Daniel Life Lessons | How to Be Christian in Today's World

We're talking about living like Daniel in today's hostile culture. You know, the story of Daniel is rich with lessons for us as Christians.

Even just the first two chapters of Daniel is rich with lessons for us.

So hopefully this discussion gets you thinking along the right lines in whatever situation the Lord has placed you. Let's go ahead and jump right in.

The first, I think the first thing we have to do is just talk about the story itself, right, Logan? So maybe we can just generally paraphrase, like what happened to Daniel when he was a kid?

Yeah, so during the time that we read about in Daniel, Babylon is in the process of subjugating

Israel, but they do it in stages, right? And so in one of the stages, when they conquer

Israel, they take back with them to Babylon some of the best and brightest, you know, kind of the most promising young minds, the people that would be their philosophers, poets, scientists, et cetera.

And the idea behind that, and this was a common practice by Babylon's kingdom during their reign.

And it was kind of, the idea was you take resources away from, you know, these other cultures that might be likely to rebel.

You make them quintessentially Babylonian. You get more buy -in from the people. That's basically the idea.

And so Daniel is among these people that Nebuchadnezzar takes away to Babylon, along with his friends,

Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, who become known as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

And they, although most of the book is about Daniel, although there's a little bit about the other three in there as well. And so they find themselves kind of basically thrown in with the wise men and the, you know, the kind of astrologers and that sort of thing.

They're kind of in that grouping. And they are expected to more or less become

Babylonians. So cultural, they're given, they are renamed. They're given Babylonian names.

They are sort of re -educated in Babylonian culture. And they're expected to, you know, sort of the win in Rome.

They're expected to act like Babylonians. And so they have to navigate that expectation of them by the political leaders and those who are in charge of them while also remaining their faithfulness to God, ultimately.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, Daniel was probably around 14 or 15 years old when he was taken captive along with his friends.

If you look kind of closely right in chapter one, verse three, it suggests that Daniel was of royal birth or at least a family of high social standing.

So it's not like Daniel was just somebody off the street, you know, and yeah, it's a really interesting tale that I think for a very long time has been disconnected to us.

Oh, that's something that happened in the past. But only in the last, probably four years, maybe five,

I've realized, you know what? This isn't so disconnected to like where it appears that the country is going and how

Christians should also be conducting themselves in this kind of environment.

And so, you know, it's just really super interesting what happened. Now, we're talking about a parallel, you know?

And so some people right off the bat, they might be thinking, well, wait a sec, you know, is America like Babylon?

And you can get into this weird thing about Revelation and all this, I don't wanna go there. Okay, Logan, you don't have any stuff on that, do you?

Let's not do that. But I do, I'm curious, are there any parallels? Do you see any parallels between ancient

Babylon and America today? So yes and no,

I think that the comparison is imperfect. I do see some parallels in the sense of the idea that Christians are to be, that they are essentially strangers in any culture, right?

And that there is a certain extent to which we find ourselves in a position where our ultimate allegiance is obviously to Christ, but we're expected to act like Americans or act like employees of X.

And that those values can align, but that they sometimes don't, right?

And we can find ourselves in difficult positions there. So I think I would see similarities in the sense that, you know, we have a lot of passages we could point to as far as, you know,

Jesus prayed, I do not pray that they are not of the world, but I do not pray that you would take them out of the world, right?

I think also of Paul saying, when I wrote to you not to associate with those who are immoral,

I did not at all mean the immoral of this world, but then you would have to go out of the world. And so I think that there's a separateness of purpose there that is kind of analogous.

And I think that it doesn't have to be the case that, you know, the culture does not have to be just super duper decadent for that to be the case.

But the fact remains that we are people of a certain goal and orientation towards God's will, living in a culture that does not have that same orientation, even if they have sometimes have more of the trappings of cultural

Christianity that Babylon did not. I think that there's that same kind of disconnect between our purpose and the cultures.

Yeah, I like where you're going there. I like where you, because that's where I see some intersections, or I should say, now

I'm mixing up stuff. That's where I see some parallels, you know? There are a couple of key things for me.

You know, it says that the first thing that the Babylonians did, and you mentioned this, was to change the name of Daniel to Belteshazzar.

Well, what's interesting about that is Belteshazzar means lady protect the king. So this was meant to be derogatory, but it also played around with gender roles because, you know, before Daniel's name was

God is my judge. Now they're referring to him as a woman who needs to protect her king.

And the idea that, you know, we get to determine who you are and what we can call you, just strikes me as a little too close to home when it comes to the issue of what we've talked about before with transgenderism.

You know, you have people that are taken up with this culture. All of a sudden, they're changing their name. They're playing around with gender roles.

And I'm not saying that Nebuchadnezzar or the Babylonian captors were thinking along the lines of transgenderism, but this idea that you just get to do this willy -nilly whenever you want, that I see as a parallel there.

Here's another one. The Babylonians immersed these foreigners in their specific culture. And I mean, through them in the deep end of the pool, immersed, you know?

And America does something similar. You know, the American culture that is displayed throughout our movies, media, music specifically, is very identifiable and reinforces the secular cultural values that America has adopted.

So in other words, you can go to Europe and find folks there that are completely familiar with our movies and our culture.

We might not be familiar with them, but they're familiar with us. That's the power of the influence of culture.

And the Babylonians did the same thing, especially with their foreign captors. And then finally, of course,

Babylon was saturated with idolatry. You know, the religious practices, the worship of Nebuchadnezzar, it was all over the place.

But America today also is saturated with idolatry of a sort. It's, a lot of it is what

I would consider self -idolatry. You know, idolizing of the self, which arguably goes back to the

Enlightenment period, which we keep talking about, where the self became the more codified hero to the new age.

But in these areas, I mean, where do you stand on all this? Do you see similarities there? Yeah, I do.

And I think that, so one of the things we might get, dig into this a little bit more once we get deeper into the text.

But I also find it interesting that the religion of Israel was not incidental or, it was not just sort of another unimportant factoid about the people that they conquered.

It was actually a target of Babylon. And you can see that because, excuse me, in chapter one, verse two, it actually specifically mentions that Nebuchadnezzar takes gold and precious things from the temple in Jerusalem and carries it back and puts it in the home of his idols.

And you see that, and I think that, I think too, some of the renaming, so I had not really thought about gender roles with Daniel's renaming, but it does, yeah, it's a great, for our audio listeners,

Eric in the comments says chocolate bunnies too, referencing the Veggie Tales depiction of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Memories, man. Memories. Pete - Bob the tomato. Pete - Bob the tomato. Jared - Right. But so, it does occur to me that I wonder if the female reference in Daniel's renaming is supposed to be a sort of emasculation and it's supposed to be a shameful reflection on Daniel's God.

And it's sort of the idea of, and you see this if you, by the way, if you look at the Captivity Psalms, a lot of these are really mourning the fact that people in Babylon are saying their

God couldn't protect them. Okay, and the reason that I bring this up is because when we get to looking at the way that Daniel and his friends acted and how they acted towards the

Babylonians, it's not just that they all of a sudden found themselves in a different country, in a different culture.

It was these are people who were in these various ways actually actively, aggressively spitting in the face of their faith and disrespecting them in pretty profound ways.

Now, that's not to, you know, Nebuchadnezzar eventually comes to have a lot more respect for them, for Daniel in particular, like that change happens.

But here in the first couple of chapters, that hasn't happened yet. Pete - Right. Jared - And I think that's important to keep in mind.

Totally, totally agree. And so now I guess we're at the heart of the issue and for this discussion, right?

How is it that, how can we learn lessons from how

Daniel conducted himself as a captive in Babylon? And I asked you if you could think of a couple of observations that you saw in there, but let me give you one and then

I'll see what you think. And again, we're talking about observing how Daniel conducted himself wisely as a captive in Babylon, because maybe there's something there for us to learn so that we can navigate our hostile culture in a similar fashion.

Well, the first thing was that just jumped off the page for me, was that he submitted and was very gracious to his secular superiors.

Okay, so if you go to verse eight in chapter one, it says that Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's food.

Now it didn't say he kind of sort of thought to himself privately. It said that he resolved that he would not defile himself with the king's food or with the wine that he drank.

Sounds like his mind was made up. Therefore, he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself.

He asked for allowance. He asked permission. And then in verse nine, it says, God gave

Daniel a favor and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs. He submitted, Logan.

He submitted to his captor and he asked permission. See, how many of us would have said, I'm not going to budge.

You can kill me, but I'm not giving up my rights to hold my beliefs. You see how

Daniel did something slightly different and why? I think because he could maintain relationship with his captors.

That's why. The text doesn't say that, but that's obviously why he did it to me. Daniel knew he was in this thing for the long haul and he realized that submitting to his captors while retaining his convictions was the way to go.

What do you think about that? Well, yeah, I totally agree with that. This was actually one of my couple of points as well.

The other thing that I, that really jumps out at me about this text here and like this is about verses eight through 16 of chapter one.

So not only does he go and ask permission, but the captain initially is really not sure about this.

He thinks he's going to get in trouble when they're looking a whole lot worse than the other captives.

And so what Daniel doesn't do is he doesn't respond to that with, you know, he doesn't even say, and this would be, you know, a somewhat gracious thing.

He doesn't even say, look, I can't do this because of my conscience. I'm sorry.

What he instead does is he responds to the captain's concerns, which shows that he was actually listening to what the captain had to say.

And so there's actual two way communication going on here. And I think that that has a lot that shows us a lot in terms of communicating with people, not just to approach them graciously and then give a gracious version of a lecture, right?

But this was actually two way communication. He's actually hearing the concerns and responding to them.

And I think that's why the captain agrees is because he gives a very reasonable accommodation is kind of meeting both of their concerns at the same time.

And he's still to as much as he can in good conscience, submitting to the authority of the captain.

And I think that that's that back and forth is an important piece of this as well. And some might say, well, it was the

Lord that basically moved the heart of the captor, which we are totally agreeing with.

But in the areas where, you know, the human being has control over how they comport themselves, which the

Bible has a lot to say about that, you know, given the sovereignty of God and how God's hand sort of, you know, shapes the heart of Kings, right?

On the other hand, we still have this wiggle room where we get to move in obedience and and do our very best to comport ourselves wisely with the people around us.

And Daniel does that. And it is it is so antithetical to what

I'm noticing going on. So we're going to talk about application a little bit later. But that was the first big observation that jumped off the page he submitted.

And he asked permission and he maintained relationship. What was something that you noticed coming out of Daniel there as well?

So this gets into a little bit further in Daniel, but something that I noticed that just is kind of in all of his interactions with Nebuchadnezzar and with Nebuchadnezzar's family later on after Nebuchadnezzar dies is that he manages to serve

God while in a certain sense maintaining loyalty as much as he can to Nebuchadnezzar and the good of Nebuchadnezzar's reign.

So he's not, he's not trying to find ways to undercut Nebuchadnezzar throughout his time serving him.

Well, one of the best examples of this, I think, is when Nebuchadnezzar gets the vision that he, is basically that he's going to become a beast and live out in the field for years because of his arrogance.

When he tells Daniel about the vision, I think this is around chapter five, and asks him what the interpretation is,

Daniel's first reaction is not to say you're getting what's coming to you for your pride, but is to say, oh, that the vision were about one of your enemies and not about you.

So, the reason that I bring this up is to say that Nebuchadnezzar was not a Jew. He was not even really a

God -fearing Gentile, although up till that point he had kind of off and on flirted with the idea.

He's not totally there. Daniel doesn't treat him like an enemy. In many ways, he treats him as a person that he has the opportunity to share in his service to God or to, you know, in some way to have some influence.

And, you know, Daniel isn't, he's not shy about his faith. He's also not using, like, weaponizing it as a way to make political change to undercut the kingdom of Babylon, which really says to me that people who are not

Christians are not people that we should always treat as our enemies, right?

Pete Yes. A really important lesson for me here that he is in a strange country. He's in a country full of people who don't fear

God. He doesn't set himself out to take down those people, right?

He, and I think a lot about a lot of New Testament passages. I mean, Jesus says, blessed are the peacemakers.

Paul says, if it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live at peace with all men. And Daniel is as much as he can.

He's trying to make peace while also showing people how a God -fearing

Jew lives and giving glory to God. And I think that that, there's a real recipe for both peace and civility in Daniel's approach here.

Paul I said, we were not going to talk about application, but here we go, right? Because when you say these things, it reminds me, so last week we talked about, was it last week?

It was Martin Luther King. I'm getting old. Pete Last week was Martin Luther King. Paul Martin Luther King was last week. Okay, and don't get old.

That's all I can tell you, Logan. Well, we talked about alternative and I'm not too cracked up.

And as much as is it in your power, do not get old. My birthday is coming up, by the way.

I'm an old man. Well, anyway, Martin Luther King had this basic, basic philosophy.

And I think it just goes right in line with what you were saying a moment ago. Martin Luther King basically said, don't look at people as if they are irredeemably wicked.

You need to look at them as if they are blind. He's talking about the lost. He's talking about people that oppose you and oppose your decisions that you're making in your

Christian convictions. And he was really taken, Martin Luther King, with Jesus.

Jesus is on the cross and he's up there. He's humiliating, naked, all that.

And he looks down and he says, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Martin Luther King said, look at that.

Jesus is saying, forgive these men because they're blind. And so anyway, to take it back to what

I just noticed a lot of us in the church, treat people as if they are malicious.

The things that they're doing that oppose us and our views, it's done with evil maliciousness at heart.

It's a premeditation, Your Honor. And if we could just sidestep that and not get into that, that's how the enemies of God characterize us.

But if we could not stoop that low and just took the other attitude, which is, no, actually, there are redeemable qualities about the people that are opposing me.

Even Daniel's saying to himself, my captors, there are things that I can appeal to them and perhaps they'll help me out.

Wow, what a better way that we could maintain relationship if we just did that. Yeah, absolutely.

I'm reminded of a college roommate of mine that had a pretty sizable influence on me at that point in my life,

I think. And one of the reasons is because he was always talking to people, man. And like always talking to people who came from very, who had disagreements with him, right?

And so he would talk about some of these conversations about like, specifics aren't super important, but like about moral choices or theological differences he disagreed with, you know, people he had met on campus or whatever.

And he would talk about their reasonings and then he would say, you know, I can see that.

I don't agree with it, but I can see that. And I remember the first time he was talking about this, I think it was something to do with alcohol.

I don't remember the details. But I remember just like for a split second, knowing that he disagreed with this person, being like, wait, what?

And it took me a little bit of time to realize like, he was just trying to understand people. Like that was his first step.

And I think that that is, you know, trying to see where people are coming from, can

I think go a long way in, you know, helping us to see past the stereotypes, so to speak.

You know, that's not going to work for everything. I do think you see that very specifically and explicitly though, in the case of the captain in chapter one.

Well, and it goes back to the golden rule, right? Which Jesus did reinforce with his own audience, you know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

If that's how you want to be talked to, if you want to be given the benefit of the doubt, if you don't want to be treated as malicious, but actually it's just somebody that maybe has an affirmation point of connection between, you know, you and the person that you're talking to, well, then do it back.

You know, do it back to the person. Well, here's the second observation that I had. See what you think about that.

Daniel appeared to have waited for the right moment. To be the most effective. Okay. Now imagine

Logan, how long it took Daniel for him to learn the ways and the education of Babylon.

Okay. He, like I said, he'd been indoctrinated. It wasn't overnight. And then it says in chapter one, verse 18, that at the end of the time, they were brought in and tested to see how they fared in their education,

Daniel and his friends and the other Hebrews. And it was found that Daniel and his friends were 10 times better than all the magicians and enchanters in Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom.

That takes time. They had been indoctrinated for what some say was three years of education, which means

Daniel waited and he laid low and he learned in submission, all he was told to learn.

The church father, Jerome, once said that Hebrews studied the Babylonian religion, not that they might follow it themselves, but in order to pass judgment upon it and refute it.

And so I am struck by the fact that Daniel doesn't come in here with his fists out and he's not protesting, he's waiting for his opportunity.

And I also think he did that because he understood that God wanted him to be in Babylon. And it's very subtle, but in the beginning of Daniel, verse two of chapter one, it says that the

Lord gave, the Lord gave Jehoiakim into Nebuchadnezzar's hand.

That means that God was always in control. God was reigning sovereignly and gave the captors, including

Daniel, gave him to Babylon. And I think Daniel knew that. That was obvious to him. So he submitted and he did what his captors wanted, even if it meant being indoctrinated with training that taught him things he knew was anathema to his religious beliefs.

What do you think about that? Well, and I think too, just to kind of bolster your case a little bit, when

Daniel eventually goes before the king, it's not, I have built my case and I'm here to refute your wise men.

It's that the wise men had failed Nebuchadnezzar. So for those that might not be as familiar with this story, he has these really weird dreams about -

Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar, yeah. Nebuchadnezzar has these really weird dreams. He calls in all these wise men and he says, now

I want you to tell me the dream and its interpretation. They said like, that's not possible. So he's like, okay,

I'm going to just kill all of you. And this sounds insane. This is like literally what happens.

And when, and then when Daniel and his friends hear about it, more or less through the grapevine, like they hear it down the chain of command through the commander.

And then Daniel basically says, he asked for time to be able to give the interpretation.

He praised to God and God gives it to him. And then he goes before the king. And so it's, which just reinforces to me that it was not about Daniel getting a spotlight and a brand and a social media following, right?

Like not that there was social media in Babylon, but like it was not about his image or even his plan.

Like he didn't premeditate this. It just kind of popped up and he prayed and God showed the way.

You see kind of a similar result actually with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. When they refuse to bow before the king's golden image, they don't march right up to the king, point the finger in his face and announce that they are refusing to do this.

Word is brought to the king because they had quietly declined to do it due to their religious beliefs.

And it just really strikes me that in both of those stories, that there's a humility that, you know, they were not going to compromise on their convictions, but they were not going to, they did not have aims to start a kingdom -wide rebellion over it, right?

That it was a much more, it was a, I hesitate to say it was a personal decision because that makes it sound like I don't want

Christians talking about Christianity in the public square. That's not true. But I think it's an orientation difference that shows a real humility on being willing to wait for God's plan, whether that be big or whether it be small, and not making it, you know, a point of making a kingdom -wide fuss about it, so to speak.

You know, there's a moment where Jesus is talking to his disciples and he says something to the effect of, whatever the father does, the son also does in like manner.

Whatever the son sees the father doing, the son also does in like manner. And I get the sense that this is kind of what it's like, you know, as I, you know, wrestled with Jesus' words there,

I realized that, you know what? What God is doing is a little bit more obvious than I think we realize.

So here comes Daniel, like, let's bring it to Daniel. Here comes Daniel, he's a captor, he's captive in this foreign land.

He's sitting there and he's biding his time. And I'm sure he thought, if I can be so bold as to tell you what he was thinking in his mind,

Logan, I'm sure a thought popped into his head. What do I do here? How do I navigate this environment?

You know, being away from my family, being away from home, being away from my place of worship. And I think he realized,

I'm going to wait and see what the Lord is doing. Well, the big thing that the

Lord did was, you know, when he gets established, all of the other people that are supposed to be wise and magicians and all that, they can't interpret a dream.

And so they go get Daniel. It's not like he went, I have an idea. It's not like he's, you know,

Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Oh, Mr., you know, he actually waited. And it's the same thing with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

It's not like they went seeking it, but when it found them, that's when I think they realized, okay, the

Lord is here. The Lord is in this, and we're going to, we're going to move. Well, and, you know, something that occurs to me too is, you know,

I said that they did not seek out, you know, a political upheaval, right?

And like you mentioned, you know, it's not like they were, you know, finding a way to go in there with guns blazing. But God, through their humility, kind of enacted something like you could see them in a type of change.

You could see them envisioning with a guns blazing approach. You know, I'm going to go in there like, you know,

Moses in front of Pharaoh with miracles, you know, please God give me miracles and then I'm going to show him.

And, you know, so none of that happened. And yet God brought about some of that change anyway, through their humility.

I mean, you see that, I mean, a couple of the biggest examples, I think, are at the end of Daniel three, that Nebuchadnezzar makes the command that anyone who speaks out against the

God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, I think shall be him and his household shall be burned with fire or something like that.

Yeah. And then also, you know, the vision that or the time that he spends, you know, as a beast in the fields, you know, is a very humbling experience.

And he makes, you know, some statements of humility toward God after that as well.

And I think it just goes to show that we can, on the one hand, believe, as I do, that God governs in the affairs of men.

And also believe that he doesn't need me to go in there with guns blazing to accomplish it.

Like, God can do what he wants, how he wants, and it's not my job to nudge him along.

Right? Right. And also, just because God did something a certain way previously doesn't mean that it's going to be the same way in the future, you know?

Right. I think the big takeaway here, hopefully, is that whatever happens, even if it's bad, even if it's like, oh my gosh, this is the worst thing

I've ever seen, if we just stop as Christians and go, okay, God, what are you doing here? And what do you want me to do?

If we could just stop for a minute and just consider that, I think we would then be better at placing our best foot forward in this new arrangement.

You know, you're right. Nebuchadnezzar, look at the end of chapter, what is it, four here.

Nebuchadnezzar goes from somebody who is completely disrespectful to Israel's God, to verse 37.

It's the last verse of chapter four. Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven.

He's talking about Yahweh. For all his works are right and his ways are just, and those who walk in pride he is able to humble.

That's significant. That's significant. Did you have any other observations,

Logan, about Daniel before we move on to the last question? Just one, which is, so this is a little bit of an addendum on my last point, just about Daniel's humility and that God was able to use him because of it.

But we've been talking a lot about Nebuchadnezzar, but Daniel's able to actually influence two monarchs.

Technically three, although his time with, was it Belshazzar? He's listed as a son.

He's actually probably a grandson by, you know, the information that we have. But his time there is brief because it kind of seems like he's, you know, in a closet somewhere and they dust him off out of retirement.

But then has a pretty profound impact on Darius, too, once the

Medes and the Persians take over. And so, I think that's just an indication that, again,

God can still use us to profound influence if he so wills it, right?

Without us, you know, trying to become martyrs in and of ourselves.

Totally. I think that's an impulse that we need to really keep a check on. Yeah. And the history of Daniel, the story of Daniel and his interactions with not only the

Babylonians, but also the Greeks. Darius was

Greek, right? Now I'm having a brain fart. Darius. I think he was Persian. Persian. I'm pretty sure.

We don't find in history this amazing transformation of the entire culture of either the

Babylonians or the Persians. What, instead, we find is that Daniel appeared to have, maybe more, but he appeared to have influenced one person.

One. One, King Nebuchadnezzar and then Darius, right? And that, again, just makes me think, like, okay, what if it's

God's will that he completely destroy an entire, like, structure that you have become so familiar with and so used to so that you could get thrown into a new environment, maybe even jail, just so you could interact with one person.

And that one person hears the gospel and is saved. Is that good enough for you, Christian? And I think the answer has to be, yes,

Lord, wherever you send me, I will go. Well.

Yeah. Let's jump into the last part. So this is the, this is where the rubber meets the road, right? Based on our observations, we've been talking about Daniel now.

How can Daniel help us today to conduct ourselves in a culture that is becoming increasingly hostile to us, right?

What do you think, Logan? I just have one thing. Okay. Well, the thing that most jumps out at me, so it strikes me that when, so we talked about the beginning about parallels to Babylon and one being that the aims of the

Christian were not in line or the aims of these Jews were not in line with the aims of the culture around them.

I think we need to take seriously the idea that that might still be the case even in America, possibly even in elements of American culture, even if you're, let's say, deep in the church going south.

Okay. I'm not picking on the south in particular. I'm just picking one thing as an example. And one of the ways, because we conflate

Christianity and American culture in inappropriate ways sometimes, and one of the ways that I think about that is, you know, we talk a lot about our rights as Americans, and I think that we could use to shift some of the emphasis on our rights and how our rights are being violated and think how is this an opportunity for peacemaking and for witness?

And, you know, I see that as somebody who, you know, politically, you know, I have libertarian leanings, like if you're talking politically about somebody who's really in favor of, you know, like free speech, you know, and the whole litany of things, right?

Like I'm right there with you. But I think as Christians, when it comes to our emphasis and how we communicate, we have been too quick to talk about,

I can't have my rights taken away from me. I need to stand up and kind of the fist pumping mentality and not enough of God has placed me in this situation, possibly even in this hardship.

How can I react with grace in order to, you know, be a more effective

Christian witness to those around me? Pete Right, right, right. Because Daniel had plenty of natural rights violated throughout this whole thing, if that's not in question.

True. And, you know, I think this kind of goes back to something that we said several weeks ago, which is that you don't slip into that dangerous mentality where you go from being a

Christian who happens to be Republican to a Republican who happens to be a Christian, because if the case, then the

Constitution and the rights that are delineated in the Constitution, they no longer become a reflection of the rights that are given by God, but they become the most important document that contains your rights.

And so if that's the case, and the Constitution is somehow done away with, it's almost like it's the end of the world.

I mean, it really isn't the end of the world for the Christian to lose some rights, including rights to freedom of speech, freedom of religion.

It's not going to change what we do at all. So, you know, not to sound glib, because I think that this has been one of the most important countries in the history of countries, in the history of nations.

But, you know, we just have to be extremely careful with all that. And so my thing with Daniel is, and I think we'll close, is that, again,

I'm struck by his patience and his ability to wait and to even put up with learning things that were completely antithetical to his religious convictions.

Imagine what we fight right now. Like, we're fighting right now in our public education systems as Christians, Logan.

We got transgender ideology. We got evolution. We have, for some Christians, the old earth view that the universe is billions of years old and the earth is millions of years old.

Even some things that are like not exactly anti -Christian, but they're more anti -American. So like pro -socialist lessons in social studies.

These are the things that we are pushing back against because they are sort of creeping into the classroom, and they have been for years.

But Logan, you have to ask yourself, how can a 14 -year -old Hebrew kid taken completely away from his family and brought into a foreign hostile environment and indoctrinated with Babylonian religious superstition and mythology come out the other side of that, still fully maintaining his belief in the one true

God, and when the time is right, proclaiming that one true God to the most powerful person in Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, right, and Darius, causing

Nebuchadnezzar to be friendly to God, say very, very praiseworthy things about God, and here we are as Christian parents, we're deathly afraid of our children being exposed to similar types of false teachings and myths.

And a lot of us decide to pull our kids away from that environment and shelter them from ever hearing about it.

Shouldn't that, Logan, expose how weak we've become as people of God in the 21st century? 19. You know,

I actually, I have a pretty good example of these principles that actually takes place in an education context.

That's brief, so I'm going to go ahead and share it. So, this was in college. So, this is my freshman year of college and it's a history class.

It's just like, it's a world history class. I don't even remember what the years were, but one of the things we covered just very briefly was

Zoroastrianism. And the history professor, this is all relevant, I promise.

The history professor says that Christians borrowed the idea of Satan from Zoroastrianism, which

I had not heard at the time, but as you know, I've now heard many times over. And there's another student, not somebody

I knew, believe it or not, I was fairly shy my first year of college, didn't make a lot of friends, but he raised his hand, was very respectful, and more or less said, well, but isn't

Job usually considered the earliest book of the Bible and Satan's in Job, and that's the

Old Testament, so how would that be true? It was a really good question. He raised his hand.

He said it respectfully. And the interesting thing was that there were a couple of people, there were a couple other students in the class that kind of voiced, you know, like, not,

I mean, you're a teacher, you know this, where like, people don't raise their hand and make comment, but they're kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's kind of like a murmur, you know.

And, you know, the professor wasn't, like, he wasn't humiliated. I actually remember how he responded.

I think he may have said something about, you know, the book of Job being outside of his wheelhouse or something, or not really being super aware of it.

But, and it was interesting to me because I was also like, you know, when I first heard it, before the student said something,

I kind of, like, I was like, well, I'm not going to say anything, because, you know, I'm not going to be the only one facing down a crowd, you know.

But, like, that I think is a pretty good example of, you know, respectfully giving pushback at the appropriate time, through the appropriate venue, in a way that's still submitted to the teacher as the authority in the classroom.

Right. Well, and it raises the same question, right? How can Daniel, how can your classmate, how can they remain so steadfast in light of the things that are bombarding them, that are trying to pull them away from their convictions?

And I would argue that their parents did their job. You know what I mean? They trained

Daniel up to know God intimately, and then to obey him no matter what.

So that when something like this happened, where Daniel was stolen from his home and from his house of worship, Daniel would not falter.

Not for a single moment. Well, and I think, too, you know, so this is something that I was thinking about as we were talking.

The prophets prepared them for this, too. Yep. Like, you had prophets like Jeremiah who had been talking about Babylon is coming.

Don't believe these false prophets. It's gonna happen. You're gonna have to live in this other place, and God wants you to submit to them as your authority in the appropriate ways, because this is part of his plan.

And I think that that is, you know, we don't necessarily do that prep work as effectively as we should.

Preparing Christians, you're going to live in a world where a lot of people disagree with you, right?

So, and teaching them how to navigate those things appropriately as disciples. I really want to know how much he heard

Jeremiah growing up, you know? Well, and that's the thing.

And I would end with this because we have to go. We need to train up our children. We need to train them up when they're young so that they know

God intimately, so that they have good reasons for why they believe in God and why they believe in the Bible, and they are also ready to engage a culture that is actively seeking to steal them away from their home and from their house of worship.

We need to do that. This has been the rallying call of apologists since I got into the game, and that's, what is that now?

That's 12, 13 years or whatever it's been. And before that,

I'm an old man. So, here's the thing, Logan. This is what we need to do. If we're going to learn any lessons from Daniel, it needs to start here.

We need to train the next generation. I'm not a parent, Nate. That's okay. You can get involved in your local church.

There's a youth group. There's a college ministry. I lead the college ministry at my local church.

We need to be doing what we can so that the next generation is not surprised and they are ready and willing to engage in a submissive way, in a patient way, those that are around them that are lost.