Daniel 1, Will You Be Assimilated?, Dr. John B. Carpenter

Daniel’s Opening Reading and the Theme of Assimilation

Daniel chapter 1, hear the word of the Lord. In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem and besieged it. And the Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand and some of the vessels of the house of God.

And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his God, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his God. Then the king commanded Ashpenaz, the chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility, youths without blemish and of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding, learning, and competent to stand in the king's palace and to teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans.

The king assigned them a daily portion of the food that the king ate and of the wine that he drank. They were to be educated for three years and at the end of that time they were to stand before the king.

Among these were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah of the tribe of Judah. And the chief of the eunuchs gave them names. Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, and Mishael he called Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego.

But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's food or with the wine that he drank. Therefore he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself. And God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs.

And the chief of the eunuchs said to Daniel, I fear my lord the king who assigned your food and your drink, for why should he see that you were in worse condition than the youths who are of your own age?

So you would endanger my head with the king. Then Daniel said to the steward whom the chief of the eunuchs had assigned over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, test your servants for 10 days. Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink.

Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat the king's food be observed by you and deal with your servants according to what you see. So he listened to them in this matter and tested them for 10 days.

At the end of 10 days it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than the youths who ate the king's food. So the steward took away their food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables.

As for these four youths, God gave them learning and skill in all literature and wisdom and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams. At the end of the time when the king had commanded that they should be brought in, the chief of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar and the king spoke with them and among all of them none was found like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.

Therefore they stood before the king and in every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king inquired of them, he found them 10 times better than all the magicians and the enchanters that were in all his kingdom.

And Daniel was there until the first year of King Cyrus. May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word. When Nancy and Joyce joined Covenant in 2011, like everyone else, all members joining, they signed their commitment to the church covenant, which is an old Baptist practice.

I listed their names in English, but here you can see that first Nancy wrote her Chinese name, her real name. This is the first one at the top. Then Joyce crossed out Joyce. Notice that she crosses out the Joyce that are printed there and wrote her Chinese name, Xin.

Now I'm surprised she didn't go ahead and write her name in Chinese characters and put her family name first. In my mind this is like the scene in The Matrix, if you've seen that movie, near the end where the agent has Neo in a headlock on a subway train tracks and says, on the train tracks, understand, hearing the train coming and says, hear that Mr. Anderson?

That is the sound of inevitability. And Neo responds, my name is Neo. And then he breaks free. Here I was saying, hear that Joyce? That is the sound of assimilation. And Joyce said, my name is young Xin and broke free.

And I look at that and I think, yeah, I know exactly how you feel. When I first went to Singapore, everything was new and exciting. I would take photographs of everything I found interesting, which is basically everything.

The temples, the mosque, the double-decker buses, the high-rise apartments, these huge concrete apartment blocks, the laundry hung out on bamboo poles, the soda cans, the drinks, like one drink was grass drink with jelly.

I just got to take a picture of that. And the people, basically everything. Because everything was so exotic and everything was so foreign. And then for a time I tried to resist assimilation. I'm gonna wear my shoes in my house like a good American.

I've never been to McDonald's as many times as much as when I lived in Singapore. I desperately tried to cling to my native culture, to my Americanness. I had to work on the Fourth of July because it's not a holiday in Singapore.

But that evening we went to an American restaurant. And for the evening's festivities and the days before the internet or satellite TV, I listened to the Voice of America radio, shortwave radio. Had to get shortwave, it's not locally broadcast.

And heard a traditional American herd, mind you, a traditional American fireworks show. Now if you think fireworks lose something on TV, ever watch a fireworks show on TV and you think that's, that just, you don't get the impact of fireworks on TV.

If you think that, if you see fireworks on TV, you ought to try fireworks on the radio. It's just not particularly impressive. But that's what exiles do, you know, trying to cling to their national identity.

This is who I am. But then there's the sound of inevitability. I began to be assimilated. I grew a taste for duck, sweet and sour fish, chicken rice. I rode the double-decker bus every day to work. I stopped being fascinating.

They were just a way to get around. I lived in those high-rise apartments that I first, sounds so interesting. I lived in them. I hung my own laundry out to dry on bamboo poles. I gave on pals at Chinese New Year.

That was the holiday. I got used to taking my shoes off at the door and I still do to this day. I even married a local. And after over five years of living there, I was becoming slowly changed by the culture.

I was being assimilated. It's inevitable. Now, Americans prided themselves on being a melting pot, on assimilating. You accept a little of something from immigrants, like pizza from the Italians, hot dogs and Christmas trees from the Germans, fireworks from the Chinese, and you make it all part of our own, eventually breaking down the differences, kind of like a pot of stew where the potatoes taste like the beef and the onions.

Now, sure, immigrants might try to hold on to their native culture and their customs, and they might even succeed for a generation, maybe, but eventually their kids begin to feel at home. And July 4th and Thanksgiving mean something to them.

And they like, at least sometimes, the hamburgers and the pizzas. And their children after them will even more so try as hard as their parents might to raise them as in their own native culture. We will assimilate you.

That is really just inevitable, but it is an inevitability that Daniel and his friends wanted to avoid, at least partially. They'll be assimilated to a point, but there are some things they will not give up because for them being totally assimilated wasn't just replacing Israelite culture for Babylonian, learning to like pork, doing things the Babylonian way.

It was losing their identity as the people of God, losing the promises of God, the future that God had for them at the conclusion of all things. Would they be assimilated and lose all that, becoming just more Babylonians, kind of merged into the wider culture?

Or would they believe in the promises to Abraham and to David that God was working through this nation to bring about his kingdom on earth? That's the critical choice. That's what's going on in this chapter.

Would they be absorbed into the culture around them? Or would they believe that there is a citizenship, that they have a citizenship in God's kingdom and that overrides all the rest? Well, here they face that question in three parts.

First, verses 1 to 7, the conquest. Second, from verses 8 to 16, the conviction. And finally, from verses 17 to 21, the conclusion. First, the conquest. Nebuchadnezzar had conquered Jerusalem, the city of David, where the temple was or was as in really past tense at this point, which the people of Judah thought was invincible because God was there.

God lived it literally, they thought, in that house. And so we would never allow the city to be conquered no matter how they lived. They could just live as rebelliously as they want, they thought, because God's going to protect them because we got them, we have them in that house.

And so we don't allow his temple to be destroyed, they thought, because they were God's people, with God himself resident in his temple. God would never allow his temple to be trampled on by pagans and the items used in the worship of it to be hauled away.

Even though Jeremiah told them judgment was coming, you know, he would say terror on every side is coming. They wouldn't believe it until they were conquered. And really they didn't believe it even after they were conquered.

You see, first they were conquered in 596 BC, as here in verse 1, this is probably what verse 1 is here referring to, 596 BC, when Nebuchadnezzar comes into the city, he conquers the city, and he takes away many of their leading citizens, takes some of the items out of the temple, but leaves the city basically intact.

Doesn't kill a lot of people, doesn't devastate the place, doesn't try to destroy it, he just tried to humiliate them, humble them. And he's hoping that would be enough to make them subject. He took some of the promising leaders of the next generation in verse 4.

Notice he describes them as youths, probably teenagers, youths without blemish, of good appearance. So they would make a good image for the regime eventually because he's wanting to put them in his bureaucracy.

And skillful in all wisdom, that is they're smart, endowed with knowledge, they're educated, understanding learning, they're good students, and they're competent to stand in the king's palace. They're skillful, they're natural leaders.

So he found these among the Jews in Judea, and he takes them away with him, and he's going to teach them. He's not taking them as, I guess they're kind of hostages, but he's not taking them to kill them or threaten them.

He's taking them to teach them Babylonian ways and literature and civilization, assimilating them to his culture. He's hoping to make them loyal to Babylon, and likely he's been on planning, once they're educated in Babylonian ways, on making them some of the leaders in his bureaucracy, particularly sending them back to Israel to be leaders there in the future in order to, he hopes, to make Israel a peaceful tax-paying subject of the Babylonian empire.

The goal of taking the best use was to detach them from their nation, from their culture, and so encourage them to be absorbed into the dominant culture, this time Babylon. It was to assimilate them. And why not assimilate?

After all, Babylon was the great power, it had a long history, and a rich culture, and of course then there's this obvious fact. It had conquered. It was victorious. Many people in his day would assume that the side that wins the war wins, it conquers, because their god is more powerful.

The more powerful god beats the weaker god. So how do you know which god is more powerful? Well, he's the one that wins the wars. And so why not believe, if that's your attitude, even if you're Israelite, why not believe in Nebuchadnezzar's gods?

Nebuchadnezzar conquered the city and he sent the items from the Jerusalem temple, took the items out, and in his mind, Nebuchadnezzar is giving tribute to his gods for conquering the god in Jerusalem.

That was his way. These are tokens of the the god of Israel. He's going to put them in his temple, pagan temples, to show, look, we're more powerful. Our gods are more powerful. So why not seek to be on the winning side, right?

Many people, that's the way their attitude, their morals, their opinions, their attitudes are always what's dominant, what the majority believes, who's in control, who's in power. The conquest improves, doesn't it?

They think. Who is more powerful? Whose gods are the best? But Daniel here tells us differently. In verse 2, I'm talking about the book Daniel, it says, verse 2, the Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into Nebuchadnezzar's hand with some of the vessels of the house of God.

Now understand what a shocking statement that is in there. You mean the Lord, why would the Lord give his own city, his own temple, to be in the control of a pagan king? I mean, from the pagan's point of view, Nebuchadnezzar's point of view, my gods gave me that city and he was expecting many people in Judah to think the same thing.

Well, the Babylonian gods, Marduk or whoever, they must be more powerful than the Lord, than Yahweh, because he won. And yet Daniel says, the book Daniel says, no, the Lord gave Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar.

The Lord was in control of even Nebuchadnezzar. Why did Nebuchadnezzar conquer Jerusalem? Because the Lord gave it to him. The people of Judah thought that there was no way that Jerusalem would fall because God would protect his temple.

The temple was their kind of their magic token. Many people think if they put a cross on their mirror or something swaying, that that'll protect them from accidents or something like that, getting in a wreck.

It's the same way with them. They thought, we have God in the temple, he's going to protect his city. They said, whenever a prophet warned them of judgments coming, they would say, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.

Just like today, when some people are warned of judgment for their own immorality, for their own lives, they will say or think, my sinner's prayer, my sinner's prayer, my sinner's prayer, or my baptism, my baptism, my baptism.

But the Lord showed that he doesn't care for buildings or rituals, but for the lives of his people. The Lord gave his temple into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar, who utterly destroyed it. Later, Jerusalem was not humbled by Nebuchadnezzar's first humiliation in 596, so Nebuchadnezzar came back in 586, 10 years later, and just utterly destroyed Jerusalem and the city.

That's when the book of Lamentations was written. And he took the instruments from the temple, and the vessels of the house of God, they're called in verse 2, and the Lord gave it all to Nebuchadnezzar, all that stuff from the temple to be put by Nebuchadnezzar for safekeeping in a pagan temple.

And when his people became no different than the world, he gives them into the hands of the world. Babylon here is the world. It is here, the representative, it's the center, it's the type of all those forces that seek to dominate and impress us, even today, to convince us that, you know, it is winning, it is in control, that all intelligent, all moral, tolerant, tolerant now means moral in modern language, people think and act like they do.

They take off their shoes at the door. You barbarian, how do you not do that? Or maybe they don't take off their shoes at the door. You know, whatever, that's what we do. You're going to conform. Whatever they do, they are sure that that is the only thing to do.

That's their culture. And you will assimilate. It is inevitable. They will wear you down, they will teach you to think and act just like them. Here in verse 5, they will eat and drink just like the king.

That's good food, you know, but they're going to eat and drink just like him, whatever he likes. They will learn Babylonian ways. They will be drilled in it day after day for three years. They're even given Babylonian names.

They were going to be assimilated. And among those Israelites were four young men, probably just teenage boys, the cream of the crop, the nobility, you guess maybe Daniel at this time, maybe he's about 15.

They're chosen, it says in verse 4, partly for their looks. They look good. You want good-looking people, you know, for the interviews on CNN or whatever. Their skill and wisdom and endowed with knowledge, understanding and learning.

The kind of young men who could lead a comfortable life of wealth and power if they just play their cards right and just go along with the regime, with the dominant culture, with what the king wants. It was a privilege to be trained for Babylonian leadership, although they may have taken it against their will, you know, they're kind of, they're living nicely, they're fed very well.

They're going to be having, eventually they're being prepared for power and the most powerful empire in that part of the world. But they would have to know the temptation to just totally assimilate, to conform to Babylon would be great.

That was, after all, one of the goals of this education that they were put through. It was to make them Babylonian. It began with their names being changed from Daniel, which means God is my judge, to Belteshazzar with the name of the god Bel in it, so it's the name of a pagan god in his new name.

From Hananiah, the Lord is gracious, to Shadrach, from Mishael, who is what God is, to Meshach, from Azariah, the Lord is a helper, to Abednego, each new Babylonian name removing the name of the Lord with the goal of removing the memory of the Lord from their identity.

The goal was total assimilation. Now, many believers today would say, well, why put yourself through that? Just say, you know, I'm the Lord's, I'm going to stay the Lord's, and so you stay in your Christian enclave, you ignore the world, try to stay as far away from it as you possibly can in every part of life, just retreat, and that's the mistake of escape.

They refuse to be a part of anything the world has to offer. They belittle education, they'll form their little clubs and schools and entertainment, just like any exiles trying to cling to their identity, not only to keep them from assimilating, but because they don't believe education or culture, all that literature has anything to offer them.

They're suspicious of it all. They've heard too many stories of kids going off to college and coming back, party animals, or homosexuals, or just elite, kind of woke pseudo-academics who reject everything their parents believe because they are sure they know better now.

Christians intimidated by that, afraid their kids will go off into that, try to escape from it. The culture, they think, is entirely hostile, and so instead of doing the really hard work of learning, of getting the education, of being faithful to the world, of kind of learning the way the world thinks and seeing what's wrong with it, being able to think beyond it, see through it, like these four young men, instead of that, many Christians today think they can opt out.

Conviction in the Heart of Babylon

They can stay out, throw stones from outside. They think that shows conviction. Maybe it kind of does, but it's a very weak conviction. Second, conviction. It takes more conviction to go in the system, to be engaged by the culture and to engage the culture back, to go in the universities and learn everything you can from it without assimilating.

It takes deeper faith. It takes conviction to learn about the objections of a Stephen Hawking or a Bart Ehrman and refute them, see beyond them, which you can do. It takes conviction to be exposed to different ideas, to be confronted by them, to learn, to change when you're wrong, not just adamantly shouting you're wrong to the world, but understanding it and stand fast when the Word of God speaks clearly.

Refute it when you can. It took conviction to be in the world, right in the heart. Think of what these men are, these four young men, in the heart of the foreign culture. They're working in it. They're going by new names, but not to be assimilated when it came to God's Word.

What these four young men did took strong conviction. So Daniel resolved in verse 8. Notice that. Daniel resolved. In other words, he came to a resolution. That's conviction. Here their conviction is tested with food.

The people of God, remember, living under the Mosaic covenant, were not supposed to eat some kinds of food, some kinds of meat particularly, like pork. They're not supposed to eat that at all. And even otherwise acceptable meats like beef and chicken had to be slaughtered in the right way.

And so Daniel and his three friends show up at freshman orientation at Nebuchadnezzar University, and the first thing they're served in the cafeteria is barbecue pork, maybe some blood pudding, maybe some veal boiled in his mother's milk, and lots of wine.

Perhaps wine probably offered to the Babylonian gods before served to them. And so the rest of the students were digging in. Students from all over that part of the world. They're chosen to be the best like them, being prepared to be bureaucrats in the Babylonian government, provided with the best of fine Babylonian cuisine.

But because Daniel and his friends had conviction, they resolved. That is, they came to a resolution. They had a solid, settled commitment in their hearts that they would not compromise the commands of the Lord.

They resolved to be obedient to the Word of God. Just like we are to resolve to believe the Word of God, not only in Scripture, but the Word incarnate, Jesus the Son. And you can never really separate those two things.

Well, today Christians are tempted to compromise in matters they shouldn't. Perhaps about the role of women in the church. You know, why not have a woman pastor? Everyone's doing it. And after all, there's some that speak very well.

And if you think having only men as it's just a tradition, it's just part of the old patriarchal culture, and we can now grow past that. If that's the way you think, then you'll be tempted to assimilate.

If you have a conviction based on the Word of God, you won't. Perhaps about homosexuality. If you think being, you know, homophobic, that's just an old bigotry, well, then you'll assimilate. You'll assimilate just like those old white churches assimilated to a true bigotry in the past, letting the racist culture around them tell them who they could accept in the church, who was their neighbor, that they should love as themselves, and who wasn't.

Remember what was wrong with the old acceptance of racism and segregation? What was wrong with it in the church? It was that they assimilated to the culture around them. But if you have conviction anchored in the Word of God, you'll stand firm.

Now Daniel resolved that he wasn't going to break God's covenant just just to get ahead, to get a good job in the Nebuchadnezzar administration with power and privileges. We are all called to resolve, like Daniel, that we will stand on our convictions that come from the Word of God.

Even when the world seems to have conquered, we see that the Lord is in control. We resolve not to compromise His Word and be willing to stand up and stand out. And then God may grant us favor with the world.

Maybe we'll be like Eric Little, the Scottish sprinter, later to become a missionary to China, who resolved not to run a race on Sunday because of his convictions about the Sabbath. God gave him favor with the Olympics and with another teammate who put him in another race, which he won the gold medal for.

Sometimes we will win favor, respect, when we stand up for our convictions, respectfully, as does Daniel here. You know, he's not angrily protesting. He's not shouting demands. He's not just kind of unreasonable, insulting everyone else.

You horrible people eating this defiled food, not denouncing everybody. We refuse to indulge in your Babylonian garbage. None of that kind of rhetoric from him. No, he didn't do any of that kind of stuff.

Notice how obviously courteous and respectful, but also firm. We're told he resolved, but he put velvet over his resolution. But here, Daniel resolves in verse 8 and then respectfully asks the chief eunuch to be excused.

The eunuch listens to him in verse 10 and then offers a way out. In verses 12 and 13, God gave favor and compassion so that the chief eunuch, apparently kind of the dean of students, was willing to take a risk for Daniel.

Notice in verse 9 it says that God gave Daniel favor. If you're like me, you're tempted to think, well, Daniel earned the favor by his principles or by his courtesy. But no, the chapter here says God gave it to him.

Now, it may be that the eunuch was impressed by Daniel and his three friends, their courage to stand on principle. Maybe he's impressed by their willingness to give up the tasty food in order to be obedient to God.

After all, I mean, serve the king's food. This is good food we're talking about. It's not as though, you know, they were giving up this horrible kind of school cafeteria food for some of their own home-prepared stuff.

Now, they were giving up good food for just plain vegetables. It was a sacrifice they were making. And maybe the eunuch was impressed by that or maybe the eunuch was won over by their courtesy. Daniel respectfully asked to be excused.

He reasons with them. He gives them a test, okay, you know, and he looks accommodating. You know, I'll let us do it 10 days and then you can evaluate, this kind of thing. But he's a reasonable person.

But those are just the instruments God used to give Daniel and the friends favor. The favor wasn't earned by their being principled or respectful. It was given by God. Maybe God will grant you favor if you respectfully stand by your convictions.

Maybe standing up for Sunday morning worship. It is important to you and you don't want to miss it just for work, just to make a few more dollars on a Sunday morning. We have conviction, resolve. God gives favor, but sometimes he doesn't.

Even in this book, in Daniel, sometimes he asks us to have convictions, to be resolved, even when he chooses not to grant us favor with people, even the people in charge. It's later in this book when these young men are willing to go to their deaths because an angry king doesn't see their resolve favorably.

Of course, we could try to weasel our way out. After all, you know, this, whatever we're being asked to do, compromise with, this isn't such a big deal. It's just food. You know, they're just asking us to eat their food.

It's the king's food. It's good food. They're just asking us to eat it. They're not asking us to fall down before Marduk or Baal. So they could think, Daniel and his friends could think, well, you know, why not give in on this?

It's a little thing. Just do it. And that's the way the world is going to approach us. The world isn't going to seek to make us compromise by asking us to sacrifice the Baal or say Jesus is cursed. It's not going to start with that.

It may end with that one day, but it's not going to start with that. It's not going to ask us to start with something so obviously just grotesque. First, the world will warm us up to compromise, one little step at a time.

Compromise starts with something apparently small, even with something pleasant, something tempting, something easy. Just eat this delicious food. Everyone around you is doing it. Just name your pronouns.

It makes some people feel better. Daniel and his friends could have reasoned that their ultimate goal of getting positions of influence in the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar, that's too important to be forfeited just because of something trivial, something small, like food.

Sure, they could think, Moses told us not to eat pork, but how could we bring justice to this? Think of all the good we can do in the Babylonian Empire when we get that power. So why not give in on this?

The end justifies the means after all. It's the greater good, they could say. But the truth is that if they had not made this first stand here, they would not have made the other stands in this book. If they had not stood up for obedience to the laws about food, they would have bowed down to the idol.

They would have stopped praying when the empire told them to. One compromise leads to another, and one act of conviction also builds up to others. So Daniel asks respectfully in verse 12 to be excused from the royal defiling diet.

And he says, test your servants. That's how he describes himself and his friends, your servants. He's very courteous, humbly referring to himself. For 10 days let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink.

He's being reasonable here, he's trying to come, understand, we'll test you and see if we can win you over. And only because God gave the dean to students a favorable disposition toward Daniel did he entertain the proposal.

So he was afraid that Nebuchadnezzar would find out and be angry, and you don't want to make the king angry at that time. It's not just a matter of being fired. It could be much worse, so he could accuse him of undernourishing his prime students and so have him executed.

In verse 10 he says, I fear my lord the king, you would endanger my head. Literally he's talking about. Now Daniel respectfully offers a test, 10 days without all that unclean meat and wine, and when they look better than the other students after 10 days, in verse 15 Daniel proves that standing up for their convictions is blessed.

Now this is not a lesson about veganism. Why you should be a vegetarian and you'll be healthier for it. No, that's not the moral of the story at all. The point is that this is just as much, here in chapter 1, them looking better after 10 days of only vegetables and water, this is meant to be just as much a miracle as them not being burned up when they're thrown into a fiery furnace, or not being eaten when Daniel's thrown into a den of lions.

God’s Gift of Wisdom in Babylon

This is a miracle here in chapter 1. The conclusion is that God blessed their convictions. Third, the conclusion. The conclusion is that God gave them a first-class education of Babylonian culture and literature without compromise.

They were able to love the Lord their God with all their minds. They didn't hold a scroll burning, you know, to destroy every Babylonian myth. They didn't despise the Gilgamesh epic. We hate that. They didn't refuse to read any story that talked about the god Marduk.

No, instead they learned it all better than the best of Nebuchadnezzar's students, better than the native Babylonian magicians and enchanters who were actually supposed to believe all that mythology. Ten times better in verse 20.

They scored ten times higher than the others in the Babylonian standardized tests, the BSTs they're called. They learned their stuff, impressed the king with their scholarship, their insight, and so God gave them the ability to thrive and contribute to a pagan society without compromising their convictions.

And modern American evangelicalism has forgotten that they are called to love the Lord their God with all their minds, that all truth is God's truth, no matter where you get it from. If it's true, it's from God.

And they are called to be excellent in whatever they do. Instead, we often belittle learning, we allow uneducated men to be pastors, we found third-rate colleges, and we are afraid of exposing our own children, our students, to mainstream scholarship because we're afraid our convictions are too weak.

Notice exactly what verse 17 says. These four youths not only survived learning the literature of a pagan culture, they were not only immersed in pagan learning and civilization and came out still faithful to, in Hebrew it literally says, the God, as God is called in this chapter.

In Hebrew, verses 9 and 17, it literally speaks of the God, which is rare in the Old Testament, to put the article the there, here emphasizing that he is the one and only God in a culture that believed in many gods.

Instead of escaping because they were too afraid of being exposed to those myths, they thrived. And they did so because the God gave them the power to do so. God blessed and empowered their studying and their pouring over Babylonian literature, their skill in analyzing their conversations with pagan professors.

We have a culture today in which many churches think it's strange if a man spends three years studying scripture in order to be a pastor, and yet here God gives to them the ability to study ungodly literature for three years and gain from it the wisdom that they can.

The wise person knows how to learn from the wisdom of others, even cultures with no direct knowledge of God, to learn from whatever source without being assimilated by it. The conclusion is that Daniel outlasted Babylon.

In that last verse, Daniel, the young man who was brought to Babylon to be absorbed and assimilated into their culture, is still alive when the empire comes crumbling down. As Cyrus, king of Persia, conquers the Babylonian conquerors.

The exile begins with Nebuchadnezzar and ends with Cyrus 70 years later. And during all that time, Daniel stood firm, uncompromising, unassimilated, completely anyway, outlasting Babylon. A person who sways with the culture, who's anchored to nothing, his feet firmly planted in mid-air.

Everything for him is like taking your shoes off of the door. You know, if everyone does it, your culture around you does it, I do it. If they don't, I do the opposite. Whatever they do, such a person lasts only as long as his culture does.

But the believer, built on his convictions, on the Word of God, has the strength to be immersed in the culture without being assimilated by it. Can adapt to fashion, sure, without being changed in his heart by the remaining centered on the Lord.

He outlasts the fads. He outlasts even the empires and civilizations that one time, their assimilating power seemed inevitable. The conclusion is that a Daniel will outlast the world. If you have convictions about God's promises, at the conclusion, you will outlast the world.

You'll outlast even his conquerors. That's why Paul says in Romans 8, because of what Jesus did for us, we are more than conquerors. That's not really because of the faithfulness of these four young men, of ourselves, of our own faithfulness to God, but it's because of God's faithfulness to them, to us.

It is God here who is the hero. Each of the three parts of this chapter 1 tell us that God gave something. First, he gave Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar. Then in verse 9, he gave favor to Daniel. And finally, verse 17, he gave to Daniel and his friends learning and skill.

God gives conquest, convictions, and conclusions. So we're promised in Romans chapter 8, verse 32, that he who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, will he not also, will he not, it's a certainty, it's inevitable, will he also with him graciously give us all things?

And the question for you is whether you are like Daniel. You're one of God's people who at the conclusion of the world will be graciously given all things. Or will you be assimilated? Now, the answer to that question depends ultimately on what God has given you.

Has he given you the faith, the conviction, to see that it is the Lord who is in control? Even when pagans conquer, he's in control. The faith to resolve in your heart not to compromise the Word of God.