank you for joining us for this week's Wednesday in the Word. We'll be back next week as we drop another episode of what God is doing in the Word of God with a review and a preview of everything going on in our study. Wedintheword.com is our website. We're also on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to watch some of these messages right before you're there. You can download, you can follow, you can like, you can share.
And a special thanks to our friends at Dario for being such amazing hosts this week. God bless you. Stay in the Word and keep sharing it everywhere you go.
