Facing the Lions

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in Daniel chapter 6 tonight. Our study of the book of Daniel brings us to Daniel chapter 6. And as we’ve been studying through this book, it’s been with an eye toward what Daniel and his associates, friends, if you want to call it that, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, or by their Hebrew names, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, it’s been with an eye toward what they did as they lived in Babylon, as they were plucked up out of everything that was familiar to them, and they were taken to another country that was totally foreign to them, and a country that was hostile toward the things of God.

A country that was hostile toward everything that God said was right and true and just, and how they lived in this kind of world, how they adjusted to it. And we’ve been looking at that because it resembles our world a lot. You know, we don’t wear the same clothes as the Babylonians.

We don’t eat the same foods as the Babylonians. We don’t speak the same language as the Babylonians. But the modern world is not too much different in its outlook toward God from what the Babylonians had.

The modern world, well, I shouldn’t even say the modern world. That’s just the way the world is and always has been, is by and large hostile toward the things of God. And they face challenges.

We face challenges every day, although I don’t pretend that our challenges that we face in 2017 in the United States are quite the same as what they face. We, by God’s grace, are not being thrown into lion’s dens at this point in history, and I’m thankful for that. But we still face challenges and choices every day, whether we’re going to be obedient to the Lord or whether we’re going to fall in line with the system that we see around us.

And we should be respectful, we should be obedient, We should walk with humility. But when what the world around us expects conflicts with what God demands, then what God demands has got to take precedence in our lives. And as I’ve said to you many times going through this series of studies, that it’s so much easier to do that when the choice is made ahead of time.

When we’ve already made the choice, when we’ve already weighed out the options and made the choice before the choice is presented to us, Are we going to obey God or are we going to conform to the world? When we’re faced with that choice in a moment of weakness, more often than not, we’re going to take the easy route and go with the world. Or if we’ve made the choice ahead of time, we’ve already committed to ourselves and God that we’re going to stand with Him.

It becomes a much easier, by no means easy, but it becomes a much easier thing to stand with God at that point. Now Daniel, Daniel was faced with this choice again. When a new king came in, if you recall two weeks ago, we talked about King Belshazzar.

Last week we were supposed to talk about Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Oklahoma weather had other ideas, and we went home. But two weeks ago, we talked about King Belshazzar, and how he had brought the vessels, the drinking vessels and such from the temple in Jerusalem, and he not only used them, but he used them and his partying to praise his false gods. And God finally said, I’m done with you.

You know, you have shaken your fist at me enough. I’m done with you. And there was the writing on the wall.

Daniel was called in. After all the other wise men failed to read it, failed to decipher what it meant, Daniel came in and told Belshazzar, you know, God’s basically said, your days are numbered, your kingdom’s over, and it’s going to be divided between the Medes and Persians. And that same night, history tells us, and Scripture tells us that Belshazzar was overthrown when the Medes and Persians came in.

And when we get here to the beginning of chapter 6, we’re in a whole new ballgame. Babylon is gone. Babylon has been taken over by the Medes and Persians.

So it’s a new king, it’s a new empire, a new language, a new culture, a new everything. And yet they’re still faced with the same choices. Everything has changed, but nothing has changed.

Because they’re still faced with the same choices, do we obey God or do we not? And we’re really going to focus in starting in verse 10, but to give you the story coming through the beginning of this chapter, Darius has come, or I’ve heard it pronounced Darius, it doesn’t matter, and I may switch back and forth tonight, because I was raised hearing Darius, and then studied under other people and started hearing Darius, so I’m not really sure. this guy that starts with the letter D.

He came in and he changed everything. And it says he appointed princes and governors and he came in and set up new people over the kingdom and just restructured the way that they did things. And he put three presidents in charge of all these other guys, in charge of all these other princes and governors.

And so they were each going to be in charge of part of the empire. And Daniel was first among these presidents. And the princes would come and give an account to Daniel and the other presidents.

And so really they didn’t bother the king. The king wanted to free himself up for the big picture stuff. Don’t bother me with the piddly little details of what’s going on in your provinces.

And the other presidents, the other leaders, did not like Daniel. Now there were probably a number of reasons for this. I’m sure they didn’t like Daniel and his foreign ways and his foreign god.

They probably didn’t like that Daniel seemed to be wiser than them. Daniel seemed to be better than them. I’m not saying Daniel acted like he was better than them.

But I’m saying Daniel probably just was better than them at the job because God had gifted him in particular ways. And the Bible says that they couldn’t find any fault in Daniel. They couldn’t find anything wrong with him.

That doesn’t mean Daniel wasn’t a sinner. Even those who look really good still have a sin nature. But there are just some people that they’re squeaky clean.

You can’t find any dirt on them. And Daniel was one of these guys and they hated it. You don’t have to raise your hands, but did any of you have a sibling growing up that mom and dad thought just could do no wrong?

They never got in trouble. Maybe they did bad things. Maybe you had a sibling who just didn’t do anything bad.

And you got in trouble all the time. Or there was that kid in class That just was always the goody two-shoes. The kind who would tell the teacher, you forgot to give us homework.

Daniel seems to have been that kind of person. And I’m not saying annoying and obnoxious about it. But Daniel just, you know, kept his head down, kept his nose clean, did the right thing.

They couldn’t find anything to hold over his head. They couldn’t find anything to blackmail him about. And he showed them up at work and they hated him for it.

And so they devised a plan. and they said, we’ve got to do something to get rid of Daniel. And they said, we can’t find anything wrong with him.

The only area where we can trip him up is where it comes to his God. Because, see, we figured out that if the king’s law and the law of his God conflict, he is not going to listen to the king’s law. And so they got together, and they were tricky, and they went in and they appealed to Darius’ ego.

They said, oh, we want everybody to know what an awesome king we have. We want everybody to know how powerful you are. We want everybody to know how strong you are, how you can just do anything.

And so we want you to make a law that for 30 days, nobody can petition, nobody can pray, nobody can so much as ask a favor of any God or any man but you. because we want everybody to recognize that we’re all dependent on you. And what big-headed leader wouldn’t want to hear something like that?

I mean, that went straight to Darius’ head. He thought, well, that sounds like a pretty good idea. Although this from the guy who didn’t want to be bothered, so he set up other people for people to take their problems to.

Now he wants everybody to bring their problems to him because it strokes his ego and shows that he’s this great powerful king. So he said, yeah, I think that’s a pretty good idea. And they said, by the way, the penalty here is they’ll be thrown into the lion’s den.

And he said, that works. And it’s going to be established in the manner of the law of the Medes and Persians, which means they had a way of doing things that if a decree was set by the king for a particular time that nobody could go in and revoke that decree, not even the king. So he had, as we now hear in our government, in our news, he had the pen and the phone where he could come and do whatever he wanted to, but nobody else behind him had the pen and the phone where they could undo what he did, at least until the decree expired.

And so he signed it, he approved it, it was all set in stone for 30 days. Nobody could change it. For 30 days, if anybody asked anything from Darius, or from anybody but Darius, they’d be thrown into the lion’s den.

And he thought, this sounds like a good idea. And they realized, we’ve got him. We’ve got Daniel.

Because we know he can’t go and won’t go 30 days without getting on his knees and praying to the God of the Jews. And so we pick it up in verse 10. It says, Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house, and his windows being open, in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God as he did aforetime.

I’m going to stop right there. I’ve heard this passage taught many different ways. And I’ve heard people teach, well meaning, but I’ve heard people teach that Daniel did this openly as a show of defiance.

Because it talks about the windows being open toward Jerusalem and being done in a way that everybody could see him. But it talks about, in the verse, him going into his chamber. He’s going into his bedroom.

He’s not out there on the balcony, facing Jerusalem, and making a big show about it like Jesus got on to the Pharisees about doing later on, saying, Oh God, hear me! He’s not putting on a show for people. He’s there in his bedroom, on his knees, praying to God, and it says like he did aforetime.

He went into his house, and I don’t think he’s necessarily trying to hide either, he’s not trying to hide not trying to make a show but he’s just there in his bedroom on his knees with him and God like he’s always done and you know what I like Daniel better for that there was a time in my life where it really was satisfying to think that Daniel went out on the balcony and sort of shook his fist at society and said I’m going to pray to God no matter what you can’t stop me but I really as I’ve gotten older and more level headed I guess. I really like the idea of the guy that just says, y’all do what you want. I’m going to go have the relationship with God that I’ve always had.

I’m going to go just spend time with God because that’s what I do. And it says in verse 11, then these men assembled and found Daniel praying and making supplication before God. They walked in, they found him.

Then they came near and spake before the king concerning the king’s decree. Hast thou not signed a decree that every man that shall ask a petition of any god or man within 30 days save of thee, O king, shall be cast into the den of lions. The king answered and said, The thing is true according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not.

So they came to him, and as if he’d forgotten this big ego-boosting decree he just signed, they said, King, do you remember, do you remember, you know, like it was just this morning, that you signed this decree that said for 30 days nobody could, you know, make any petitions of any god or man except for you. And he says, oh yeah, it rings a bell. I signed it and it can’t be changed according to the law of the Medes and Persians.

And now they know they’ve got Daniel. Verse 13 says, Then answered they and said before the king, That Daniel, that Daniel over there, that Daniel which is of the children of the captivity of Judah, regardeth not thee, O king, nor the decree that thou hast signed, but maketh his petition three times a day. See, they’re not just going with the facts, they’re editorializing here too.

They could have just let the law be the law and gone and told the king. By the way, Daniel is doing the thing that you told everybody not to. But they decided to spin it and try to make it sound even worse than it already is.

He’s breaking your law because he doesn’t respect you. Now everything that we know about Daniel tells us that’s not the case. Daniel’s not a disrespectful person.

You go back to, I believe it was Daniel chapter 1, when we talked about what they were eating or not eating. And Daniel was very humble when he came to the leaders and said, please would you let us not eat these things that the king has appointed. I mean, he did it in a very respectful way.

He’s not one of these you can’t tell me what to do kind of guys, and yet they’ve painted him in that way. They said he’s there making his petitions before his God. That Daniel, that Jewish Daniel, who has no respect for you, is praying to the audacity.

He’s praying to his God three times a day. But their attempts to stir the king against him didn’t work because the king was distraught by this. The king didn’t get mad.

The king was upset with himself that he had let this thing happen. Verse 14 says, And the king, when he heard these words, was sore displeased with himself. He’s not mad and ready to take Daniel out.

He’s mad at himself. Why was I so stupid that I let this happen? And set his heart on Daniel to deliver him.

And he labored until the going down of the sun to deliver him. The king, the king who couldn’t be bothered with the piddly little concerns of the common people, spent his entire day racking his brain. trying to figure out how to deliver Daniel.

How to find. . .

Where is some loophole where I can get Daniel out of this predicament that he’s in and that I’ve put him in? The king had apparently respect for Daniel because of who he was and the character that he’d shown and the work that he’d done. Until nightfall, he’s struggling, trying to find some way to get him out of it.

Verse 15 says, Then these men assembled unto the king and said unto the king, Know, O king, that the law of the Medes and Persians is, that no decree nor statute which the king establisheth may be changed. So apparently he’s already, he’s maybe even starting to waver on whether or not he should enforce this. And they’re reminding him, you know what, the laws of the Medes and Persians, the way this is set up, it can’t be changed.

And what they’re reminding him, I think here, is that if you go and let him out of this, if you don’t enforce this law, nobody’s going to have respect for any of your laws. because it’s not supposed to be changed. And if you go changing it now, they’ll expect it in the future.

Verse 16 says, And the king commanded, and they brought Daniel and cast him into the den of lions. Now we call the story all the time Daniel and the lion’s den, but the Bible says it’s Daniel and the den of lions. That they put Daniel in the den of lions.

There’s an important distinction there. A lion’s den may or may not be empty, but a den of lions has got lions in it. And so they go and they put him in the den of lions.

There are lions in this big hole in the ground. Now the king spake and said unto Daniel, Thy God whom thou servest continually. And he recognized that this is something Daniel had always done.

He was continuous. He was consistent. He said that the God that you serve continually, he will deliver thee.

And I’ve wondered many times and probably will never know, But I’ve wondered to myself whether Darius really believed that. Or if he’s not just trying to comfort what he saw as a dying man in his last moments and maybe trying to assuage his own conscience. Well, yeah, I put him in there, but God will deliver him.

He’s trying to justify it to himself. I don’t know. Maybe he really did believe it.

But he said it. He said to Daniel, Thy God whom thou service continually, he will deliver thee. And a stone was brought and laid upon the mouth of the den.

And the king sealed it with his own signet and with the signet of his lords that the purpose might not be changed concerning Daniel. This is just like with the stone in front of Jesus’ tomb. It was rolled there and it was sealed with a royal seal. This stone was put over here and it was sealed with a royal seal so that nobody could go in and sneak in and let Daniel out.

And Darius has to walk away. Knowing that this man’s only crime was being disobedient. His only crime, his only disobedience to the king was being obedient to God.

I imagine that weighed heavily on his conscience. And the Bible tells us the king went to his palace in verse 18 and passed the night fasting. Neither were instruments of music brought before him and his sleep went from him.

He had a rough night. He went home. He didn’t want to be entertained.

He didn’t want music. He couldn’t sleep. He didn’t eat.

it’s very hard for me to understand a night like this if I have trouble going to sleep or getting back to sleep you can bet that there’s television and snacks involved until I can go back to sleep I mean that’s just being honest with you he did none of this he couldn’t sleep all through the night and he was so distraught he didn’t want his entertainment brought in he didn’t want them to feed him He just wanted to be left alone. And the king rose very early in the morning. He got up as early as he could to go down there and went in haste.

He hurried down to the den of lions. And when he came to the den, he cried with a lamentable voice unto Daniel. And the king spake and said to Daniel, O Daniel, servant of the living God, is thy God whom thou servest continually?

able to deliver thee from the lions. So he orders that big stone rolled back, he orders it opened, and he hollers down there to Daniel. Now the last thing he said before that was sealed up was your God who you have served constantly will deliver you.

And the first thing that said when he opens it up, has your God who you serve constantly been able to deliver you? Then from the back of that den of lions, somewhere peering down there in the dark, he hears a voice, and in verse 21 it says, Then said Daniel unto the king, O king, live forever. Now we hear that phrase a lot, especially in the book of Daniel, O king, live forever.

It’s like we would hear people in Great Britain today say, long live the king. They don’t have a king. Long live the queen.

Or God saved the queen. One of those things. It’s a show of respect to the monarch.

so he responds even in humility not you lousy so and so you threw me down here with these hungry cats this is not a man who is rebellious this is a man who is under control but knows that when the king’s will and God’s will conflict the king’s will is out the window so he says to the king O king live forever he says my God hath sent an angel and hath shut the lion’s mouths that they have not hurt me. For as much before him innocency was found in me and also before thee, O king, have I done no hurt. He said, God looked down here and God saw I did not deserve this.

And so God sent an angel to deliver me from this fate. Now, this doesn’t mean that anytime we suffer, we deserved it. And that God looked at us and said, yep, you’re breaking your leg tomorrow.

Yep, you’re getting a visit from the IRS, man. I saw what you just did. That doesn’t mean that every time there’s some kind of suffering in our lives, that it means that we are the immediate cause of it.

Just because God said, well, you’re innocent, I’m going to spare you from this. And it also doesn’t mean that when we’re in the right, that we’re always going to get off scot-free. There’s sometimes going to be a cost and a consequence, even when we take a hard stand for God.

But in this case, Daniel knew that God had looked at him and seen that there was nothing he had done. The only thing he had done was to be obedient to God and to kneel in submission to him three times a day and pray to him. And so God had sent this angel to spare him, to hold back the lions.

Verse 23 says, Then was the king exceeding glad for him and commanded that they should take Daniel up out of the den. So they pulled Daniel up. He was excited and Daniel was taken up out of the den and no manner of hurt was found upon him because he believed in his God.

You see, there was a faith relationship that Daniel had with God that protected him in the midst of suffering. And the king commanded, and they brought those men which had accused Daniel, and they cast them into the den of lions, them and their children and their wives, and the lions had mastery of them. In other words, the lions won.

and break all their bones in pieces or ever they came at the bottom of the den. Now, I question sometimes, I don’t always understand why things happened the way they did in the Old Testament, why sometimes an entire family was removed. In some circumstances, like with King Ahab, I was reading about that this week, where King Ahab was judged, he and Jezebel, over the murder of Naboth for his vineyard.

There are times that God looks at a family and sees you’re all in on it. You’re all in on it. Or God looks in the future and sees, yeah, you would be doing this kind of thing if I don’t remove you from the picture before you get the opportunity.

We can’t do that in our justice system, say we think you’re going to commit a crime because we don’t know. But God knows. God knows the brutality that was going on.

God knows the brutality that needed to stop and the only way to stop it. So those questions arise all the time in the Old Testament, especially since we don’t have the capacity to understand like God does. But before you get too disturbed by this, notice God didn’t tell him to do that.

That came from Darius. This came from Darius. Throw the whole families in there.

And it doesn’t say necessarily that God said that was the right answer either. But God spared Daniel. And Darius at the end writes a decree praising the God of Daniel and what he had done, telling everybody what the God of Daniel had done in preserving him and protecting him.

And Daniel was in this predicament for one reason really and one reason only, and that’s because when it came to a question of whose will would come out on top, when Daniel was faced with a choice, do I follow the king’s law or God’s law? Daniel sided with God. And folks, we are faced with the same choice as believers too.

We are taught to obey the law of the land. The Bible tells us to be subject to those who are in authority over us. Tells us to be subject to God-given authority.

But it also tells us, the Bible teaches that we ought to obey God rather than men. And so, even though we are supposed to obey the law, whether it’s the tax law, whether it’s the speed limit, I hate to tell you, we’re supposed to follow man’s law, unless it conflicts with God’s law. If man’s law says we can’t do something God has told us to do, we have to humbly and respectfully disobey that.

If man’s law tells us we must do something God’s law has said we cannot, we must humbly and respectfully disobey that. Not to be disobedient, not to be rebellious, but so that we can be obedient to an even higher law. And that’s what Daniel did here.

And he made the choice already. He made the choice in his young days. See his choice didn’t begin with these events.

It talks all throughout this passage about the God he served constantly. The way he had prayed aforetime. It uses these words because this is just one event in Daniel’s life.

This is just one event that took place in the journey of Daniel concerning his relationship with God. There was a new consequence. There was a new twist in the story, but nothing changed for Daniel in his relationship with this.

Daniel’s obedience didn’t end because of the lions. That’s the first thing that we need to know tonight. His obedience to God didn’t end because of the lions.

Daniel, thankfully, was not somebody who would look at the consequence, the very real and very scary consequence, and say, yeah, I can’t do what God tells me to because those lions are too big. That might be a hard decision. I won’t lie to you and tell you that’s going to be an easy decision.

Earlier I said if you make the decision ahead of time, it becomes much easier. But I also said it doesn’t become easy. There’s a difference between easy and easier.

That’s got to be a hard decision. But he’d already made it ahead of time. I’ve obeyed God all these years.

I’ve served him all these years. He’s seen me through all the things he’s seen me through. I’m not going to stop obeying God just because of some silly lions.

And quite honestly, there’s only so far that consequences can go for us. There’s only so much that man can do to us. I mentioned on a Wednesday night just recently some of the things that the Apostle Paul said.

Hey, if they throw me in jail, great, I’ll spread Jesus Christ in jail. If they let me out of jail, great, I’ll take the gospel to the rest of the world. hey, if they kill me, I’ll go with you with Jesus Christ. And it’d be one thing for me to say that when nobody’s holding a sword to my neck.

And it would sound kind of flippant for me to say, hey, all they can do is kill you. At some point, the consequences are over. But from somebody like Paul, where the consequences were very real, somebody’s there with chains to his hands and a sword to his neck, to say, I’m not worried about the consequences.

Well, Daniel’s obedience didn’t stop because of the consequences. Because I think Daniel rightly observed that these lions are temporary, but his relationship with God was eternal. His obedience didn’t end because of the lions, but second of all, his obedience didn’t begin because of Darius’ decree. Daniel didn’t suddenly get religion because he wanted to act out.

And sometimes that’ll happen. Sometimes that’ll happen. I remember several years ago, we were planning a political meeting at the Moore Community Center.

And I was just fresh out of high school, and it was put on me to go and make the arrangements for the, to reserve the room. And so I’m sitting down talking with the director or assistant director, somebody like that, of the Parks and Recreation Department. Told him what we wanted to do, told him what kind of group we were.

And he sits there across his desk from me, this 19-year-old kid, and said, but y’all can’t pray or have any kind of religious expression. And I said, excuse me? First of all, I hadn’t mentioned anything about that.

it was a political meeting, but I’m pretty sure we can, but I just said, okay, that’s, that doesn’t sound right, but all right, I was just trying to get out of there. And I called a friend of mine who happened to be one of our state representatives at the time, and by the time I got home about 20 minutes later, he had called another state representative and a state senator and two county commissioners, I think, they’d all been on the phone with the mayor’s office, and we were told that we could say and do whatever we wanted, which I think was the legal thing to do. If you open it up to any community group, you open it up to all of them.

Here’s where the story goes, though. Some in our group said, well, let’s just have a prayer breakfast beforehand. I’m always up for prayer.

I think that’s a great thing to do. As I’ve looked back on it, it kind of bothered me that we hadn’t had the idea to have a prayer breakfast before the government tried to tell us we couldn’t. And our group, we still meet and we still have prayer, but that was a really well-attended prayer breakfast. And I can almost guarantee you if I tried to organize a prayer breakfast today and said we’re just going to meet at somebody’s house in the same community and invited all the same people, we may not have the huge turnout that we had for that.

Because sometimes we get religion when the world tells us we can’t and not for the right reasons. We do it because we want to prove we can. see Daniel didn’t do that that’s where I say years ago I might have liked the idea that Daniel was standing out on his balcony saying hello world you can’t stop me but I’d much rather I’d much prefer to be the guy who’s just doing the right thing that I’ve always done because it’s the right thing and so his obedience to God did not begin with Darius’ decree he wasn’t making a point he had nothing to prove he was just being obedient And finally this evening, I don’t even know what time of day it is, Daniel’s obedience was rooted in his relationship with and his trust of God.

He was able to face down the lions because of God. And he recognized that the lions were held back because of God. See, Daniel had a close walk with God and a trust of God that I think is lacking from many of us, and I put myself in that category.

If I was threatened today with do this or be thrown to the lions, I’d like to think I’d take the lions, but I might have to stop and think about it longer than Daniel did. But see, Daniel spent so much time with God, and he had spent so many years with God, and God had carried him through so many things, and what’s more, he didn’t focus on the lions, he just focused on the God that would get him through the lions, that the lions weren’t a big deal. And we can look at consequences the same way we look at troubles. And I’ve used this illustration for years that when we stand in the midst of a hurricane, when we stand in the eye of the storm, and all we see around us are the walls of clouds and the floodwaters closing in, when that’s all we can see from every direction because we’re in the middle, even a small hurricane makes it look like the whole world is a hurricane.

And we may not see how big God is outside that hurricane because all we can see is the hurricane. but when you stand when you stand back from the hurricane when you’re outside of it you can see there’s blue sky on the other side when you see a satellite picture and you’re looking at the hurricane more from God’s perspective you can see it’s just a little white swirl on the surface see when we look at the consequences when we look at the troubles this world throws at us when we look at all the bad things that can happen they seem really really big because we’re surrounded by them and we’re focused on them but when we step back and we focus 

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