A Resilient Remnant (Daniel pt 1): Setting the Stage

Intro

Daniel 1

What is a Resilient Remnant anyway?

Resilient: characterized or marked by resilience: such as

a: capable of withstanding shock without permanent deformation or rupture

b: tending to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change

Remnant: A small group which remains; leftovers.

In Romans 11:5, Paul uses the word remnant to describe the faithful of Israel who, through Christ, are returning to God by grace through faith.

Romans 11:5 NASB 2020

In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God’s gracious choice.

In the Old Testament the word is often used to describe those who refuse to reject God even amidst crushing pressure to do so. In Elijah's day all but a mere 7,000 of Israel had rejected God. Wide scale apostasy had become the norm. Those who remained with the Lord were the exception.

Yet Isaiah prophetically named a son Shear-jashub which means "a remnant will return."

God has fulfilled this prophecy by leading many blood children of Abraham to faith in Christ over the years. He has not only preserved a remnant for Israel, but has greatly expanded Israel by grafting in the countless gentile believers who have come to faith since Christ ascended to the Father.

So what does the term remnant mean for us today?

The way I'm using the term draws from the OT and from Paul. Like the Jewish believers of old, we are living in a day in which wholesale apostasy is common. From the deconstructionists who would tear the faith apart, to the reconstructionists who would rebuild the faith in Adam's image rather than Christ's, we face mounting pressure to abandon Christ today.

The church once had a sort of home field advantage in the west. When the culture of Christendom was in tact the church was considered the ultimate authority, even out influencing kings at times. Those days are over yet many in the church struggle to embrace the reality that Christendom is dead and we are no longer at the center of the culture.

Our host culture has been conquered by secular humanism and now an encroaching wokeism (which is a weird combination of Freudianism and Marxism) which has made the old liberals look like conservatives in comparison. So what do we do? We are on the edges of culture once again, much like most of the church in the world has always been.

Rather than being respected and revered, we are reviled and laughed off by a culture which has sold it's soul back to the devil; a culture who wants all of the benefits of God's kingdom but without the King and without a king, chaos is all that can become of a kingdom.

In this current cultural context, at the ruined outskirts of Christendom, those who remain in Christ, who persevere in the faith regardless of the pressures we face, are a new kind of remnant. Because of the world we live in was once christianized and has since abandoned the faith in favor of secularism, those who remain in Christ are truly a new kind of remnant.

Philippians 2:14–18 NASB 2020

Do all things without complaining or arguments; so that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world, holding firmly the word of life, so that on the day of Christ I can take pride because I did not run in vain nor labor in vain. But even if I am being poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I rejoice and share my joy with you all. You too, I urge you, rejoice in the same way and share your joy with me.

Tension

As we walk through Daniel, we will see that Daniel and his friends went through some of the worst trauma a human being can go though. This sort of trauma tends to destabilize people. It would have been easy for Daniel and his friends to abandon the ways of the Lord. It would have been easy for them to adopt the customs of their new host culture. Yet these men stood strong. They were resilient. They were a remnant.

Following Christ is not always easy. In fact, throughout most of history Christians have had much more difficulty that American Christians have ever had.

If Daniel and his friends could hold on to their faith and their life in God after all that they went through, we can be confident that we can too. Our culture is shifting hard and many of us feel that shift. Thankfully we have Christ, the Holy Spirit, the truth of God’s Word, and we have the fellowship of the saints.

In ourselves we have no power to remain in Christ as this culture shifts but through His might, by the cross, the empty tomb, His ascension to the Father, and His sending of the Spirit to indwell and lead us… we are every bit, and actually even more, capable and prepared than Daniel and his friends were.

Like Daniel, we need to walk with the Lord in all things and He will keep us and walk with us through it all.

Truth

The Setting

Daniel 1:1–7 NASB 2020

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord handed Jehoiakim king of Judah over to him, along with some of the vessels of the house of God; and he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and he brought the vessels into the treasury of his god. Then the king told Ashpenaz, the chief of his officials, to bring in some of the sons of Israel, including some of the royal family and of the nobles, youths in whom there was no impairment, who were good-looking, suitable for instruction in every kind of expertise, endowed with understanding and discerning knowledge, and who had ability to serve in the king’s court; and he ordered Ashpenaz to teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans. The king also allotted for them a daily ration from the king’s choice food and from the wine which he drank, and ordered that they be educated for three years, at the end of which they were to enter the king’s personal service. Now among them from the sons of Judah were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Then 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 Abed-nego.

Let’s take a look at the many traumatizing experiences these young men went through.

I. They lived through their nation and their religion being destroyed. (1-2)

Imagine having everything you ever knew destroyed in what must have felt like an instant.

Their King who sat on David’s throne and represented the Kingdom of God on earth was killed.

Their home city was sacked, the walls torn down, their homes and businesses destroyed.

The temple where they practiced their faith was robbed, destroyed, and the holy objects placed into the temple of pagan deities.

II. They were taken from their land and forced to move to a pagan city which they had no knowledge of. (3-4)

Their entire support structure was eliminated along with everything which had been familiar.

Many of them had probably seen their parents killed and if their parents were still alive, they were ripped from their families and forced to move.

III. They were forced to learn and conform to a new culture including a new government structure and a new religion. (4-5)

They went through a government reeducation program designed to strip them of their Jewishness and make them into Chaldeans.

They were fed food which they were not accustomed to, and which likely forced them to break the law and thus covenant with God.

IV. They were forced to accept a new personal and corporate identity. (6-7)

The renaming is significant. Before they carried the names their parents had given them but this government wanted these men to carry the names given to them by their new masters.

This was another way the government of Chaldea would break off the relationship these men had with their families and culture of origin.

Who gets to name us?

What name do we carry?

Application

In summary: Daniel and his friends experienced a cultural takeover which was much harsher than anything we have experienced, yet they stood strong in the Lord. How? What can we learn from them about remaining faithful to Christ in the midst of a strong, even threatening temptation to capitulate to popular culture?

Truly we have much to learn from Daniel and his friends. I believe that we must learn a new mindset if we are to persevere and shine in this world we are in. We must embrace living in exile within a culture that is no longer our home. We must learn how to work from the margins, and within the broken culture in order to join Jesus in His work of redeeming and restoring people out of our broken culture.

Daniel and his friends were exiles in Babylon. The name Babylon was a real place, but it is often used in scripture to describe a place dominated by the culture of Adam rather than the culture of Christ. John used the name Babylon to describe Rome in Revelation.

What we see through the lives of me such as Daniel, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel is that Babylon may be a worldly place full of sin and death, but it is the exact sort of place God uses to bring his saints to maturity. As diamonds form under pressure, so does our character. In Babylon we are forced to depend on God and to trust that He will see us through our darkest and most difficult moments.

In Jerusalem it's easy to be a believer. This is true to the extent that even those who don't fully embrace the faith will add a bit of it to their lives. They will go to synagogue and temple but when the push comes to shove they will quickly fall away. We see this in Elijah's time. It didn't take much for all but 7,000 Israelites to apostatize.

God uses Babylon environments to make a clear distinction between those who belong to Him and those who don't.

But Babylon isn't only about fortifying the saints. It is about creating an environment within which the saints can be a blessing as a missionary force within a dark culture.

Just as God left heaven to come redeem and restore His church, He has sent His church into the world to join Him in His work of redeeming and restoring the world.

We find ourselves in a culture more akin to Babylon than to Jerusalem today. What will we do? Well, we could just wholesale join the culture as some have done. These may abandon the faith entirely or distort it just enough that worldly people can accept it.

Option 1: We could decide to be anti-culture and separate ourselves into enclaves of believers, staying as far from the taint of the world as possible.

Option 2: We could exist within the culture while holding to our Christian scruples, following the Holy Spirit, and gaining influence in order to bring about transformation of the culture from within.

Option 3 is what Daniel did and I would encourage us that this should be our aim too. We want to be Christians above all, but we also want to be the best Americans we can be without dishonoring Christ. We want to be change agents by standing strong, loving well, being great citizens, and accepting consequences of obeying God with joy and resolve even if going with God puts us through hell on earth.

God’s heart is to graft as many broken branches into His church as possible but in order for us to be a part of this, we have to recognize where we live and have a mindset of being for sinners rather than being against them.

Daniel 1:8 NASB 2020

But Daniel made up his mind that he would not defile himself with the king’s choice food or with the wine which he drank; so he sought permission from the commander of the officials that he might not defile himself.

One observation about Daniel is that he was absolutely resolved to be who God made Him to be. He was not frazzled by the fact that most others did not walk the same path that he did. He was more focused on his personal holiness and his walk with the Lord than he was the sins of others or how they perceived him. We will see as we move through this book, that by his life and witness, Daniel became a clear and living gospel proclamation for the world around him in both word and deed.

I say all of this today to get one point across to us today. We are called just like Daniel was, to represent God in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. We face the same temptation he did. We have the same Great God on our side that He did.

If Daniel could persevere, by the Spirit so can we. Let’s prepare for living powerfully within the culture God has placed us in so that as Paul encouraged the Philippians to do, we may be a people who shine like stars in this dark world. In so doing we will grow to be more like Christ and we will also lead others to come to Christ and be redeemed also.