Daniel 2: Determined Not to Defile
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Daniel 1:8-16
N:
Welcome
Welcome
Good morning, church and those of you who are guests of the church family this morning, whether you’re here in the room or online. I’m Bill Connors, senior pastor, and I just want to say thanks for being here this morning. To that end, I’d appreciate it if you’re a guest today and you’re here in the room, if you’d take just a minute during the service today and fill out a welcome card. You’ll find it in the back of the pew in front of you. We’d just like to send you a note of thanks for being here today, and to see if there’s prayer or ministry that we can serve you with. You can get those back to us by putting them in the boxes by the doors as you leave after service, or better yet, you can bring them down to me when service is over. I have a thank you gift to give to you, and would love the chance to meet you personally for just a moment following our service time today.
I’d also like to take a moment to thank our praise band, Worship 4:24, for their consistent use of their time and talent to bless this church by leading our musical time of worship every week.
Announcements
Announcements
LMCO ($27.581.92) This morning, we will watch our last video on the LMCO, and again, we will hear from missionaries who are serving in a way we might not normally think about. Let’s hear briefly from Mark and Vesta:
LMCO Video
Remember that 100% of what we receive for the LMCO goes directly to the field to support missionaries like Mark and Vesta, as well as missionaries that this church has sent out to the mission field. We’ll take the offering up through the end of January. Pray and ask the Lord how He would have you give to our LMCO goal.
Opening
Opening
Last week, we opened up our new series in the book of Daniel, during which we are going to visit every verse in this book of both history and prophecy, and in many ways, we will compare the context of Daniel in Babylon to our own culture today. If you missed last Sunday, I’d recommend going back on Facebook, Youtube, the website, or the app and watching last week’s sermon, because at the beginning of that message, we looked at the history that led us up to Daniel, as well as what else was going on at the time. Then, as we looked at the first seven verses of chapter 1, we were reminded that God is the true hero of the book of Daniel, and that He is sovereign over all of life’s circumstances, even the ones that we don’t like or don’t understand, because God’s purposes and glory are the ultimate best for creation, for His people, and for the world. We also found that, just as the land of Babylon is truly the land of “confusion” (because that’s what Babylon means), so it would appear that we live in our own version of Babylon right now. And Babylon is constantly trying to press us into its mold, just as it tried to do with Daniel and his friends Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, and to try to do that, it uses the tools of isolation, indoctrination, compromise, and confusion.
This morning, we will continue in chapter 1 of Daniel, as we look at verses 8-16. As you’re able, let’s stand in honor of the reading of God’s Word as we focus on this passage today:
8 Daniel determined that he would not defile himself with the king’s food or with the wine he drank. So he asked permission from the chief eunuch not to defile himself. 9 God had granted Daniel kindness and compassion from the chief eunuch, 10 yet he said to Daniel, “I fear my lord the king, who assigned your food and drink. What if he sees your faces looking thinner than the other young men your age? You would endanger my life with the king.” 11 So Daniel said to the guard whom the chief eunuch had assigned to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, 12 “Please test your servants for ten days. Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. 13 Then examine our appearance and the appearance of the young men who are eating the king’s food, and deal with your servants based on what you see.” 14 He agreed with them about this and tested them for ten days. 15 At the end of ten days they looked better and healthier than all the young men who were eating the king’s food. 16 So the guard continued to remove their food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables.
PRAYER (BCNM team, Steve Ballew Executive Director; Mark & Vesta, serving in West Africa with various groups of deaf people)
So last week, as we looked at the tools that Babylon tried, and tries, to use in order to press us into its mold, I mentioned that we would be looking at one of them in a little more detail this week. That tool was called “compromise.” Now, when I say “compromise,” I’m not meaning the idea of working out our differences by mutual concession. I mean the definition of the word that says:
compromise: n. a concession to something derogatory or prejudicial (m-w.com)
So this form of compromise is an agreement to something that hurts you, something that hinders you, something that is going to cause you problems later on.
We saw in verse 5 of Daniel chapter 1 that:
Daniel 1:5a (CSB)
5 The king assigned them daily provisions from the royal food and from the wine that he drank.
Now, that little mention itself doesn’t reveal that it was an attempt at getting the Hebrew guys to compromise on their faith. Nebuchadnezzar’s goal with this provision was to seduce these young men to the delicacies and delights of Babylon: if he could get them to start living like Babylonian royalty, they wouldn’t be very likely to want to stop living like Babylonian royalty.
The tactic of compromise is something that the devil has weaponized since the very beginning. Way back in the Garden of Eden, Satan lied and convinced Eve (and Adam) to compromise on the commands of God regarding the forbidden fruit. He told them that there were things about the world that they were missing because their eyes were “closed,” and that eating the fruit would make them “like God, knowing good and evil.”
5 “In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
All they had to do was to compromise their obedience for just a moment, and they would be able to call the shots, or so it seemed. But it was a lie.
Satan used a similar tactic on Jesus when Satan tempted Him in the desert at the beginning of our Lord’s public ministry. He offered to Jesus that if He would just compromise God’s plan for His life, then Satan would give Him all the nations of the world:
8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 And he said to him, “I will give you all these things if you will fall down and worship me.”
The devil is still doing things this way, and compromise is so easy, such a normal path to take in our world, that sometimes we don’t even realize that we’ve compromised until we’re stuck in the results.
So this morning, the question that we need to ask ourselves is this: “How do we live a life of faith in a place like Babylon?”
We’re going to look at the examples of Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah to address this question. And we’re going to see that they did three things when faced with the possibility of compromise: They chose holiness; they chose humility, and they trusted God. We can do the same things in our form of Babylon today. So how do we live a life of faith in a place like Babylon? The first thing we must do is to choose holiness.
1) Choose holiness.
1) Choose holiness.
Throughout our look at the book of Daniel, we are going to see Daniel and his three Hebrew friends acted in ways that we consider to be heroic. We will see the three friends face the fiery furnace. We will look at Daniel in the lion’s den. We will consider the many times that they stepped up and spoke the truth of God to those who had the power to destroy their lives. Daniel and the boys even get a mention in the “Hall of Faith” chapter of Hebrews. They aren’t mentioned by name, but what God did through their faith is mentioned: “…who by faith…shut the mouths of lions, quenched the raging of fire...” (Heb 11: 33-34). Well, the first display of what we might consider heroism in Daniel comes right here at the beginning, and it is this first act that makes the rest of their acts possible: they chose holiness, instead of compromise. Look at the first part of verse 8:
Daniel 1:8a (CSB)
8a Daniel determined that he would not defile himself with the king’s food or with the wine he drank.
Why would the food and wine defile him (make him unclean before God)? The most common suggestion is that the rich food (which would have included a lot of various meats) and the wine would both have been offered to pagan idols before being given to the king, so for the Hebrews to eat them would have been idolatry, since they would be participating in the worship of those false gods. Unfortunately, probably just about every kind of food was offered in idol worship in ancient Babylon, so this might not necessarily be the reason, because they couldn’t guarantee that anything hadn’t been offered to an idol.
Another suggestion is that certain types of meats, things such as pork or horse meat, were unclean for the Jewish people, and that these would have been on the menu in Babylon. While this is undoubtedly the case, it doesn’t explain the inclusion of the wine as being something that would defile them. So some suggest that the meat and wine hadn’t been properly prepared or produced, according to the Jewish Law, and so they were unclean because of that. But again, there was no guarantee that anything wasn’t unclean because of preparation restrictions.
So the suggestion that I like the best is that eating from the king’s provisions would have defiled them simply because it was doing things in a way that wasn’t God’s way, and so for Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, it would defile them. Perhaps this conviction was based in David’s words in Psalm 141:
4 Do not let my heart turn to any evil thing or perform wicked acts with evildoers. Do not let me feast on their delicacies.
There’s a great New Testament picture of this connection between faith and sin in Romans:
23 But whoever doubts stands condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith, and everything that is not from faith is sin.
Daniel didn’t want to eat and drink the king’s food because he couldn’t do so in good faith at that point. He had to be in Babylon, but that didn’t mean that Babylon had to be in him. So he “determined that he would not defile himself with the king’s food or with the wine he drank.”
To be honest, I think that the CSB, while accurate, obscures what’s going on in the Hebrew text of this verse a little bit when it uses the word “determined.” Literally, the Hebrew says that Daniel “placed upon his heart” that he would not defile himself. This wasn’t a decision that was simply made in the moment. It was a decision that he had made over and over before in his life. He regularly chose to deny himself for the sake of his relationship with God. And so when the time came that he was offered food and wine that he couldn’t eat in faith, his heart had already been set against it.
There are lots of examples of this kind of determination (or lack thereof) to follow the Lord in the Old Testament. I’ll share just a couple:
14 Rehoboam did what was evil, because he did not determine in his heart to seek the Lord.
10 Now Ezra had determined in his heart to study the law of the Lord, obey it, and teach its statutes and ordinances in Israel.
In light of this, we have to ask ourselves if we have determined, or “placed upon our hearts,” that we are going to follow the Lord—that we are going to choose holiness—or if we are going to compromise.
Please hear me that I’m not talking about salvation here. I’m talking about discipleship (following Jesus) and sanctification (being made more and more like Jesus). We have to be saved by God before we can really choose holiness.
Our salvation is something that we can’t make happen. We don’t really “choose” to be saved as much as we give up. We give up our rebellion against God. We stop believing in ourselves and our own ability to save us, and instead we believe that Jesus did everything necessary for us to be reconciled to God. Humanity is separated from God and deserve eternal spiritual death because of our sin, and we can’t fix the problem because to deserve salvation, we have to be perfect, which we can’t be. So we deserve death. We need someone who is perfect, someone who doesn’t deserve death, to take the penalty for us. And because of God’s great love for us, that’s exactly what His one and only Son Jesus did. He lived a perfect life, and then died the death that we owe for our sin. He did this so that we could be set free from our sin debt, forgiven completely by God if we believe the Gospel—surrendering to Jesus as our Savior and Lord. And as Jesus overcame death and rose again, so we will live forever if we belong to Him by faith.
What we see in Daniel is that these four Hebrew boys already knew and related to God in faith, and thus, had pre-determined that they would pursue holiness while in Babylon. Because of that, they were unwilling to consider eating and drinking the food and wine that Nebuchadnezzar had provisioned for them.
Do we have this kind of conviction? The kind of conviction that acknowledges the fact that we live in Babylon, but then determines that our “where” doesn’t determine WHO we worship. The kind of conviction that, in contrast to the message of the world to “follow your heart,” actually informs our hearts about what is true and what we will do ahead of time?
In our culture right now, feelings mean everything. In many ways, what one feels determines that person’s truth. But Daniel placed the truth upon his heart, not the other way around! He TOLD his heart what it was going to feel, what it was going to do, because Daniel worshiped the Lord, the designer, determiner, creator, and owner of reality—of the truth. Certainly Daniel knew that his feelings couldn’t be trusted because of what Jeremiah said:
9 The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and incurable—who can understand it?
Let me say this as clearly as I can: Your feelings can and will lie to you. They will tell you that something is true when it is false. They will tell you that something is right when it is wrong, and vice-versa. They will tell you that something is good when it’s bad…evil, even. Especially if we’re just focused on ourselves and our situation.
Our hearts are woefully broken and unreliable, and the only way for them to be repaired is through faith in Jesus. But even then, we’re in a process of being made to be like Christ. So even if we are saved, our feelings are still not to be what determines the truth. Our hearts are to be told what the truth is, which we can know through the revelation of God’s Word by His Holy Spirit.
Consider what the Bible has to say about this:
3 For this is God’s will, your sanctification: that you keep away from sexual immorality, 4 that each of you knows how to control his own body in holiness and honor, 5 not with lustful passions, like the Gentiles, who don’t know God.
7 For God has not called us to impurity but to live in holiness.
14 Therefore, dear friends, while you wait for these things, make every effort to be found without spot or blemish in his sight, at peace.
Making every effort is a choice: a choice to be holy. Do the things that your heart desires line up with God’s Word? If they don’t, you can know for certain that your heart is lying. Choose to follow what God says, even if your heart resists it.
Young people in the room, please hear me: These four guys were teens like you. And they determined that what God said was true, not what Nebuchadnezzar said, and not what their feelings told them. And they decided well ahead of time what they were willing to accept (for example, learning Babylonian language, literature, and culture), and what was out-of-bounds. You cannot just passively drift down the stream of culture, taking as true everything your heart tells you, because it is often buying the lies that the world is trying to sell you.
Adults, we’re not exempt. We buy many of the same lies, but for us, doing so often holds bigger, more permanent consequences. These lies of the heart can destroy our marriages, our families, our careers, our finances, even impact the government and future generations. But still we trust our hearts for some reason. Instead, we must allow the Word of God by the Spirit to inform our thinking, and that biblical thinking must inform our feelings.
In his book on the first seven chapters of Daniel, Brave By Faith, Pastor Alistair Begg writes:
“Resolve now. Think through where to draw the lines you will not cross. … know your lines. And know the God who will give you all you need in the situation he has put you into, to enable you to stand firm for him and say, No, I am not going to give in.”
—Alistair Begg, Brave By Faith (emphasis his)
So how do we live a life of faith in a place like Babylon? First, assuming we know God, we choose holiness.
And honestly, I think that I could have preached an entire message on just this first half of this one verse. But there are two other points that I believe we need to cover in order to balance this point and see the fuller picture that the biblical narrative reveals.
Even though Daniel placed upon his heart what he would not do, that didn’t mean that he was rude about it. We could learn something from him, especially when it comes to our online interactions. If we are going live an impactful life of faith, we must choose humility.
2) Choose humility.
2) Choose humility.
Another way that we place the truth upon our hearts is that we choose to be humble. As we look at the interactions that Daniel had as he sought to prevent himself and his friends from defiling themselves with the king’s food, we don’t see demands or threats. We don’t see rudeness or violence. We don’t see insults or offense. Instead, we see the humble request of a person who knew where his lines were, and was willing to risk trouble, even death, by trying to obtain permission from Babylon to abide by them.
Daniel 1:8b–13 (CSB)
8b So he asked permission from the chief eunuch not to defile himself. 9 God had granted Daniel kindness and compassion from the chief eunuch, 10 yet he said to Daniel, “I fear my lord the king, who assigned your food and drink. What if he sees your faces looking thinner than the other young men your age? You would endanger my life with the king.” 11 So Daniel said to the guard whom the chief eunuch had assigned to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, 12 “Please test your servants for ten days. Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. 13 Then examine our appearance and the appearance of the young men who are eating the king’s food, and deal with your servants based on what you see.”
We see here five ways that Daniel and his friends showed humility:
He asked permission of Ashpenaz, the chief eunuch, to allow him not to defile himself. He asked. He didn’t demand.
He didn’t argue when Ashpenaz gave him a very valid reason as to why he was unwilling to grant the permission Daniel had requested. If he had given permission, and the boys had become malnourished, the one who gave the permission would pay the price.
He went to the person who was directly managing the four of them, the “guard” or “steward.” This took the pressure off of Ashpenaz.
He asked the steward to perform a reasonable test, instead of just asking or demanding that he permanently cancel the rich food for the Hebrews. Ten days on just water and vegetables (the Hebrew term literally encompasses any plant that is grown by sowing seed, so grain and anything made from grain was included).
Finally, Daniel put the ball in the steward’s court by saying that the final evaluation would be up to him. He would deal with the boys based on what he saw at the end of the test.
These officials didn’t work for Daniel, but they had a job to care for Daniel and the other Hebrew boys. He could have made their lives at least more difficult, as Ashpenaz suggested. But instead, Daniel approached the situation with humility and wisdom, perhaps remembering what Solomon said in Proverbs about humility:
2 When arrogance comes, disgrace follows, but with humility comes wisdom.
33 The fear of the Lord is what wisdom teaches, and humility comes before honor.
I’m going to admit that this is hard. I’ve confessed before from this very pulpit that pride is my biggest arena of spiritual battle. And to be completely honest, in an interestingly ironic twist, the thing that gets me probably the fastest is when I perceive that someone else is being prideful or arrogant. I doubt that I’m alone in that. And some days I manage it better than other days… which I guess really means that some days I’m more repentant than other days.
Culturally, we think that pride is the way to go. Look out for number one. Stand up for your “rights.” And the church has been seduced by this thinking in ways. The fact that we have incredible rights as American Christians is a blessing that we get to enjoy that much of the world hasn’t had throughout history. But does protecting those rights mean that we should be rude, arrogant, insulting, or condescending? Sometimes it even happens within the church herself—we press for position, power, or prestige within the body of Christ, even though the church is not about us, and we are all equal at the foot of the cross.
Of course, it goes beyond the church. Our politicians are often arrogant and prideful, or they’re considered weak or uncommitted, and that’s from every side of the aisle. In the area of business, corporations push social agendas, instead of selling products, in a way that looks way more like prideful virtue signaling than actual belief in a cause.
But think even further: The word “pride” has even been co-opted to refer to the affirmation and celebration of unbiblical sexual lifestyles: pride month, pride flags, pride parades. Women are challenged to, “Shout your abortion,” to show how proud they are of taking charge of their lives through the termination of an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy.
So we want to fight fire with fire. We want to shout and insult and threaten and belittle and verbally abuse. After all, they say horrible things to and about us… But can I ask you something? Have you ever, EVER, insulted someone into seeing your point of view? Have you ever threatened someone into honestly agreeing with you? Have you ever belittled someone into a Gospel conversation? Have you ever bullied someone to the cross?
I’m not saying that we can’t have convictions. We absolutely should, and we should communicate them. But perhaps it would be best if we didn’t do so in such a worldly manner. We can tell the truth without attempting to manipulate. We can directly state our case without name calling and insulting. We can disagree without being disagreeable. I’m preaching heavily to myself here, and perhaps this point is mostly for me this morning.
What does the Scripture tell us? That humility brings wisdom, and humility comes before honor. Arrogance and pride ultimately bring disgrace. So we have to choose: would we rather have disgrace, or wisdom, honor, and even (in God’s timing) exaltation? In the New Testament, James wrote:
10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
And Peter penned:
6 Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you at the proper time,
We can learn from Daniel’s example that a humble approach is a wiser approach. Keep in mind that we don’t see anywhere in this passage that Daniel was willing to compromise his conviction in order to maintain his humility. We don’t know for sure what the four of them were going to do had the test failed, but we can assume based upon what we will see later in chapter 3 that they would have taken the blame for their malnourishment on themselves, and paid the penalty of death for it. I believe that this is what he meant when he said to the guard, “deal with your servants based on what you see,” in verse 13.
We can live the life of faith in a place like Babylon by choosing to be humble before the Lord as we interact with the lost world. But in order to do that, we need to consider what allowed Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah to take the risk that they took in such humility. It’s because they trusted God.
3) Trust God.
3) Trust God.
For our final point, we look at our focal passage and see that God was at work well before Daniel even made his request to the chief eunuch. God was going to work out his plans in the Hebrew boys’ lives, and they had nothing to fear. From the very beginning of their time in Babylon, God was moving to make the path smooth for Daniel and his friends.
9 God had granted Daniel kindness and compassion from the chief eunuch,
But even with the kindness and compassion that Ashpenaz felt for the boys, he didn’t have the freedom to risk losing his head for them. Fortunately, Daniel’s trust in God extended to the plan that he proposed to the guard that had been assigned to the four boys. He was certain that God was going to come through for them, and thus could peacefully risk the dietary test:
14 He agreed with them about this and tested them for ten days. 15 At the end of ten days they looked better and healthier than all the young men who were eating the king’s food. 16 So the guard continued to remove their food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables.
The test worked. The Hebrew captives were given a special diet, and after ten days they looked stronger, healthier than the non-Hebrew captives (or Hebrew captives who didn’t agree with Daniel). We can say that their diet did that. But in just ten days, and no meat? That was truly a work of God.
This reflects us back to our first point last week: that God is sovereign over all of our circumstances for His purposes and glory. If He is at work glorifying Himself, then we can trust that His plan is going to accomplish that end. And if His plan is going to end in His glory, then whatever part He chooses for us to play in that plan is a means to that glory, and is intentionally provided by Him for that purpose. So even if it might not be what we enjoy doing to promote God’s glory, we can trust that He can use it. Consider our Lord Jesus:
22 He did not commit sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth; 23 when he was insulted, he did not insult in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten but entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.
And as Jesus trusted Himself to God the Father in His trial and crucifixion, we can trust God as we walk, even if we suffer in the process.
19 So then, let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust themselves to a faithful Creator while doing what is good.
Our calling isn’t determined by our location. We’re in Babylon wherever we go. And we are called to be the city on a hill, the light in the darkness, the salt of the earth. We’re called to “work for the good of all,” as Paul wrote in Galatians 6:10.
Closing
Closing
So how do we live a life of faith in a place like Babylon? We choose holiness. We choose humility, and we trust God. This is what we’re called to, church.
But if we are going to do these things, first we need to know trustworthy God, who can empower us to holiness, and break us of our pride so we can show true humility. We can only know Him through faith in Jesus, as I said earlier.
We don’t bring anything to the table of our salvation other than our need to be saved and our surrender. We don’t “determine” to be saved. We give up, we surrender to Jesus. If you’ve never believed the Gospel before this morning, would you give up your fight against God, and trust in what Jesus has done to save you? That surrender happens between you and God, right where you are, not during some special time in the service.
You might declare this to God through a prayer that goes something like this, “God, I admit that I’ve been a rebel against you. I know that I deserve death. But I give up my rebellion, and I surrender to You in faith, believing that Jesus died on the cross so I can be forgiven of my sins, and that He rose again so that I can have eternal life. Jesus, You are both my Savior and my Lord.” If this is you this morning, would you please let us know? The band is going to come in a second and lead us in a song of invitation and response. If you have surrendered to Jesus as your Lord and Savior this morning, would you come down during that song and tell one of us so we can celebrate with you? If you have questions about salvation, come and ask. We’d love to talk more with you about it. If you’re online, send me an email.
Church membership
Prayer
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Giving
Bible reading (Genesis 22-23, Psalm 14)
Pastor’s Study canceled tonight.
Prayer Meeting: Just finished a series of studies on the connection between prayer and evangelism. Specifically praying this week for those we know who are lost. Starting a series focusing on prayers from the Old Testament the week following. Consider coming to check out prayer meeting at 5:45 on Wednesday nights.
Sanctuary is unavailable all week due to the start of our lighting upgrade.
Instructions for guests
Benediction
Benediction
2 Indeed, God is my salvation; I will trust him and not be afraid, for the Lord, the Lord himself, is my strength and my song. He has become my salvation.”