Dare to be a Daniel

Dare to be a Daniel,

dare to stand alone;

dare to have a purpose firm,

dare to make it known

Given the course of current events worldwide, this Sunday school chorus aptly encapsulates the challenges Christians face daily. Indeed, we encounter much of the same conflicts as Daniel did in the 6th century BC. Like Daniel, we face relentless political and religious pressures seeking to impugn our faith practices. Like Daniel, Christians are surreptitiously coerced into embracing worldviews hostile to our faith. And like Daniel, we are compelled by circumstances to make a choice: either to adapt to, or adopt the mores of the powers-that-be, or withdraw from the mainstream of society and thereby lose out effectiveness as Christian witnesses. Given these realities, this ancient book of Daniel offers us both relevant and wise counsel.

From the outset, Daniel faced a crisis of identity. Hand-picked from among the cream of the exiled Jewish community, Daniel and his friends were to be sequestered into the service of the Babylonian empire. To serve effectively, however, Daniel would have to be assimilated into the culture and belief system of the ruling power. His name would have to be changed, of course: henceforth, he would be called Belteshazzar. His education would comprise “the letters and language of the Chaldeans” (Daniel 1:4), and he would, for all intents and purposes, be expected to be Chaldean, not Jewish. We have no record that Daniel objected to the name change or to the learning opportunities opened to him at the ‘University of Babylon’.

Nonetheless, Daniel drew the line when it came to his food rations. It is unclear why he chose to object to a non-kosher diet when he had apparently tolerated other ‘culture-defiling’ impositions. Perhaps it was his aversion to the food itself; or it could be that the food had been offered to pagan gods before consumption. Whatever the motivation, we are told that Daniel “purposed in his heart” (Daniel 1:8) that he would not partake of the prescribed provisions. It is reasonable to conclude that Daniel understood he needed to make a stand because if he did not, he would eventually succumb to the temptations and pressures to conform to an alien culture. More importantly, it would have eventually led to a denial of the God of Israel.

There is an important lesson for us here. The challenges which confronted Daniel find an echo in our times. To take our education system as an example: we are similarly subjected to not-too-subtle attempts at inculturation into the religion of the majority. Non-Muslim students have been compelled to study Islamic Civilisation in order to graduate from our universities. History, as taught in our schools, is basically propaganda for one religious ideology. On a larger scale, we are inundated (one may say, suffused) with atheistic, secular and anti-Christian philosophies through the social media.

How are we to react to such situations? Some churches have responded with strident protestations while others (forming a significant majority) have remained mute. I suspect the reason for such silence stems from an ignorance of the magnitude of the problem. Like the proverbial frog in the kettle, we fail to realise how with each slice of the knife, the church’s space in the public arena is gradually whittled away. As the late Francis Schaeffer observed,

“… there is a “thinkable” and an “unthinkable” in every era. One era is quite certain intellectually and emotionally about what is acceptable. Yet another era decides that these “certainties” are unacceptable and puts another set of values into practice.”

The most obvious and current example of this is the wholesale acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex marriage in the West as the ‘new normal’, something that was unthinkable as little as thirty years ago. Now, there is a push to even question the objective reality of the binary gender. This would have been considered an outrageous assertion as little as ten years ago, but that ideology has secured a firm foothold in the minds of the Western intelligentsia. The monument of morality which had seemed so solid on the outside was in fact crumbling beneath its foundation. Undoubtedly, the secularist worldview, coupled with the support of the mainstream media and governments, had a lot to do with this mindset change. It is no wonder then, that scripture is replete with warnings for us to stand firm against the “powers and principalities” (Romans 11:20; 1 Corinthians 16:13; 2 Corinthians 1:24; Galatians 5:1; Ephesians 6; Philippians 4:1; 2 Thessalonians 2:15).

Certainly, the call for the church to stand firm in troubling times will not resonate with the feel-good ethos of the mega church or indeed, the comfortable middle-to-upper class congregations. Daniel knew that his resistance was not to be without its attendant consequences: after all, he was going against the most powerful monarch on earth! The question is not, however, whether the church should assert its Christian commitment but how it should do so. To ignore the writing on the wall would be disastrous for the church.

Daniel’s example includes both accommodation and separation. As noted, he accepted his new name, graduated summa cum laude from the Chaldean university and eventually served the despot Nebuchadnezzer faithfully. In summary, he was actively engaged in the hostile environment and had great influence over its administration. Still, he stood firm when it mattered. As we have seen, he resisted the Babylonian diet. Later, he disobeyed an absurd prohibition against worship of any god except the king. For this, as we well know, he was placed in the lions’ den.

It is crucial that we do not read the narrative passages of Daniel as normative prescriptions for ethics. We are not asked to decide between a vegan meal or bak kut teh. Neither do we need to pray three times a day facing Jerusalem as Daniel intentionally did. Nevertheless, some obvious principles find their parallels in the New Testament.

In John 17:15, Jesus’s request to the Father is not that believers should be taken out of the world. Instead, verse 18 emphatically affirms our mission: “As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” Firstly then, we have been tasked with the same mission as our blessed Saviour, a mission we must carry out while still being engaged in worldly affairs. We need to be reminded that our warfare is not principally the destruction of physical strongholds. First Corinthians 10:5 explains the nature of our struggles: “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”

This is a clear mandate for us to speak out on the wider issues affecting culture – corruption, justice, law, morality, education, conversion – based on a genuine understanding of the biblical themes of creation, fall and redemption. We are to be so, however, keeping in mind Jesus’s instructions to his disciples to be “wise as serpents and innocents as doves” (Matthew 10:16). This calls for discernment on the part of the church in its engagement with wider society.

It will not be an easy task. The “dare” in the title of this article presupposes that it takes a certain amount of courage to make a stand and to speak out. Indeed, it requires an unwavering commitment to God. The stories in the book of Daniel underline God’s ability to deliver his children from their trials and we may take courage from the fact that the central message in Daniel is that God is in control of all circumstances. This does not necessarily mean that the outcomes will be as we ourselves expect. Daniel’s friends in chapter 3, while fully convinced of God’s ability to deliver them, nonetheless inserted a caveat – “But if not…” The events we encounter must be considered in the context of God’s overall authority in the stream of human history. The prophetic portions in the book are not recorded merely to satisfy the curiosity of millenarians. They are also given to offer assurance to the exiled community (of which we are all a part) that God will have his way eventually.

The church today is desperately in need of Daniels: heroes of faith who have willing to die or at least suffer for the truth of the gospel; heroes who are not self-serving and who will not yield to the temptations of office, but are willing to sacrifice for the glory of God. We must be clear about one thing at least in our Christian life: there is a battle raging and we as Christians are at the forefront of this battle, the outcome of which has actually been predetermined. As Christ said to his disciples, either we are for him or we are against him. There is no neutrality with God.