Into Babylon

Our scripture reading today is from the book of Daniel chapter 1. That's 21 verses of chapter 1 in the book of Daniel.

Daniel 1 · chapter mention

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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, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both the royal family and of the nobility, youth without blemish, 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 Sheph 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 eunuch gave them names.

Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, 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 are 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 ten days.

Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink.

Then let her 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 ten days.

At the end of ten days it was seen that they were in better appearance and faster in flesh than all 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 into the chief of the eunuchs,

brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar.

And this king spoke with them.

And among them all, none of them 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 ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom.

And Daniel was there until the first year of King Cyrus.

Let's pray.

Lord, you promised to speak through your word.

So we ask today that you would do that.

And you say in Isaiah 55 that whenever your word is preached and goes forth,

that it never returns empty.

It never fails to do what you want it to do.

So we recognize that truth today.

And we pray, Lord, that you would open our hearts and speak to us.

Help us to believe that the word of God really is what you say it is, the word of God.

So we ask for your help.

We pray that in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

We start today looking at the book of Daniel for the semester.

And Daniel has six of the most memorable stories in the whole Bible.

And it also has six of the most difficult chapters to read in the whole Bible.

And so when you read even this first chapter, you recognize very quickly this is a very ancient text.

It's a context that is so far away from us and so different from us.

And yet at the same time, I hope you'll see today how relevant the book of Daniel is for us, especially in our moment.

So we're going to focus on just verses one to seven mainly today.

And we'll start with the stories next week.

So the first story of Daniel and his friends coming to Nebuchadnezzar's table.

That's next week.

So today, let's just look at the first seven verses and try to understand the book of Daniel, especially as a whole.

There are three little moments in these first seven verses, three words or little phrases,

that if you get them, the whole book will open up in a way to understand what it's saying and also understand how relevant it is.

And here's the three phrases, the three words.

I'm going to give them to you now.

Now, the first one is in verse two, and it's the land of Shinar.

What is the meaning of the land of Shinar?

And then secondly, in verse seven, it says the chief eunuch gave Daniel and his three friends new names.

And that's very important.

And then the last one is in verse two and nine and 17, this threefold chorus refrain,

and the Lord gave.

So if we get those and open those up a bit, you'll see the whole point of the book of Daniel,

and it'll help us for the rest of the semester.

So let's look at it together.

First, the meaning of this little phrase, the land of Shinar.

We know, you don't have to be a Christian today or have grown up in the church to know some of the stories from Daniel.

You probably know about Daniel and the lion's den.

You probably know about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and the fiery furnace.

These are very famous stories.

But when you read Daniel very carefully, verse by verse, and really look closely at the words,

there are depths to Daniel.

Daniel's the writer, and he's connecting us to all sorts of other parts of the Bible as he writes

and uses very particular words and phrases to do that.

But here in verse 1 and 2, we learn that this is the third year of the reign of King Jehoiakim.

And King Jehoiakim was the king in Jerusalem, in Judah, in the southern part of Israel.

And the third year of the reign of King Jehoiakim was not his best year.

Okay, so what happened?

This great, powerful king named Nebuchadnezzar, who was the king of the power of the world that had risen,

defeated Assyria, the previous great empire, and gone in 605 and defeated Egypt, the other great world power.

This king, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, he comes after beating Egypt at the Battle of Carchemash.

He goes up to Jerusalem to take care of this tiny little city relative to everybody else.

And when he goes there, he does not destroy it.

So you may, if you know much about Old Testament history at all, you may know the year 587,

that famous year when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple, Solomon's temple, and leveled Jerusalem.

But Nebuchadnezzar had actually come to Jerusalem a couple times before that as well.

And the first time he comes is in 605, and he doesn't destroy anything.

Instead, he goes and he ransacks it a bit, but he takes the professional class, 10,000 people in Jerusalem,

and he ships them off to Babylon.

And then he also, we learn here, takes the gold and the silver from the temple of the Lord himself

and takes it to the temple of Marduk in Babylon.

And so he goes and he takes people and he takes property, and we'll come back to why in just a minute.

But when this writer, Daniel, describes this event in verse 1 and 2,

when these 10,000 people are taking into Babylon, including Daniel and his three friends,

the word that he chooses to use is that he brought them, Nebuchadnezzar brought them to the land of Shinar.

You could translate that as into Babylon.

But he doesn't say Babylon.

He says Shinar, and that's important.

And it's because, it's important for this reason.

This word Shinar is an archaism.

It's a very old word.

And it'd be like going to JFK in New York to fly to Edinburgh.

Maybe some of you have had that experience.

And you go up to the front desk and you say,

I'd like to get a ticket to Caledonia, please.

Right?

Now, some of you, I can tell, don't understand that because maybe you're not from here.

Caledonia is the old Roman word for this area, for Scotland.

Right?

It'd be like going and saying, I'd like to fly to Caledonia.

Maybe you will know this a little better.

It'd be like in tea and coffee coming up to somebody and saying,

Good morrow, sir.

How fair thou.

Right?

That's Middle English for normal everyday greetings.

But if you say that to somebody today, it would be weird.

In the same way that this choice to say Shinar is strange.

And the reason he doesn't say Babylon, he will later, but he says Shinar.

If you're a reader of the Bible, you may know why.

You may remember where this phrase, the land of Shinar, shows up.

And it shows up in the book of Genesis.

And in the book of Genesis, we have this moment in Genesis 11, verse 1 and 2,

Genesis 11:1

where it says,

The whole earth had one language and the same words.

And as a people, they migrated to the east, and they found a plain in the land of Shinar.

And they settled there, and they said,

Come, let us build for ourselves a city.

And let us build its towers to the heavens and make a name for ourselves.

And that, of course, is the Tower of Babel, Tower of Babel.

And the Tower of Babel was placed in the land of Shinar.

And the writer here is connecting us to that and trying to get us to remember that.

Why?

Because Babel in the land of Shinar is proto-Babylon.

It's the first great city of Babylon.

And here we're reading about the way Babylon, Babel, developed over the centuries into this great empire.

And the reason I think that Daniel is using the word Shinar is because he knows that every Old Testament reader,

and then if you read the rest of the Bible, you start to realize that Babel or Babylon becomes a great symbol throughout the whole Bible

for the reality of the human heart set against the city of God.

From the time of the Tower of Babel all the way to this moment, Babel or Babylon becomes this great symbol for the truth of what's going on in the human heart.

And that's why he uses this word.

He's trying to contextualize it spiritually and tell us where we are spiritually.

And over and over again in the Bible, Babylon is used in this way, Revelation 18, 17, for example.

It's a symbol that says every single human heart ever since Genesis 3 has desired to build towers up to the heavens

in order to save ourselves and actually slay God and bring him down.

That's the meaning of the Tower of Babel.

They wanted to make a name for themselves, and the goal was to build a temple all the way into the heavens

to actually kill God, the real God, where creature would become creator

and creator would be cast down.

And ever since then, in all the Bible, Babylon becomes a symbol for that reality in the human heart.

Babylon was one of the great cities, one of the greatest cities that has ever existed.

And, you know, there's more myths about it than truths that we really know,

but Rome is one of the other great cities that existed and still exist.

And in the year 410, one of the great events that really shapes who we are today happened.

The Visigoths came and sacked the city of Rome in the year 410, August 23rd and August 24th.

And this guy named Alaric led the Visigoths.

And people had believed that Rome was going to be this eternal city that never went away.

They had thought Rome is the hope of the world.

And Alaric comes in with the Visigoths and he sacks the city.

And the scariest part about it is that when he did that, he came for three days,

two full days, three nights, and he plundered a bit, but he didn't set himself up as the emperor.

Instead, he sacked the city and he just left.

And he left all the Roman citizens behind.

And one of the things that got said about that was the nobility of Rome said,

the reason that this has happened is because of the Christians.

See, ever since Christianity came to Rome, people have stopped worshiping all the gods.

And they're not paying tribute to the gods like they're supposed to.

And so the gods are condemning us and judging us through the Visigoths.

But then the Christians also were afraid because the Christians at that time thought Rome was going to be the hope of the world.

They thought, surely Jesus is going to turn this place into the city of God itself.

And we're doing our work to make that happen.

That's what they thought.

And so St. Augustine, Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, he comes and writes this very famous book,

thousand pages that you probably only ever read if you take some great text class in university or something like that.

And he had a thesis and he said to the nobles in Rome that were blaming it on the Christians,

saying Rome is the hope of eternity.

And to the Christians who were saying Rome is the hope of eternity,

Augustine said there is no city of man, no city in this world, no nation that will ever be the city of God.

No great kingdom.

And to believe that is just to inhabit the truths of Babylon, to have a Babylonian heart.

In other words, a Babylonian heart is when you say,

I'm going to take something in this creaturely domain, something that was created by the real God,

and I'm going to elevate it and build for myself a tower with it that will get me to the heavens and will save me.

And another way to say it is the Babylonian heart or the Babylonian captivity that we all come into this world with

is just the good old-fashioned word idolatry.

And Babylon becomes the great symbol throughout the whole Bible of the truth of what's going on in our hearts

and in every city, including our city.

That idolatry is at the center of every city of man, at every society,

and that it will always be that way until the Lord brings the city of God.

There's no hope in Babylon, there's no hope in Rome, and there's no hope in Edinburgh either.

Every city is a city of man.

And that means that the Bible comes and tells us,

if you're a Christian today, Hebrews 3 and 4, 1 Peter 1,

we are all in exile in this life,

living in the city of man, awaiting, longing for the city of God to come.

And so the reason that Daniel, the writer, says Shinar is because of all that.

Because at the heart of every city, at the heart of every human is idolatry, Babylon.

We have Babylonian captivity in our hearts and in our lives,

and that's what's going on here.

I need to move on.

But at the very center of this book,

I think probably the most important moment to explain this book is in Daniel 4,

when Nebuchadnezzar comes out onto his terrace,

and he looks out at the city of Babylon,

and he says,

Look at this great city that I built with the might of my power

and for the glory of my majesty.

And then, of course, Nebuchadnezzar is cast down like a beast.

And he's saying at the heart of every human being is that attitude.

And the attitude that, the pride that says,

I can build my own salvation.

And we'll come later to Daniel 4,

and we'll learn that it's beast-like.

It's beast-like.

Secondly, the new names here.

Now, let's focus in a little more tightly.

That's a broad look.

More focused here on Daniel himself.

In verse 7, we learn that the chief of the eunuchs

gave Daniel and his friends new names.

So here, Daniel and his friends are now in Babylon,

and they're at Nebuchadnezzar's table in his courtroom.

And if you just look for a second at the new names that they're given,

it really helps explain what's going on really precisely in this book.

Daniel's name is a Hebrew name,

and it means God is my judge.

But here, he's named Belteshazzar.

And in Babylon, they spoke the language Aramaic.

But in the court, they would often study in Akkadian,

or use the Akkadian language,

just like academics in Edinburgh for centuries and centuries

use Latin more commonly.

And in the same way,

so Daniel here is given an Akkadian name.

And his Akkadian name means,

Bel protects the king.

So he's actually named after one of the gods of Babylon, Bel.

And then Hananiah,

his name is Yat means in Hebrew,

Yahweh is gracious, the Lord is gracious.

But he's renamed Shadrach.

We probably know these guys far better by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego

than their original Hebrew names.

Shadrach means commanded by Aku,

which is the moon god of the city of Babylon.

And Mishael, his name is translated something like,

who is like God?

Who is like the real God?

Nobody.

But he's renamed in Akkadian to the name Meshach,

which is just who is like Aku,

who is like the moon god Aku in Babylon.

And then lastly, Azariah.

His name means Yahweh is my help, the Lord is my help.

And he's renamed to Abednego,

servant of Nebo, one of the other gods of Babylon.

Now, Nebuchadnezzar's plan was not to go to Jerusalem and to devastate it.

It was not to go to Jerusalem and ransack it and plunder and kill everybody.

Instead, his plan was to dominate the world.

How?

Annihilation by assimilation.

The goal was not to kill everyone.

Instead, the goal was to assimilate Judah and Jerusalem into Babylonianism.

And here's his great plan.

In other words, the danger here for the people of God,

the danger here in Babylon in the ancient world and for us today,

is not so much being excluded by the city but being far too included.

It's not so much being pushed away to the margins as we often think about it.

The danger that's being told about in the book of Daniel is being so included

that you assimilate and eventually lose your faith.

And so that was the goal.

Renaming in the ancient world was so important.

And they're renaming them at the beginning of this three-year educational process

into the magic occult of Babylon, hoping that they can assimilate them,

send them back to Jerusalem, and capture all of Jerusalem

through this process of assimilation.

And that means that when you come to this book,

boy, this is where we see how relevant it is.

This book is asking the question,

how can a believer in the Lord remain faithful in Babylon?

How can a believer in the Lord, the true God,

remain faithful in a culture of assimilation,

acculturation in the midst of a Babylonian city?

That's the question of the book of Daniel.

And they were surrounded by polytheism and pluralism

and idolatry of all kinds.

And you can look up today, and if you're a believer,

you can clearly recognize we are surrounded by polytheism

and pluralism and idolatry of all kinds.

And the question is, how can you remain faithful as an exile in the city of man

until the city of God comes, just like Daniel and his friends?

Scotland, just like many other places across Europe,

we know we say this all the time,

Christianity used to be right at the center of most of the institutions of our culture.

And, of course, now Christianity has been pulled to the margins of our culture.

And Christians, Bible-believing, gospel-believing, resurrection-believing Christians,

are a tiny minority in our population.

And, boy, is this book not relevant.

It comes and asks you the question,

how do you stay, how do you live as a Christian

in a pluralist, polytheistic context

where idolatry is actually at the center of the culture?

But one of the things it's also telling us here

is that living in exile, living in exile,

back to Hebrews 3 and 4, back to 1 Peter 1,

where Peter looks out and says to every person,

every person that's a Christian,

you're in exile until the city of God comes,

you're living a life of exile.

Living in exile for us,

we need to, boy, we need to hear this,

living in exile is not a time or season in our lives.

It's the whole of the Christian life.

It's not to look out at the culture and say,

well, boy, things used to be so much better than they are now.

The Bible actually says that living in exile

is not a season in which culture is not healthy.

Living in exile is the whole of the Christian life.

There is no golden age.

There is no time when things were great.

Idolatry is always at the center of the city of man.

No matter how much Christianity gets into the institutions,

it's still not the city of God,

not the city of God that is to come.

And so this book comes in whole

and tries to say,

how do you live with wisdom and hope and faithfulness

in the midst of a lifelong exile

that you've entered into as a Christian?

One of the things to see that's really important,

I think, about how to read the book of Daniel

is that in the Old Testament,

before it was translated to English,

it was in slightly different order,

the books of the Old Testament were.

And Daniel shows up,

not in the prophets like we have Daniel

here in our English Bible,

but in the Hebrew Bible,

the Old Testament,

before it was rearranged a little bit,

Daniel shows up amidst the wisdom books.

And it shows up right next to the book of Esther.

And so what you have in the Old Testament

is Daniel and Esther,

a man and a woman,

showing you how to live a life of faithfulness,

hope, wisdom in the midst of exile.

These two great examples.

So Daniel is ultimately a wisdom book.

And week by week,

we're gonna see the wisdom

of what it looks like to live in faithfulness

and hope and wisdom in wisdom

in the midst of this exilic life

that the Christian leads.

So let me finish

by giving you the first principle of wisdom

that this chapter gives us.

And we'll look at two more next week.

And so the first is found in verse two,

verse nine, verse 17,

three different times in this passage.

It says,

the Lord gave Jehoiakim, king of Judah,

into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar.

So God, if you're a Bible reader

and you've read the book of Esther,

you know that God is not mentioned

across the book of Esther, right?

In the same way in the book of Daniel,

God is not mentioned very often.

So after chapter one,

we don't see the name of God hardly at all.

And there's only one time

in the whole of the book of Daniel

that the covenant name, Yahweh,

the name from Exodus three of God

shows up in Daniel's prayer.

That's it.

No other time in the whole book.

And for that reason,

when you come to chapter one

and you see the Lord gave,

the Lord gave,

the Lord gave in the first story,

and then very little mention

of the Lord or God after that,

the writer's trying to say,

pay attention to that.

This is setting up something

that you need to be aware of,

the great principle

throughout the whole of the book.

And here's the first principle.

When you open up this first story,

it looks a whole lot like God

and his people have lost.

His people have been scattered,

taken into exile.

They're being annihilated by assimilation.

But even more than that,

and only an ancient reader

would really catch this,

it says that Nebuchadnezzar

took the silver and the gold

from out of the temple of the Lord

in Jerusalem,

and he brought it to the temple

of his God, Marduk,

a very evil deity in the Old Testament.

And in an ancient person's mind,

when they read this,

what they think is,

if a culture, a civilization,

that follows a certain God like Marduk

goes and defeats another culture

that follows a different God

like the Lord

and takes and plunders their temple

and brings back the things

that were devoted to the Lord,

to the temple of Marduk,

it's saying Marduk has won,

Babylon has won,

Nebuchadnezzar has won,

the religion of the Israelites

is lost.

It's gone.

It looks so much in this book

like God's people

and God himself have actually lost.

And three times in chapter one,

it comes in the midst of that context

and says it's the Lord that gave,

the Lord that gave,

the Lord that gave.

And that means the very first principle

of wisdom in a life of exile

that this book is asking you to see

is that it is the Lord

that puts his people into exile.

It's the Lord that put you,

Christian person here today,

into a city that doesn't largely,

for large measure, know Jesus.

It's actually God that gave us this.

So in other words,

it's asking us not to say,

oh, the culture and lament it.

There's truths there.

We should do that

and can do that in a way.

But instead,

this is asking us to see

it is actually God

who has brought the culture

to the place where it is.

And he's in control.

And he's the one that's

raising up the nations

and casting them down.

And he brought his people to Babylon.

And he put Nebuchadnezzar on the throne.

And he's doing something in that

that we don't understand.

And so he's asking us

not to sit around

and merely lament the culture,

but instead to realize

God gave this to us

and gave us to it.

He gave us to this city.

And we're here for this place.

And he has us here,

what did Esther say,

for such a time as this.

Whatever he may be doing

in the midst of a time

where we say,

we wish Christianity

was the heartbeat of Scotland.

But this is where God's put us

in this moment,

in this time.

And he's given this to us.

Now, let me give you

two things to do with this

and we'll finish.

This little phrase,

the Lord gave,

doesn't just show up here,

but if you read across

the Old Testament,

there's lots of places

to read about the Babylonian exile.

Ezekiel is one.

Isaiah talks about it,

prophesies it.

But one of the places

is in the book of Jeremiah.

And in Jeremiah 28,

we have this moment

where lots of the people

who had been exiled to Babylon

are all sitting around

the Kabar Canal.

You read about this

in the beginning of Ezekiel as well.

And the Kabar Canal

is this canal

just outside of the city of Babylon.

And there they are

and they're waiting

and they're lamenting.

In Psalm 137,

how can we sing the Lord's song

in this place?

He's taken everything.

Nebuchadnezzar has taken

everything from us.

How can we survive this?

And so this prophet,

Hananiah,

back in Jerusalem,

he goes to the people

in Jerusalem

and he says,

the Lord has spoken to me

and the Lord told me

that in two years,

Yahweh,

the real God,

is going to destroy Nebuchadnezzar

and break his back,

it says.

And he's going to bring

all these exiles

back to Jerusalem.

And so he says,

what we need to do

is we need to write a letter

to the citizens in Babylon,

the people who have been exiled,

and say,

just wait where you are,

stay at the Kabar Canal,

don't get stuck in,

he says,

because it's only two years.

And then the Lord

will fix all this.

He will bring the city of God.

And Jeremiah,

in Jeremiah 28,

the prophet Jeremiah

comes to Hananiah

and he stands before

the elders in Jerusalem

and says,

this is a false prophet.

And Jeremiah says,

no,

the Lord has spoken to me

and said,

the Lord gave,

the Lord delivered us

into Babylon.

And then he gives

this very famous,

he gives us

our marching orders.

Okay,

very famous,

Jeremiah 29,

what does he say?

For such a time as this,

to all the exiles

whom I have sent

into exile,

so that's where

Christians do today,

from Jerusalem

to Babylon,

build houses

and live in them,

plant gardens,

eat their produce,

take wives,

have sons and daughters,

take wives for your sons,

give your daughters away

in marriage

that they may bear

sons and daughters,

multiply there,

do not decrease,

seek the welfare

of the city,

seek the peace

of the city

where I have sent you,

pray to the Lord

for Babylon,

for in its peace

you will find your peace.

What does he say?

How do you live

in exile?

How do you live

in a city

dominated by unbelief?

How do you live

in the city of man

where idolatry

is at the very center

of most of the things

that we're all about

in our culture?

He says,

the Lord is in control,

the Lord has sent you here,

don't stay away

at the K-Bar Canal,

get stuck into

the lives of the city,

the lives of the culture.

In other words,

he's giving you

this two-fold spirituality

and he says,

don't separate,

instead seek,

go to the very heart

of the culture

of the city

and be there

and be a part of it

and on the other hand,

don't assimilate.

Neither separation

nor assimilation.

So don't give your heart

to idolatry

at the heart of the city

but go and be there

and know

and you should have

lots of non-Christian friends.

That's what he's telling us

and you should be right there

at the heart of what's going on

in our city.

In verse 7 and 8,

in verse 7 and 8,

the ESV has veiled this

just a little bit

but in verse 7,

it says,

the chief eunuchs,

in Hebrew it says,

set the names

of Daniel and his friends.

And then in verse 8,

it says,

but Daniel,

not resolved,

but set upon himself

that he would not defile himself.

In other words,

it's saying,

as soon as Babylon

tried to assimilate Daniel,

he was there,

he wasn't going anywhere,

but he set his heart.

He was given a new name

so he gave his heart

back to the Lord again.

So as soon as the culture

tried to assimilate him,

he said,

I'm not going anywhere,

but I'm going to give my heart

to the Lord

while I'm here

in the midst

of the heart of Babylon.

This twofold spirituality,

neither separation

nor assimilation.

And it's coined

in a very famous phrase.

What is the Christian life?

Be in the world,

but not of it.

Be in the world,

but not of it.

Go into the heart

of the culture,

but do not be of the culture.

Neither separation

nor assimilation.

And that's really

at the heartbeat

of the Christian life

that we're being talked about here

in the book of Daniel.

Daniel's a blueprint,

in other words,

for us.

Esther's a blueprint.

Boy, did Esther go

into the heart of the culture,

the king's court,

marrying the king himself,

right?

Do you,

friends,

today,

Christians in this room,

are you in a state

in your Christian life

right now

of either separation

where your life

is all about

protecting yourself

from the city,

from the culture,

from non-Christians?

Or,

on the other hand,

are you struggling

with assimilation?

Are you in one

of those two spaces?

And if you are,

Daniel's invitation to you

is to come this semester

and see how you can

rearrange.

Now, we're going to get

into specifics,

okay?

Not today,

don't worry,

of how to do that.

What does it look like

very specifically

in a city like ours

to do that?

That's coming later.

But this is a blueprint.

And I just want to say,

say it like this.

Do you know

how much

God wants to change you,

change your life,

renew you

by sending you

into the heart of Babylon?

He wants to actually

change your heart,

change your life,

renew your soul

by getting stuck

into the heart

of the culture.

And in doing that,

at the same time,

is he not maybe

using us

as one tiny little expression

of the city of God

on earth

to renew

our great city,

the city of Edinburgh?

That's exactly

the paradigm

that we see here.

How can you do that?

Secondly,

second takeaway,

the last one,

how can you do that?

But,

how can you do that?

The only way

that we're going to be able

to do this today,

to be in the world

but not of it,

to not separate

nor assimilate,

neither one,

is if we are willing

to go out

into our city

and our culture

in contemporary Scotland

and never have an ounce

of moral superiority.

Never have an ounce of it.

In other words,

the only way we can do that

is we've got to look today

and say,

yes,

the culture is Babylonian,

yes,

idolatry is at the center

of so many of the things

about our contemporary nation.

It's always been that way.

But we've got to go

and say first,

the greatest problem

that I need to recognize

and deal with

is there's a Babylonian

captivity in my heart

and if the Lord,

Jesus himself,

did not come

and rescue my heart

out of Babylon,

I would be in exactly

the same place.

Never moral superiority.

Instead,

always on an equal footing,

always saying,

it is all by grace.

We,

in our Babylonian hearts,

we build our little

towers of Babel,

we take things

in this creaturely life

and try to build our towers

to the heavens

and slay God.

That is,

I know that's in my heart

if you're able today

to say it,

that that's in all

of our hearts

and as soon,

as soon as humanity

tried to build

little temples

to reach the heavens

to kill God,

God the Son

decided,

we tried to

usend to the heavens

so what did he do?

He condescended.

We tried to go up

and kill God

so what did he do?

God came down

and he put the knife

to his own throat.

We tried to build towers

that would reach him

so he laughed

and said,

I'll come to you.

And Jesus,

you know,

how do we protect ourselves

from ever thinking

we are morally superior

because we look at the cross

and we say,

Jesus Christ died

for my Babylonian heart,

my Babylonian captivity.

Never morally superior.

No.

All by grace,

through faith.

And we say,

that's what I want

for my city,

to know that.

To know that.

This is a book of wisdom.

It's a book

that just gives perspective.

And so,

the last word

I'll give to Daniel,

in verse 21,

the writer here says

about Daniel,

verse 21,

and Daniel was there

until the first year

of King Cyrus.

Okay.

Daniel came.

He's 15 years old

when he comes to Babylon

in 605.

But then the writer,

the first chapter says,

but he was there

until King Cyrus.

That's 539 BC.

That's 66 years later.

What is it telling us?

It's telling you to see

wherever God has put you today

and your life

in the midst of this exiled life

that we're living,

you may be in a very tough place today,

right now.

I don't know where God's

put everyone in this room,

but right now,

he's given you

to something that's not easy,

right?

And it says here

that Daniel

outlasted Nebuchadnezzar.

He outlasted Babylon.

He saw multiple kingdoms

come through this place.

And here's a bit of eschatology

that we all need today.

And here it is.

It may seem at times

in our lives

like the kingdom of God

has lost,

like the church has lost,

like the people of God

has lost.

The kingdom of God,

the church,

the people of God,

the believer will endure.

No matter how small it looks,

no matter how lost it looks,

we will endure.

Daniel saw multiple kingdoms

come through.

That's an eschatology.

That's a vision

of how God is going

to orchestrate

the whole of the end.

He will endure

his people to the end.

Faithfulness,

wisdom,

and hope

in the midst of exile.

Let's pray.

Lord,

we need your help

to be faithful

and not assimilate

and give our hearts away

to the city of man,

the idolatry

that's at the heart

of our city

because it's at the heart

of every human heart.

And so we look again

to that today.

We recognize it.

We think before you

of ways we've assimilated,

of ways we've given

our hearts away

to sin

and to little idols

and little gods

and to a culture

that's driven us away

from the truths

of the Bible.

And so we pray

for this whole semester

as we look at that truth.

Would you rescue us today?

Would you rescue someone today

from Babylonian captivity?

Set us free.

Liberate us,

oh Lord,

we pray.

And we ask this

in Christ's name.

Amen.