Daniel 1:1-7
Core question: To whom are you giving permission to define your identity? Are you letting someone in the world give you a label that isn’t accurate?
Context: Babylon had dominated God’s people, and the situation felt hopeless. The Hebrews were humiliated, because it seemed like God wasn’t showing up to defend himself. They likely felt foolish for believing in Him. It looked as if God was letting chaos rule, and there were many reasons to doubt His love and provision.
If you look at the reasons the Hebrews had to doubt God, some are pretty intense. For example:
1.) There was an apparent shift in power. Even the vessels of the temple were confiscated and used disrespectfully by their enemy. It could have easily seemed like God wasn’t even defending His own name or values. Was God allowing evil to triumph? What kind of faith does it take to walk with God into a situation that appears broken and hopeless and trust that He still has a plan for it?
2.) It seemed like outward appearances were more important than inward strength. Daniel, Shad, Mesh, and Abedn were chosen because they were young, intelligent, able, and desirable. This raises two issues:
A. If that was the selection process God allowed, what hope was there for the weak and unable? Does this even fit with God’s statement that He cares more about the condition of our hearts than he does about our worldly appeal? When the Hebrews who were not chosen saw this selection process, did they doubt God’s concern for them?
B. Also, were those guys tempted to see their value in this identity given by the world? Were they flattered? What sort of faith does it take to see our true identity when we are being praised for our surface strengths? (Here’s the old question: ss success sometimes a bigger temptation as failure?)
3.) The elite training these guys received was focused on serving a worldly king. They were discipled in the values of Babylon.
*Illustration of a haunted house and all of the stimulus presented to disorient you (flashing lights, seemingly crooked floors, noise, etc.). Once the foundations are shaken, we are more easily manipulated. The Babylonian training program was meant to disorient these guys from their old heritage and acclimate them to the new. This is what happens to us. We are hit with all sorts of stimulus that attempts to skew our focus. What stimulus is being thrown at me right now that could “define the world” if I let it?
4.) These guys were hit with an alternative identity. They were literally renamed. Old names that had recounted God’s faithfulness were taken away and new names were assigned to them that represented the values of the worldly kingdom. They were called by the new “gods” they were supposed to serve. This was an attempt to disrupt their core identity. The world says, “You are ______ (insert title here).”
“If you aren’t careful the world will rename you.”
*Illustration of the Bourne movies. Here was a plot that showed a person’s identity being stripped out and another forced into him. He lost himself.
The bottom line:
You are a stranger, an exile, a wanderer. There is a reason you feel disconnected sometimes. Christ lives in you, so in that sense you are complete, yet you are not fully home yet. This is your season as an ambassador. This is not yet the end of things, and that is why you feel a sense of longing so often.
While you walk in the shadowlands, are you willing to believe what God says about you, or are you buying what the world says about who you are?
C.S. Lewis quote: (Screwtape)
“Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. ...
...It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot “tempt” to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
