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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Rev. Rodney den Boer > God preserves his faithful children, exiled in Babylon | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) Read: Daniel 1 Sing: Ps 9:1, 4, 5; Ps 101:2, 3; Ps 43:1, 5; Ps 138:2, 4; Hy 55:1, 2, 3 Questions for discussion/reflection
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Dear congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ,
As Christians, we have the great privilege of belong to Jesus Christ and being adopted into God’s family. This is an incredible blessing. But this adoption has happened in a world that is opposed to God. We are God’s children living in a world where Satan, the great deceiver, is a roaring lion. His power is limited, but it is real. We live in a world full of ungodliness and sensuality and hedonism, the love of pleasure. We live in a world that is like Babylon.
The apostle Peter wrote to Christians in Asia Minor, who shared the same rich privilege as us, Christians who have been born again into a living hope by the resurrection of Christ. And how does he address them? He writes to pilgrims, or as another translation says, those who are exiles.
And there is a sense in which we are exiles, too, as we live in this world. By the world I mean the principle of opposition against God that is so common all around us. The world wants to conform us into its image. The world wants us to compromise on our values and behaviour so that we become like them, living for self, living for pleasure, living as if God does not exist. As God’s special children, we are living in a hostile world, in a world like Babylon.
And that is the situation, too, of the young men in our text, Daniel and his three friends. They belonged to the family of God, but they were taken into a hostile environment, to Babylon, where the king tried to strip them of their Jewish identity, make them deny their God, and become like the Babylonians. How could they remain faithful in such a world? How can we remain faithful to God as we live in modern Babylon? The answer of Daniel 1 is that:
God preserves his faithful children, exiled in Babylon
- Exile (v1-7)
- Allegiance (v8-16)
- Outcome (v17-21)
1. Exile
Verse 1 sets the scene: it is 605BC. The kingdom of Judah, the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, were in their last days. They had repeatedly rebelled against God.
The last good king, Josiah, had brought some reformation, but his reforms were neither pervasive nor permanent. Jehoiakim was the current king. 2 Kings 23 says that he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord. He rejected God’s word. One example of that is in Jeremiah 36, Jeremiah’s servant wrote down all his prophecies on a scroll and then someone one else read it to the king, and you know what Jehoiakim did? He happened to be in his winter house, there was a fire next to him, and he cut the scroll in pieces and burned them. He rejected God’s word.
And so, as God foretold through Habakkuk and Jeremiah, he brought the king of Babylon to bring punishment to Judah. As v2 says, the Lord gave him into Nebuchadnezzar’s hand. He brought Nebuchadnezzar to punish his people.
That phrase, “the Lord gave,” is important, it will come back two more times in this chapter. It shows that God is in control, even as his people are defeated, even as Nebuchadnezzar flexed his political muscle. What Nebuchadnezzar did not know was that his heart was like a stream of water in the hands of the Lord, that God was directing him, that he was merely a pawn in the hands of the great King of the Universe. The Lord gave Jehoiakim into his hand.
Who was this Nebuchadnezzar? He was making it big. Only 20 years earlier his father had defeated Assyria, the previous world power. Now he had taken over from his dad and defeated Egypt, another great world power, at the famous battle of Carchemish. In the wake of this victory, they besieged Jerusalem, a small backwater city compared to Assyria and Egypt. Nebuchadnezzar was at the top of the world order, probably even more powerful than the President of the Oval office. He was big.
And he flexed. As an act of defiance, he took some articles from the temple in Jerusalem, the temple reserved for the worship of the true God. Nebuchadnezzar took them back home to Babylon and put them in the house of his god. It was a symbolic act claiming superiority over Israel’s God: “I, and my gods, are supreme!” The action loudly boasted: “Israel’s God is under my feet.” The action breathed defiance.
Daniel underscores this by calling Babylon Shinar. You remember the plains of Shinar in Genesis 11? What did they do there? They built the tower of Babel, a tower representing opposition to God. God said, “fill the earth.” But they stayed in the same place and built that tower. Babylon was built on the plains of Shinar, opposed to God, built on human pride.
And Nebuchadnezzar’s program, or strategy, was to take the young men, to take them out to Babylon, strip them of their Jewish identity and change them into Babylonians. It was incredibly smart. Adolf Hitler tried to do the same with his Hitler Youth program, brainwashing the youth with his hateful, racist ideology. Vladimir Lenin tried to brainwash the youth with his teachings about communism, training youth to be loyal to him and even deny their own parents. Nebuchadnezzar had done it all before them. You notice whom he targets in v4? The royal family, the young men who were the future leaders, nobles, the ones who got the best grades and had the greatest potential to influence the future of the nation. The youths he took were probably about 14-15, in their formative years.
Nebuchadnezzar’s strategy was, make no mistake, to conform them to the world, to make them Babylonian. He did it in the Babylonian university, giving them a curriculum where they learned, not the Torah, but the history and language of Chaldea. He did it by giving them food from the king’s table. In the ancient world, all of life was connected to religion, including the food you ate. It was likely that this food was offered to idols. It was all part of a comprehensive life of worship. It was the king who appointed this diet for them.
And he gave them new names. Now we’re introduced to four young men, who all have Jewish names reminding them of their God. Daniel means God is my judge, and the names of the three friends all refer to God’s name, either his name Yah, a shortening of Yahweh, or El, God. They were now ruled by the King of Babylon, in his court, so their Jewish names were replaced by Babylonian names, names which all referred to Babylonian gods. You see Nebuchadnezzar’s strategy? Take the boy out of Jerusalem and take Jerusalem out of the boy. Take him away from his God and take his God out of him. Make him a Babylonian. Make him a child of the devil. Conform him to the world.
And it’s not a far cry from the devil’s strategy today, is it? We live in a world opposed to God, and the devil would have us to be conformed to that world, he would have us compromise our Christian faith and beliefs.
We live in a world, beloved congregation of Jesus Christ, that is opposed to God. Think about entertainment. How many clean shows can you find on Netflix? Think about the ungodly agendas aimed at our young people in universities: the lie that our gender can be divorced from our biology, the lie that self-expression is the path to freedom, the lie that this material world is all there is, so build your business up and make that most important.
You see, Satan wants to make us like the world, so that we forget our Christian identity. He wants us to listen to the music of the world and watch the entertainment of the world and adopt the values of the world, to dress like the world, to party like the world, to drink like the world.
As one example, think of how sexualised our world has become. Sexuality is a beautiful gift in marriage. Marriage is a safe and secure context where two people have made a life-long commitment to each other, to give of themselves to the other person, and in that context, sexuality is good and beautiful.
But the world takes it out of that context and says it is a right, a need, for anyone at anytime, to have their desires satisfied. The human body has become an idol to be used for our pleasure. Pornography has become pervasive. The world says, live for your own pleasure. Have what your sinful desires crave. Don’t wait for marriage where you give of yourself. Just live for yourself. Satan wants us to change us to become like the world, living for ourselves, enslaved to pornography, caught up in erotic literature, or stuck in sinful fantasy, he wants us to be like the world, living for ourselves rather than for God.
Beloved, this is a battle for our hearts, so that we would shift our allegiance away from God, that we would lose our distinctiveness as Christians, so that we would forget the privileges we have as those born again by the Spirit of God, and live just like the world. How can we remain faithful in this world?
2. Allegiance (v8-16)
In v8, Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the king’s delicacies or wine. There is a deliberate-ness to this action, even better captured in the Hebrew language. In v7, the chief of the eunuchs gave them names or literally set names on them, and here in v8, Daniel set it in his heart not to defile himself. Daniel responds to the action by deliberately setting it in his heart, firmly resolving not to defile himself.
What was wrong with the king’s food? It was in some way, showing allegiance to the king, submitting to his program of assimilation. It was compromising by eating food that was defiled, probably by idol worship. It was a step that he would not take.
Notice where his faithfulness begins? He purposed in his heart. His heart and mind were devoted to God. Daniel doesn’t start out as a hero in the lion’s den. We’ll get there in chapter 6. Here, he simply shows the humble faithfulness of making a commitment in his heart. That’s actually what makes the stuff of heroic actions. A commitment in the heart leading to small acts of faithfulness is where any heroism begins. In the quietness of my heart, I resolve before God not to be defiled, I resolve to stand up for his name when it is blasphemed, I resolve not to look at the sexualised images or to open the website I know I shouldn’t or to entertain those impure thoughts.
His boldness is very encouraging! Daniel was a faithful Jew, and it didn’t seem there were many of those around at the time. How did Daniel know about God? Probably his mother and father had taught him Torah at a young age, they had taught him about God who rescued them from Egypt and brought them into the promised land, who called them into a relationship with him and said, you are my special people. His dad had taught him about God at the dinner table in their time of family devotions, his mum had taught him in her conversations throughout the day. And what he had learned as a young child had stuck. He had been trained in the Lord’s way when he was young, and now he did not depart from it.
It’s heartening that the lessons you are teaching your children now in their young years will stay with them forever. Your faithfulness in teaching your children can bear fruit in their lives for years to come. It turns out that you can take the boy away from his people and land, but you cannot take his God out of him. Daniel purposed in his heart to be faithful to God.
Why did Daniel make this purpose? It was because he knew he was God’s child, he was one of God’s special children. He couldn’t become a Babylonian. God had paid a high price to redeem Daniel. He was, in NT terms, in Christ, he belonged to Jesus Christ who had bought him and died for him and he did not want to compromise that identity. God loved him. He could not afford to lose that. He could not afford to gain the whole world and lose his soul.
And that commitment in his heart led to his actions. Daniel went to the chief steward and asked him if he could be exempt from the king’s delicacies. Notice that this guy doesn’t flat out deny his request. He doesn’t say, “Tow the line, mate, the king has given his order!” No, v9 says that God had brought Daniel into his favour and goodwill. In Hebrew it literally says God gave him favour and goodwill in the eunuch’s eyes. Again, God gave… So this man doesn’t flat out deny Daniel’s request, but says how scared he is of Nebuchadnezzar.
And that gave Daniel the freedom to try the next guy, the one who fed them, and asked them to test them for ten days with vegetables. And this steward agrees to try it out, and God blesses them, and miraculously, at the end of ten days they are healthier than everyone else! God preserves his faithful exiles. With the temptation, he gave the way of escape. He blessed the allegiance of Daniel and his three friends.
And beloved, God also promises to preserve us in this world, even as he calls us to be faithful to him. Our Lord Jesus Christ gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil age, as Paul writes in Galatians 1. He paid the great price of his precious blood to redeem us from our sin and slavery to this world that we should be a people devoted to God. He is working in us to transform us by the renewing of our minds, that we would not be conformed to this world but rather give ourselves as a living sacrifice of thankfulness to him. We belong to Jesus Christ.
And so, he calls for our allegiance to him. He calls us to be faithful in the quietness of our hearts and minds. He calls us to be faithful in our bedroom when no one else is watching. He calls us not to compromise in what we see on YouTube, in the music we listen to, in what we allow on our social media feeds. Ask yourself this question: would I thank God for the video I watch, for the time he gave to spend on social media? Ask yourself this question ten times a day: would I be comfortable praying right now?
You see, compromise happens slowly. Maybe I don’t actually watch porn, but I’ve become accustomed to seeing men or women who are indecently dressed and I’ve stopped quickly turning away. Maybe I don’t actually get drunk, but I drink enough to crave alcohol for comfort or courage or pleasure, and I start to need it often. Maybe my YouTube feed is harmless, but I’ve run out of time to read my Bible and pray. Maybe I’ve become comfortable attending church once. Compromise happens in small steps.
What is the commitment of your heart? Is there a line that you are not prepared to cross? Has that line changed? It’s sobering that we only read about four young men who refused to compromise. What happened to all those other young men who went with them?
The LORD calls for our faithfulness, in the quietness of our hearts, in our everyday actions. If you are compromising, then he calls you to return to him. And he shows us the blessing of committing to him as we see the outcome of Daniel’s allegiance.
3. Outcome (v17-21).
As for these four young men, God gave them knowledge and skill in literature, wisdom. Daniel had a special gift of understanding dreams and visions. It was all given to them by God. And so, when they were brought in before the king at the appointed time, it turns out they were at the top of their class. God greatly blessed their university degree. The king found them to be ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers in his kingdom. The magicians is probably a reference to Egyptians. Daniel and his friends knew more than the best wisdom of the world.
Here is a hint of God’s preserving power and how he blesses his people. The prophet Jeremiah later wrote a letter to the exiles, a letter that Daniel himself would read, and in that letter he wrote about how God had good plans for his people, plans to eventually bring them back from exile, “for I know the thoughts I have towards you, to give you a future and a hope.” Here is a hint of that preservation. God would preserve his faithful exiles and eventually bring them back.
Their success also reminds us of Joseph, in the book of Genesis. Joseph was also an exile, and God also gave him understanding in visions and dreams, and God brought him to the top of Egypt and made a ruler over all, so that God would preserve his people. Just as God preserved his people in the time of Joseph, he would do it in the time of Daniel. And the last verse is a beautiful testament to the fact that God did just that: Daniel continued there until the first year of King Cyrus. Cyrus was the Persian king who defeated Babylon and gave the decree allowing God’s people to go back to Jerusalem. Throughout the whole exile, while Babylon’s kingdom rose and fell, God preserved his faithful children, his exiles.
I’d like to come back to a phrase in v17, God gave them knowledge. God gave… That’s the third time that phrase is used. You see what Daniel does here? He gives us a peak behind the curtains; he shows us who really is in control. It’s not Nebuchadnezzar who really calls the shots, it is the heavenly King. It’s not the leaders of China, Russia, North Korea, or the president of the USA, whoever happens to have the largest army in the world… however they might think they’re calling the shots. No, God gave Jehoiakim into Nebuchadnezzar’s hand. He’s directing everything here.
And he defends and preserves his children. And so, today, while the world tries to shape us, to conform us, while the devil attempts to snatch us away from God and make us compromise, the Lord Jesus Christ is sitting at the Father’s right hand, and he is our eternal King, defending and preserving us in the redemption he has obtained for us. Our Father has eternally decreed to save us, and no one can nullify that decree, but God’s Son will preserve us. Jesus Christ has died for us and his blood will not be wasted. He gives us his Holy Spirit to seal us. Christ defends and preserves us so that not a hair can fall from our heads without our Father’s will.
So, he calls us to trust him. He will preserve us. Do you believe that? That’s what gives you the confidence to live as his children. So, beloved, let’s trust in his eternal rule, and live for him. Peter wrote to the exiles in the dispersion and said that by God’s power they were being preserved for a salvation ready to be revealed at the last time. That’s our hope, that’s our destiny. Let’s not lose sight of that by compromising in the small moments of our lives. Let’s not be conformed to this world but transformed by the renewing of our minds. Let’s know the richness we have of belonging to God and being his children, and live out of that identity, not compromising, but showing complete allegiance, in our hearts. He will preserve us until the end. He has a perfect record of holding on to each of his children. Let’s trust him and be loyal to him. Amen.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Rev. Rodney den Boer, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
(c) Copyright 2025, Rev. Rodney den Boer
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