We're in a series called Daniel, and Daniel happens at a time like this. This guy named Daniel, and and the book was written by him and about what he and his friends experienced and some of the the extraordinary things that they walked through and the the visions that Daniel had the visions that some kings had that he interpreted for them and there is looks like opposition to the king and yet it's not and so we're going to go through all of that it's a 10 week series I'm excited that you're here and part of it and if you didn't get a handout for it we've got a guide that goes along with it, and so if we ran out, I'll print more. That's how we'll do it. But I want you to be able to have that so that you can both know what's coming up the next week, but follow along this week on it. Amen. So Daniel is is this guy. He's a young man, and we'll get introduced to him in a minute. But his nation is in a trouble spot. They're in a place where there's prophets that have been speaking about this time that's about to happen because the people of Israel, the Jewish people, had gone so far away from how God called them to live. They said God's about to do something judgmental. He's about to judge us for what's going on, and so you have prophets. These are in your scriptures. Like there's this book called Jeremiah, and Jeremiah is kind of the central voice in this period. He's he's he speaks for 40 years to people that don't want to listen. Can you imagine that? I preached for a few years to people that didn't want to listen. I'm like, why are you here? You don't want to hear me talk. Why are you here? He preached for 40 years for it, but he preached both leading up to the time where the city fell and the nation fell, he he he preached during the time of it, and what he was doing was he was kind of over and over repeating this warning that they were worshiping idols and they needed to stop. Now we like to think today, oh well, we don't worship idols because we don't carve images or make statues and coat them in gold or any of this stuff. So we don't have idols, right? We don't go to a temple of an idol and worship there. You know what happened in the the places where they worshiped idols? There would be all kinds of drunkenness, sexual immorality. They would they would take different substances that would alter their state of consciousness. There's all these things that they would do that was part of idol worship. Don't ever try to say that we aren't involved in idol worship in our society today. People that were doing things like even in the temple of God, they were bringing in other foreign worship articles. They were worshiping the moon. They were worshiping the sun. We still have people that are doing that here in our midst today. Jeremiah had spoken about it, and he had told that there was going to be a conquest by the nation of Babylon. Now, at the time, there's two kind of powerful empires: there's Babylon and there's Egypt, and there's a couple different kings over the nation of Judah that that vacillate back and forth, trying to figure out which one is going to be the one that kind of helps keep them safe. They're like kind of hedging their bet, and they're saying, "Well, let's just go ahead and pay tribute to Egypt, and Egypt will protect us. And if we have a famine in the land, they'll feed us, and and like we'll be their their servants, and they'll take care of us. And then another king comes to power, and he's like, "Nah, we're going with Babylon. I think that's a smart move, and people still do this today. We try to say, I don't know, maybe we're voting in an election, and we're like, I'm not happy with the party that I voted for, so I'm going to go to this one, and I think that one's going to fix it, and then they don't fix it.
So you're like, I'll go back here, and then you end up like independent, or you end up like me, like I just don't think I'm going to vote anymore. I'm just so jaded by the whole thing, you know. I don't even know if that fixes anything. Our only hope is repentance and turning to Jesus Christ. You've got the prophet Isaiah that had written a little bit earlier. He predicted before Babylon was even a world empire. He predicted the rise of Babylon and that they would end up being the ones that would take the king into captivity of Israel, Ezekiel was another prophet. He himself was taken as an exile out of Jerusalem and out of the the land, and he had prophesied that Babylon would be the one that would be kind of God's tool to bring judgment on the people. Habakkuk was another prophet, one of the ones we call a minor prophet. How would you like to be called that? Like, I guess I'm a minor preacher, you know. Like, I don't have a mega church, so I'm a minor preacher. I don't have like 60 chapters, like Isaiah or something like that. But Habakkuk he wrestled with the question that God was using what they called the Chaldeans, which is the Babylonians, that He was going to actually use them who were viewed as evil idolaters to be his God's tool of judgment on God's chosen people. They wrestled through these things, and the prophets talked about this as these kings had kind of gone back and forth. You know, they're they're going back and forth between one power and the other, and they're rebelling against one, and then rebelling against the other, and and. These nations are coming in and exerting power over them, and they're either executing a king or they're taking him away. Or one of them, they actually, as punishment for his rebellion, they slaughtered all of his sons in front of him, and then gouged out his eyes because that would be the last thing he ever saw. Like they weren't the good people, right? These aren't the good guys, and yet God was using them as his tool for judgment. Think first of all, there's some things in our nation that are going on that we need to be thinking like, are we the same way? Now, granted, we're not the chosen, covenanted people of God. I I know there's a lot of people in America that like to think that we are God's new chosen people, and we're not. We have enjoyed the favor of God in this land, Amen. Like this nation has enjoyed the favor of God, and so many times we've squandered that, and we've done the wrong things with it in abuses of that. And I pray that we would come to our senses and say, Lord, may we be a holy and righteous people in this country, a force for good, as I know we can be and are in so many places, and yet sometimes we're not. So one of the things that's going on is is the the king of Babylon keeps bringing people, you know, kind of bringing exerting more power over the people of of Judah and taking them captive, and a little bit at a time having these deportations of people. One of the groups of people that he would deport wasn't the poor people of the land. He needs farmers and and people to take care of the animals in the land. He wants to keep them in place, but he finds the nobility, especially the young nobles, and he takes them out, takes them back to Babylon. Part of what he's doing is kind of a a re-education, so that he can take the the men that are used to-they've been kind of trained up to be leaders. They're used to that position, and he's taking them so that he can have leaders in his own courts and in his own government. But the other thing he wants to do is to kind of cut off any chance that there would be somebody that would rise up for a rebellion. And so he's bringing these young men out, maybe 12, 1315, years old, somewhere in that range, and he's saying, "Okay, you guys were on a track to lead in your nation.
Now you're leading in mine, and he captures them young enough that he can change their thinking process. We see this in our country today. There are ideologies that take kids at a young age and try to twist rational, logical, godly thought and and moral living, and they take it and they try to instill the ways of the world in them at a young age, so that when they're older, that they're they're so confused by it that they just buy it hook, line, and sinker. And so these these young men were taken away, and they're brought to Babylon, and they're brought there, and they're living in the capital city, so it's prestigious. They're given lots of nice things and banquets and great food, and they're thinking like these guys are gonna love it. They're gonna stay here. There's no worries. They're not worried about an army conquering them. We already conquered them, and now they're here in the good place. And so Babylon is thinking we got these guys. We're gonna teach them our stuff. We're gonna teach them astrology, signs in the stars. We're going to teach them how to how to be magicians and enchanters, how to actually tap into this divine realm to use power from the dark arts and use it to conjure things up in this world. They're going to do this. This is what this is what they're teaching these young men to do. So I want to read this to you, and one of the things that I want to do through this whole series is we're going to read every chapter. In a couple weeks, we have two chapters, so bear with me. It's good for you to hear the word of God read, amen. It's good for you to read it too, but it's good to hear it read out loud, so you can follow along if you want in your Bible. But it's not on the screen. I don't think so. I didn't. I didn't mean for it to be. Michelle's really good sometimes, and just puts it up there. I'm like, oh wow, okay, there it is. Daniel chapter one. We're going to read every chapter because I want you to hear all the stuff that's said in here. In the third year of the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah. By the way, this gets confusing. There's a guy named Jehoiakim and a son named Jehoiakin They didn't have much creativity, I guess. Okay, so King Jehoiakim of Judah, during his third year of his reign, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon advanced against Jerusalem and laid it under siege. Now the Lord delivered. Listen, the Lord delivered King Jehoiakim of Judah into His power, along with some of the vessels of the temple of God. Those will come up again, I believe, in chapter four. By the way, just wait for that. God puts details in Scripture for a reason. Don't miss them. He brought them to the land of Babylonia to the temple of his God and put the vessels in the treasury of his God. The king commanded Ashpenaz, who was in charge of his court officials, to choose some of the Israelites who were of royal and noble descent, young men in whom there was no physical defect and who were handsome, well versed in all kinds. Wisdom, well educated, and having keen insight, and who are capable of entering the king's royal service, and to teach them the literature and language of the Babylonians. Can we say brainwashed? No. Can we say it brainwashed? Okay, good job. Just making sure you're paying attention. So the king assigned them a daily ration from his royal delicacies and from the wine he himself drank. They were to be trained for the next three years, and at the end of that time they were to enter the king's service. As it turned out, among these men were some from Judah, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. But the overseer of the court officials renamed them. He gave Daniel the name Belteshazzar, Hananiah he named Shadrach, Mishael he named Mishak, and Azariah he named Abednego. But Daniel made up his mind that he would not defile himself with the royal delicacies or the royal wine, he therefore asked the overseer of the court officials for permission not to defile himself.
Then God made the overseer of the court officials sympathetic to Daniel, but he responded to Daniel, "I fear my master, the king. He is the one who has decided your food and drink. What would happen if he saw that you looked malnourished in comparison to the other young men your age? If that happened, you would endanger my life with the king. Daniel then spoke to the warden, whom the overseer of the court officials had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Please test your servants for 10 days by providing us with some vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who are eating the royal delicacies. Deal with us in light of what you see. So the warden agreed to their proposal and tested them for 10 days. At the end of the 10 days, their appearance was better, and their bodies were healthier than all the young men who had been eating the royal delicacies. So the warden removed the delicacies and the wine from their diet and gave them a diet of vegetables instead. Now, as for these four young men, God endowed them with knowledge and skill in all sorts of literature and wisdom, and Daniel had insight in all kinds of visions and dreams. When the time appointed by the king arrived, the overseer of the court officials brought them into Nebuchadnezzar's presence. When the king spoke with them, he did not find among the entire group anyone like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, or Azariah. So they entered the king's service. In every matter of wisdom and insight, the king asked them about. He found them to be 10 times better than any of the magicians and astrologers that were in his entire empire. Now Daniel lived on until the first year of Cyrus the king. Okay, so here's what's really interesting about this: you've got enchanters, astrologers, people messing with demonic things, but Daniel did a couple things in his friends. First, he it says he purposed himself not to be kind of in you know bought by the king's delicacies. But the other thing is that he received this wisdom from God, and he went headfirst, headlong into wisdom and knowledge. He was so excellent that he excelled so much at that, and his friends that they didn't have to get involved in the dark arts part of it. Some other guys messed with that stuff. Daniel and his friends did this. Now I got to kind of explain a little bit about this. Their homeland, by the time by the time they've been here a little while, their homeland is destroyed. The temple is gone, like the place that they think of as their spiritual, religious, just kind of cultural center of life is gone. Like, I wonder sometimes how we would be if we were like, well, all the churches got obliterated. They just disappeared somehow. There's no churches. You can't watch a sermon on TV. There's no worship videos on YouTube. There's none of this stuff. How faithful are people going to be to their Savior Jesus Christ in that moment? And that's what's going on for these young men? They are hundreds and hundreds of miles from home. They will probably never see it again. Daniel won't. They'll never see it again. They'll never be back there. They'll never have any accountability that the entire Jewish religious system brought. And so they they they have every everything in their favor to just go ahead and abandon the ways of God, and to just go along with everything that they're being spoon-fed, everything they're being given in Babylon. But they purposed themselves; they they set themselves up steadfastly to not go that route. They said, no matter how long we're here, no matter what pressure is on us, no matter what the. Consequences may be we are steadfastly going to serve God, and so that's what they did. There's this guy. Anybody ever seen the movie Hacksaw Ridge? Maybe a couple of you. I didn't. I never saw it, but I know about the guy that's kind of like behind it, Desmond Doss, D-O-S-S. Desmond was a guy that he was Seventh Day Adventist, so he had two big rules when it came to you know serving in the army. He said, one, I'm not going to kill anyone.
I'm not going to carry a gun, and two, I'm not going to I'm not going to do this stuff on the Sabbath. Like the Sabbath was very important to him, and he didn't want to break the Sabbath rule, and he didn't want to break the commandment that says, "Thou shalt not kill. Now, a lot of people felt that way, and they said, "I'm not going to serve, and they called him conscientious objectors. But what he did was he became a conscientious cooperator. Desmond Doss said, "I'll serve. I'll be in your army. I'll I'll go into battle with you, but I will not pick up a firearm. I will not harm another human being. So what he ends up doing as like a combat medic is is bringing people to get help. And so he's he's he's in this place. They're they're in Japan. They're they're fighting for for this ridge. And there's this cliff, and all these they get up there, and all of his guys are just getting slaughtered, and so they all retreat. But there's a whole lot of dying and wounded that are up there. He spends a day and a night by himself, bringing them to the edge and lowering them down with ropes that he kind of tied around a tree, and he's lowering them down. and And as he gets them down, he saved the government accounts for 75 people, so it was probably perhaps even more. This man becomes so highly decorated. He was given the Medal of Honor by President Truman himself. He was awarded two Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts and a lot of other honors. This is a man who refused in war to pick up a gun or a knife or a bayonet, and yet he was given all these honors, he himself was was harmed by a grenade and by a sniper round. And when the medics tried to come and carry him on a stretcher, he says, "No, get some other guys that are worse than me. And he crawled his way to get to where he could get medical help. This is a man that went into the war knowing that he was being called to service, but there were some things in that calling that he refused to do. But rather than saying I'm staying out of it altogether, he says I'll be in there, but I'm going to do it as a force for saving life rather than taking life. Because as he went into service, he had purposed in his heart what he was going to do. So many people that made fun of him pressured him, just gave him such a hard time as he was starting out. Later, were the ones that were commending him for his service and supporting him to receive some of these awards and medals. He had turned them around because they saw his heart and his passion and his love for his fellow human being. So Daniel is much in the same kind of situation as that. He's watching his homeland get slowly brought down, one little peg at a time. He's watching, and he's just a young guy himself. And as he's as he's coming of age, he's seeing this happening, and every hope or dream that he possibly had of being a a noble in the courts of of the rulers of Judah is going to be gone. He hears the prophets speak, and he hears Jeremiah. He hears them all talking, and he says, "This isn't this isn't going to go for very long. There's a there's a time limit on what we've got going on here. And so, as he is taken and he's taken over to this foreign land, he is shown some of the just beautiful, best things that the world has to offer. And as he's there, he's offered food, food that would be offensive to a Jewish boy who has been given kosher food laws by their God in the law of God. One of those things is you know they were probably served a lot of pork, and they're like, nope, we don't do that. That's against our law.
Those pigs or whatever meat it might have been were probably offered in a sacrifice to the Babylonian gods and deities as a as a roasted burnt offering, and then after that they would then be served to the people, and it was a way of taking part in the worship of that god. And so Daniel and his friends said, "We're not doing that. That's not what we're about. Now he didn't say like I don't care what it takes, you know I'm not doing your thing. He went respectfully to the man in charge over him, and then said, "Here's what I propose. Here's what I would like to do. Now notice that guy. He's more concerned with his own hide. He says, "What would that do to me? You're not thinking about me, Daniel. You're not thinking about about my my reputation, my standing before the king. What if you don't look healthy? Then the king's going to ask me what I've been doing wrong, and then I'm going to be punished or killed for it, Daniel. You can't do that to me. So Daniel, he it's like he goes and then he asks. Didn't he ask another guy? I I was actually just. Noticing this as I was reading, I'm like, wait a minute, how did I miss that before? Doesn't he go to a different guy that's in charge, like a lower guy, and say, how about this? How about you give me some some water and vegetables? And so they go there, and that guy's like, 10 days. We'll do a test, like just just enough time that if you're not looking too healthy, and like I get it, you know I've seen some vegans and they seem pretty weak sometimes. And he's thinking maybe that's not good, you know. Nothing, okay. And so he says, hey, you know, like let's just try it for 10 days. I don't think it's going to work, but we'll see. It's like nobody had ever tried a vegetable diet before, you know. They're just gorging themselves on all of the fatty meats and all the wine they can have. They're waking up with a headache every morning. All this stuff from the hangover, and and he's like, I got an idea. What if we just maybe don't do that? What if maybe our appetite isn't the most important thing in our body, like in our life? You know, if if you if you decide, you know, Lord, I'm gonna take a time and I'm gonna fast. I'm gonna spend that time. Yeah, it doesn't mean every moment during your fast that you're devoted to prayer, but perhaps it is. But what you're doing in a fast is you're you're weakening the desires of your flesh to say you don't rule over me. Okay, I submit to my Master Jesus Christ, and so I'm not going to let my appetite and my my desire for food and my need for sustenance rule over me. I'm going to put that into submission so that I can be filled up with the Spirit of God. And so you're you're you're not like hunger striking against God and saying I'm not going to do anything until you answer my prayers. You're saying, Lord, I just want to be with you, and I want to hear from you. And so Daniel, he he was he he was. It wasn't a full fast. I've heard people say, Oh, I'm on the Daniel fast or the Daniel diet. You're probably not okay. Like if even if you're just eating vegetables and drinking water, Daniel wasn't doing it as a health fast. Like yes, the outcome was that he looked healthier than the guys around him that gorged themselves on the king's delicacies, but what Daniel was doing wasn't a fast in the sense of of some dietary thing. He was doing this because he he had steadfastly purposed himself not to enjoy the king's delicacies. Wonder where you got these lines in your life that you've drawn. Like there's going to be times where, throughout the course of your days and weeks, you're going to be faced with something. You're going to be given an opportunity or an option or or an occasion to do something that you might not, when you're sitting here thinking about it, you you say I'm not doing that.
But in that moment, maybe because your flesh is weak, maybe because you've been enjoying the king's delicacies, the fancy things of life, and you've been gorging yourself on it, and you haven't put a line or a limit in your life on any anything to do with lifestyle and behavior and morality. Because you haven't drawn those lines, you find yourself in this situation where there's something that you think you would never do, a line you would never cross, whatever that might be. But in that moment, because you have allowed yourself to be weakened by your lifestyle, you find yourself easily falling over and over into that sin. The first time you do it, you feel guilty. You feel bad. You feel like, oh man, I messed up. I'm never doing that again. But you haven't actually purposed yourself to avoid that. And so now what you've done is you've actually stepped into it this time. And then the next time it's easier. And the next time it's easier. And before you know it, you're caught in a in a pit, you're falling in the pit. You're caught in a trap, and it's just got a hold of you over and over and over again. I wonder what those boundaries in your life that you might have set up, where you say these are things I don't do. Married people, it might be I don't cheat on my spouse. Good for you, seriously, good for you. But there are lots of people who do, and the reason they do that is because they never set that boundary in their life that said this is something I never cross, this is a boundary I never go beyond. Some of you might have said, you know what, I might drink a little, but I I don't I don't really get drunk often, more often than a few times a week, you know, or whatever it might be, and and and the reason that that's a struggle and a problem is because you never actually set a boundary and said I don't cross this boundary, whatever it might be in your life. I don't know. Maybe you just drive way too fast, and you're like, I I don't go 50 miles an hour over the speed limit. Like I'm not that crazy, you know. I'm not like those guys on the motorcycles running up the middle lane to the interstate, you know, 30 miles an hour faster than everybody else. I'm not like that, but unless you say, you know what, I'm a person that doesn't-I can't say this. I do it, by the way. But unless you say I'm a person that's, you know, doesn't break the speed limit, you're gonna do it every day, probably. Probably, what boundaries do you have in your life? And I'm not just talking like speed limits. I'm talking the serious things, the things that'll get you into spiritual traps over and over and over again because you haven't set up a boundary. What are those things that you've been caught up in for a long time, one of those might even be bitterness, hatred, anger. You you know, it's actually possible to say I'm not going to be a bitter person because some of you are. I don't have names. I don't have images of your faces in my minds. I'm not like looking at people saying, "Oh, it's them and them, and I'm just saying, some of you are bitter. Some of you carry that constantly, and you haven't decided to give it away, to let go of it, to not have that in your life. You haven't decided I'm not going to be that person. You haven't you haven't purposed in your mind to avoid that at all cost. Whatever it might be that you've allowed into your life because you haven't set that boundary, those are the things that will continually ensnare you and entrap you. Daniel and his three friends went into that situation saying, "We're not going to do it. There's some things we won't do.
Over the next few chapters in Daniel, we'll see a couple of those occasions where they're presented with something that it would have been seemingly easier or simpler for them to just go with the flow, and yet they found some incredible spiritual victory, and were able to be vessels of God's voice of judgment on the evil system or empire that was in place, because of their faithfulness to God and their steadfastness in obeying Him. These young men were given every opportunity to have it, just kind of have the world by the tail, and they did in a way, but they refused to do it outside of God's promises. So what they end up doing is they maintain not just faithfulness to God's laws, but also Daniel will find at one point he even when there's a law made that he can't pray. He prays three times a day, right out in the open. Reminds me of a few years ago when they were telling us, "Hey, you can't meet in church because you might it might not be safe. Somebody might get sick. And people said, "Okay, I guess I don't go to church then. I preached powerless sermons to my cell phone camera on a tripod, sometimes from my living room, sometimes in this space, and then put them out online. We did that about five weeks, and I said, "We're coming back together. Everybody wants to meet. We're going to meet. The thing is, there's there's no power in that. And for people that watch us online later or catch it from somewhere else, like good for you for chiming in or viewing in, I'm glad you guys are part of this. We have these cameras and the you know the system for a reason for that. But my prayer is that you would be involved in a congregation, in a church. If you're physically able to be there, be there, because there's something about having these friends. I think if Daniel was alone, he probably would have been faithful. But but him and his friends standing together in the face of all of this. There's something about being together with other believers-the strength, the bond, the brotherhood, the sisterhood-that we have to stand together and say, "I'm going to be faithful no matter what happens, no matter what laws the king's king tries to pass or the governors, presidents, whatever they might be. These men were faithful, and God ends up overthrowing some of these kings. He ends up deposing some of them. One of them goes crazy by the hand of God for seven years or four years. What is it? I haven't gotten that far. I forgot. A few years. He's he's in the other picture. Sorry, in the in the slide for yeah there there he's eating grass like a crazy dude like a cow this is this is the thing that God is doing and what God shows is that He can depose rulers and authorities and powers and principalities when His people remain faithful despite anything that's going on around them. There's so much, by the way, that's in Daniel chapter one. I really hope you might stay after service, come to the the discussion group over in the other building, the Sunday school class that we have. We get into a whole lot more there and kind of talk about your thoughts, questions, ideas, things that you've observed. But I want to wrap up this morning with one thing: What things has God called you to surrender to Him?

Transcribed by https://otter.ai