Thought for the day – Wednesday 15th April 2020
It’s often said that we are living in strange times. There are times in our lives even in ‘normal’ times when we go through difficulties, when it’s hard to keep going, when we may wonder ‘Where is God in all of this?” It can be hard to admit our doubts and fears that come bubbling to the surface – we may fear that others won’t understand, or they might blame us in some way.
Daniel knew what it was to live in tough times. The book of the same name is one of the prophetic books of the Old Testament, it’s full of drama and mystery, and it contains prophecy, historical events and apocalyptic visions of the end times. Daniel lived in the 6th century BC, but this book is very relevant to us today.
Woven through the book is the message that God is sovereign, God reigns and God is in control. God’s people needed to know it and the pagan people around them needed to know it too. God as sovereign is the first truth we need to hang onto and to find comfort in it when God seems far away. Perhaps we need to proclaim at the end of each gloomy news bulletin, “God is in control, God is sovereign.”
Daniel and his 3 friends were amongst the first group of Israelites taken into exile into Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzer. They were teenagers at the time. Prophets had warned of the coming exile because God’s people had failed to keep their side of the covenant God made with them. The people failed to heed the warnings, so the unthinkable exile finally happened.
These young men had their whole lives before them, they were godly young men, who had remained true to God, though Israel as a whole had not. When the exile happened to the nation, it happened to them too. Babylon and Jerusalem are nearly 900 miles apart, a journey that took a group of people almost 4 months. Captives didn’t expect to see their own country or families again. They were now living in a distant, foreign country, amongst people who spoke a foreign language – which they now had to learn. The Babylonians were a pagan nation, they worshipped all kinds of idols – they knew nothing of Israel’s God. Daniel and his friends were uprooted from their traditions of worship in the temple; there were no longer any priests or prophets to bring them messages from God.
They were going to be taught all the literature and learning of the Babylonians, and they had to study it well in order to pass the testing at the end of the 3 years. They would be exposed to all kinds of ideas that belonged to this pagan culture, which would be contrary to all they had been taught back home.
And to cap it all, they lost their own names. Your name is important to you, it’s your identity, it belongs to you. They lost their Jewish, godly names and were renamed with the names of babylonian gods. So even their names were no longer their own.
How would any of us cope with such a traumatic and cataclysmic series of events? And at such a young age? Daniel and his friends hung on to their faith in God, they continued to trust in Him in the new circumstances they now found themselves in. They found that God could be trusted, when their hopes and dreams for the future had been taken away from them, and they had no control over their over lives. God is still sovereign, even then, or perhaps we should say, especially then.