Hinsdale Covenant Church
11.03.24 - "Daniel: The Witness of Patience" - Lars Stromberg
Amen. Perfect song for our text today. Would you pray with me as we turn to God's Word this morning? Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, are rock and are redeemer. Amen. I'm going to invite you as you are able to stand for the reading of Scripture. It is a long scripture today, so if you would rather sit, that's just fine. But if you're able, please stand. We are finishing our series in the first half of the book of Daniel, sort of the narrative portion of the book of Daniel today with the most commonly known text, Daniel and the lion's den. So with this lengthy passage, I'll invite you to just take a deep breath before I begin. Feel your feet underneath you on the ground and be reminded that this is God's Word for us this morning. Any words that come after it for me or anybody else are merely secondary. This is the main course of the meal today. Let's hear God's Word. It pleased King Darius to set over the kingdom one hundred and one hundred and twenty satraps stationed throughout the whole kingdom and over them three administrators, one of whom was Daniel. To these satraps gave account so that the king might suffer no loss. Soon Daniel distinguished himself above all the other administrators and satraps because an excellent spirit was in him and the king planned to appoint him over the whole kingdom. So the administrators and the satraps tried to find grounds of complaint against Daniel in connection with the kingdom. But they could find no grounds for complaint or any corruption because he was faithful and no negligence or corruption could be found in him. The men said, "We shall not find any grounds for complaint against Daniel unless we find it in connection with the law of his God." So the administrators and the satraps conspired and came to the king and said, "Oh, King Darius lived forever. All the administrators of the kingdom, the prefects and the satraps, the counselors and the governors are all agreed that the king should establish an ordinance and enforce an interdict that whoever prays to any God or human for thirty days except for you, O King, shall be thrown into the den of lions." Now, O King, establish this interdict and sign the document so that it cannot be changed according to the law of the Medes and the Persians which cannot be revoked. Therefore, Darius signed the document and the interdict. Although Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he continued to go to his house which had windows in its upper room opened toward Jerusalem to get down on his knees three times a day and to pray to his God and praise him just as he had done previously. Then those men watched and found Daniel praying and seeking mercy before his God and they approached the king and they said concerning the interdict, "Oh, King, did you not sign an interdict that anyone who prays to any God or human within thirty days except for you, O King, shall be thrown into the den of lions?" And the king answered, "The thing stands fast according to the law of the Medes and the Persians which cannot be revoked." And they responded to the king, "Daniel, one of the exiles from Judah pays no attention to you, O King, or to the interdict that you have signed. But he is saying his prayers three times a day. When the king heard this charge, he was very much distressed and he was determined to save Daniel. And until the sun went down, he made every effort to rescue him. Then the conspirators came to the king and said to him, "No, O King, that this is the law of the Medes and the Persians. No interdict to ordinance that the king establishes can be changed." Then the king gave the command and Daniel was brought and thrown into the den of lions. The king said to Daniel, "May your God whom you faithfully serve deliver you." A stone was brought and laid on the mouth of the den and the king sealed it with his own signet ring and with the signet ring of his lords so that nothing might be changed concerning Daniel. Then the king went to his palace and spent the night fasting. No entertainment was brought to him and sleep fled from him. Then at dawn, the king got up and at first light hurried to the den of lions. When he came near the den where Daniel was, he cried anxiously out to Daniel. "O Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God whom you faithfully serve been able to deliver you from the lions." Then Daniel said to the king, "O King, live forever. My God sent an angel to shut the mouths of the lions so that they would not hurt me because I was found blameless before him, also before you, O King. I have done no wrong." Then the king was exceedingly glad and commanded that Daniel be taken out of the den. So Daniel was taken up out of the den and no kind of harm was found on him because he had trusted in God. The king gave a command and those who had maliciously accused Daniel were brought and thrown into the den of lions themselves. They, their children, and their wives, before they reached the bottom of the den, the lions overpowered them and broke all their bones and pieces. Then King Darius wrote to all the peoples in the nations of every language throughout the whole world, "May you have abundant prosperity. I make a decree that in all my royal dominion people shall tremble in fear before the God of Daniel, for he is the living God. And during forever, his kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion has no end. He delivers and rescues. He works science and wonders in the heaven and on the earth, and he has saved Daniel from the power of the lions. So this Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus the Persian." The word of the Lord thanks me to God. You can be seated. A little bit of background here is in order. Five things that I'd like for you to know about this text to really understand it while they're way more than five, but we'll at least do five. First of all, Daniel at this point is a well respected octogenarian. This story takes place 60 years after the first chapter of Daniel, which also has to do with prayer and a king. So Daniel by now is an old man. Best guess is he's upwards of 80 years old. Babylon, in between chapters five and six, has been conquered by the Medo-Persian empire, and a new king now sits on the throne. This brand new empire is now the largest empire known to man at that point in human history, stretching all the way from Egypt, in the south and west, up to modern day Russia, in the north, and then as far east as the Indus River, which is in Pakistan, current day Pakistan. It's a wide expansive kingdom and King Darius appoints Daniel over the satraps. That's like a kind of governor over the entire empire. So here's Daniel, 80 years old. He's not only lived through two kingdoms, but at least three or four kings, depending on how you count, but he's still really doing well at his job. He's still at it. He is better than ever, which is why the king says, "I'm putting these people under you because I trust you. I trust you." Second thing to know, there is an echo from chapter three. Some of you may have been hearing it if you've been a part of this sermon series. There's a lot of similarities between this story in chapter three, which is the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego getting thrown into the furnace. In both of these stories, there are Babylonian leaders that are jealous of these Jews. So they come up with this plan to entrap Daniel. They do the same with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. And just like in chapter three, there's tons of political machinations going on here, not spiritual machinations, but political ones. They're angry. They're jealous. They appeal to the king's vanity. In both narratives, they are reluctant to judge. The kings are reluctant to judge their Hebrew advisors because they respect them. And in both narratives, our faith heroes are delivered from peril. So that echo between chapters three and six, it does matter. Third thing I'd like for you to know about this text, Daniel's prayer life is not ordinary. It's actually pretty remarkable. This is one of the cool things I found out this week. I love Daniel. I love Daniel. That's one of the things I really realized through this sermon series. He knows that prayer is outlawed to his God, and it's said the text that she goes straight away back home to pray, right through the window facing east towards Jerusalem. Daniel knows the scriptures really well, and he's probably going through a scripture that's from 1 Kings 8. You can read it on your own at some point. That probably shaped his daily prayer rhythm. If you read that, you'll see it talks about praying three times a day, morning, noon, and night towards Jerusalem. But when you read that text, you'll also note it's not a command. It's not a universal command for all people. In fact, there is no command in scripture in the Old Testament that you should pray three times a day or pray towards Jerusalem. That's not anywhere in the Old Testament, which means this was just a part of Daniel's daily routine. As far as I can tell as I'm reading this, and I'd like to go out on a limb and say this, I just think he created this rhythm out of his own devotion because he experienced God when he did this. Now, this story, unlike chapter one, if you remember that, which is a chapter about compromise, this story is not about a sin that Daniel will not commit. It's about a practice that he will not omit. And if you think about it, it would have been really easy for Daniel to just omit this practice, right? I mean, you're Daniel, just take a month off. I mean, come on, you're 80 years old. Everybody knows that you're a faithful guy, apparently. So you know what, you don't even need to take a month off prayer. You could just not pray by the window. You could find a place where nobody can see you and go pray. Go pray in secret for 30 days. No one will ever know. But apparently for Daniel, that was not an option. It was worth dying in order to live out his faith, not only in private, but where people could see him. And to me, that's just really inspiring. Four thing you should know about this text, lions are a powerful symbol. This is not super uncommon. You should know that lion hunting was a favorite pastime for many kings in the ancient near east. They would often keep lions around in their kingdoms for anyone that was a threat to the throne, to intimidate them and scare them. This continues all the way, by the way, to the early followers of Jesus in the early church, first, second, even third century, when Christians were thrown into the Colosseum, where there were lions prowling, right? So Daniel thrown into a lion's den. Just like with the furnace in chapter three, there was a common ancient legal custom called Innocence by ordeal, which long story short meant that if a defendant's guilt was in question at all, in any way, they would put them through some sort of trial. Maybe it's a furnace. Maybe it's dumping them in a river. In this case, it's a lion's den. If you made it out of that trial, it was a sign that God or the gods had cleared your name and that you were innocent. However, if you died in these perilous situations, that must mean that you were guilty. So let's not complain about the American legal system, okay? We've come a long way from that. So when Daniel is there, awake and alive in the morning, untouched, that to the ancient Near Easterner would have been a sign that, okay, God has cleared your name. You're innocent. Daniel's untouched. He's innocent. And his enemies are judged very harshly, brutally. And Darius, the king, recognizes Daniel's God once and for all, which leads to my fifth thing that you should know about this. Daniel's faithfulness has wide-ranging implications, not just for the biblical story, but for human history. The last verse of that chapter says this, "During the reign of King Darius, the reign of Cyrus the Persian, most scholars believe that Darius is actually another name for Cyrus, that it's the same person. Kings in the ancient ancient Near East would often have more than one name. In second chronicles, we read this, "In order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord moved the heart of Cyrus the king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and also to put it in writing. This is what King Cyrus of Persia says, "Yahweh, the God of heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Any of his people among you may go and may the Lord their God be with them." This is a huge, huge deal. Because of the influence of Daniel and others as well, Ezra, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, and above all the influence of the Spirit of God in exile, Cyrus or Darius, if they're the same person we assume, they don't only send out a letter to the entire empire saying, "Everyone must revere this God, this Yahweh, the one true creator God." But he also tells the Hebrew people, "You're free to go back if you'd like to. Your exile is over." He sends the Hebrew people back to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple, to rebuild the city, to rebuild the nation from the ground up. This is a massive moment not only in biblical history but in human history. So with these five things in mind, let me move to some application. To be honest, when we started this series, I was most nervous about this particular Sunday for two reasons. First, this is the Sunday just days before an election day on Tuesday at the end of an election cycle where I sense that many people are kind of worn out and ready for this to be over, right? Feels like an important Sunday, we should probably say something about that today. And then second, I knew that I was also scheduled to preach on Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, which I did a few weeks ago. And let's be honest, it's kind of the same story, isn't it? I mean, the application is very, very similar. So King decrees something and Hebrew dude or dudes refuse to do it and they are sent to death and God delivers them. How do I basically keep from preaching the same sermon after, you know, three weeks from one another? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on something different this morning that I think addresses both of my concerns about the Sunday. If you want to hear my thoughts on what it means to stand in faith amongst a culture that is telling you to bow down, I'd invite you to go back and listen to that sermon from Daniel chapter three and that will apply to Daniel six as well. But I want to focus instead on the power of Daniel's witness. Now, I know saying witness is a bit of strange language for us, but it's the appropriate word. Daniel is a witness to Yahweh, the one true creator, God, while he's living in the heart of Babylon. And what strikes me in this passage is that everybody knows that Daniel is a worshiper of Yahweh. From the very beginning, they know it. His boss, the king knows it. His co-workers know it. His neighbors know it. But he doesn't carry a bullhorn. He's not yelling on a street corner. There's no proselytic tattoo that he's showing everybody. There's no sandwich board sign out in public. There's no social media hashtag. But in some kind of appropriate, subtle, classy way, Daniel's witness to the one true God is visible to like everybody. It's public. It's out there that everybody knows that this is a man who is a man of God. The narrative would suggest three ways at least that he's an exemplary witness. I'll go through him really quick. He was, first of all, he was excellent at his work, right? He worked his way to a place of prominence. And even at 80 years old, he was a respected leader and advisor. He was still working with excellence. He was also a man of high character. Remember that verse four, which I love so much, it says that the satraps could find no corruption in him because he was trustworthy and he wasn't corrupt and he wasn't negligent. They couldn't find anything. He was a bubb reproach. But the text tells us he was also a faithful man. Now that doesn't merely mean that he had some faith that he was a man of faith, though that's certainly true in terms of what he believed. Faithfulness is a steady faith over time. He's 80 and he has been working hard with integrity and character for a very long time for decades, in fact. That's faithfulness. And that right there, my friends, is the trifecta in a lot of ways of Christian witness, excellence, character, faithfulness. Daniel models that for us in this passage and throughout his life. It is his witness that led those men to catch him preaching towards Jerusalem. The satraps knew that they were going to find him there doing exactly that. It was his witness that delivered him from the lions then. The king knew that Daniel's God was powerful, was a deliverer. Daniel is an exemplary witness. Now, what about you? What about me? Could the same thing be said about us? And I don't mean here in church today. It's pretty easy to follow Jesus when you're when you're here in this place. I'm talking about what about our neighbors? What about our friends? What about the waitresses and the valets and the custodians that we run into? Is the word out on you amongst your co-workers, your boss, the girl you sit next to in class or the guy that lives in the apartment across the hall from you, your family, your extended family? Do people know you as a follower of Jesus as a witness? Are you a witness to the one true God in your life? That's the question for all of us this morning. As we look at Daniel, I think he demands that we ask that question. And it can be sobering because we're so aware of the ways that we fall short of this, the ways that we fail to be a witness to Jesus. It feels overwhelming for us to say, okay, I'll just go ahead and be excellent and have high character and be super faithful. Here we go. Let's do it, right? But I also think the evil one wants us to wants to discourage us from even trying to do so because he desperately wants God's people to be so overwhelmed that they don't even try to be a witness to Jesus Christ. And this is where I want to bring it home for us, especially this week. I have a place for us to start in an election week and whatever will come after in the weeks to come. There is so much to say about specific policies that are near to the heart of God and how to be a faithful citizen in our country while still keeping our allegiance to Jesus above everything else. If you need wisdom on specific matters as you're wrestling through those things, let's get coffee. I'm available to you. But here's where I want to center in to close on our series on Daniel. I think it's the perfect place to do it. And it's the virtue of patience, of patience. Daniel is upwards of 80 years old. He's lived through the rise and fall of two empires and at least three kings or four kings. He's still at it. If you want to influence your community or the people around you or your kids or the world, you have to have a patient faith. I think we all kind of know this, but we also want everything right now immediately. We live with the microwave and the email and the TV on demand and Amazon Prime. We are so used to the world at our fingertips. But the problem with many things, unlike technology, there are so many things that we're never going to be able to speed up no matter how hard we try. Character, you can't speed it up. Friendship, you really can't speed it up. A healthy marriage, parenting, a legacy, excellence in your skill or job, your work or whatever it is that you do. That stuff takes not just years, it takes decades. It takes a lifetime. Professor Cal Newport calls this patient way of being deliberate practice over time. Just every day you're at it and you're not in a hurry. I love that line in Hebrew 6. Imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised. Daniel models patience in all dimensions of life. He's patient with God. He stays true. He doesn't get sucked into compromise. He doesn't assimilate into the wider culture. And he's a model for us, for patience in our community, to your spouse if you have one, to your family, your friends, your church, faithfulness to God's calling on your life. Do not friends underestimate the power of quiet faithfulness of patience over a lifetime. And I think this theme of patience is the word that God has for us where we are right here right now. I've been struck in this current election cycle of the lack of anything that is slow, still, quiet and humble. It's all immediate if you think about it. This is the most important election of our lifetime. Just like the last one and the one before that and every single election I've ever been a part of. Candidates on all levels promise things on day one. Here's what I'm going to do on day one. We're pressured to have immediate opinions on things that happened like four minutes ago. The impatience that we feel it plays on our emotions. And I'm far from immune from this. I'm not lecturing. I've had to repent of my constant refreshing of the news feeds in the last couple months. Because if we're impatient and agitated and fearful and riled up and a mess of conflicts, one of the things that we're doing is we're surrendering our witness. Because impatience is not a model of biblical faithfulness. And here's the cool thing. The earliest forms of Christianity of Christ followers, they recognize this. I've been going through this fascinating book called The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. It's by Alan Crider. It's been blowing my mind. When we think of the earliest church movements, we think of this time of massive spirit-led growth of Christianity that spread over the known world to the point where in the span of just a couple hundred years, totally unheard of, Christians went from being the most persecuted class of people who were being thrown to lions in the gladiatorial forum to enjoying the benefits of Christendom as the empire's official religion. Crider makes the case that this massive explosion of growth did not come from capital campaigns or evangelism efforts or seeker-sensitive attractive ministries. In fact, quite the opposite. The earliest Christians, by and large, did not evangelize to their neighbors, as near as we can tell, nor did they invite people to come to church with them. They didn't dream of bigger spaces or more capacity. They did not center their worship services around attracting new people, and yet they grew rapidly out of control growth. How? Well, the saints, my friends, on All Saints Day, the early fathers of the church say that it grew through the virtue of patience. That's how it grew. I just want to go through some of these saints on All Saints Day. Cyprian, third century, wrote a treatise called the bono potentiae or on the good of patience, and he wrote, "Beloved brethren, we are philosophers not in words, but in deeds. We exhibit our wisdom not by our dress, but by truth. We know virtues by their patience rather than through boasting of them. We do not speak of great things. We just live them." Justin in Rome, 150 AD, noted that his church in Rome didn't even consider people to be Christians if they simply quote Christ's teachings, but there's no evidence of them in their life. He notes that the mark of a true Christian is a commitment to a lifestyle of "strange patience." Both in their personal life and in the way that they conduct their business. Clement of Alexandria, North Africa, third century AD says that a Christian shows themselves strong in patience and endurance in his life, behavior, words, and practice both day and night. Origin, one generation later, preached that when people seek to follow Jesus, God forms them into a people who embody patience. He envisioned the world as a great theater filled with spectators, all of them watching Christ followers to see how they were going to respond when they faced difficulty. He said, "Christians treating their neighbors well and behaving courageously in the arena is the core of the church's witness." A contemporary of his Tertullian said that Christian patience has nothing to do with social location for all Christians, whether poor or comfortably off, whether slave or free patience is the highest virtue. And lactantious, yet a generation later, was a convert from paganism to Christianity. And he wrote that what drew him into the community of faith was this community that characterized above everything else patience. He wrote that he learned from them to trust God and not be in a hurry. And here's the thing that blew me away. There are three main treatises written on the virtue of patience in the early church, more than any other virtue, by the way. They're by Ciprian, Tertullian, and Augustine. All of them lift up Daniel as the primary biblical hero that exemplifies patience, especially this story of Daniel and the lions then. They see him as a forerunner of Jesus Christ himself, who was perfectly patient in every way. My point is this, friends. Our earliest brothers and sisters in the Christian faith lived in exceedingly impatient times. Kings and and Caesars, they just marched forward, they supplanted each other, roamed concord nations quickly, they built things quickly, they expected things quickly, they took what they wanted, they sold their people fear in order to maintain power, but these brothers and sisters in faith insisted on the patience of Daniel in impatient times. Not for their own sanity, but for the sake of their Christian witness. They remind us that it is the patience of Christ, the patience of of the lions then, that will be our greatest witness, that will draw other people into the faith that will speak best about God's work in our life much more than what we say or where we stand on an issue or how we vote. It's patience. What Eugene Peterson calls along obedience in the same direction. Friends, Daniel's been instructing us this fall on how we are to view our work, how we are supposed to interact with the politics of the day, the powers and principalities of the day, and how to live faithfully while in exile. His patient example is worth following, especially in the anxious world that we find ourselves in, maybe more than ever in this week. By encouraging patience, I am not minimizing in any way the importance of this week, I'm not saying that the result of this election doesn't matter. What I'm saying is that if you have an opportunity to be a witness to Jesus, way beyond who you vote for or what you stand for, to show the world something other than what they've been conditioned to expect, then that is a high calling. You can show them excellence in what you do, strength of character and enduring faithfulness. You can show them a patient spirit, the spirit of Daniel with the window open facing Jerusalem, the spirit of Daniel that endured an entire night in the lions then, the spirit of Daniel that faithfully and purposefully engaged with king after king over decades and remained faithful to the one true God, the spirit of Daniel which allowed the powers and principalities of his world to worship Yahweh and allow for a return to the holy city to rebuild the temple. Friends, the opportunity that we have right now in this cultural moment to be a patient witness can truly change the world. It did for Daniel and again I'll ask could the same be said for us. Oh God, would you teach us what it means to be a patient people? Would you help us to look upon the life of your servant Daniel and his faithfulness over years and years? His commitment to you, his unwillingness to waver in his commitment to what is good and true. Lord, may we use his example to develop a patience in us that distinguishes us from the world that we see around us, that speaks well of you and that witnesses to your goodness. We pray in your name. Amen.
From Daniel 6