Sovereign
Passage Daniel 1:1-21
Speaker Ben Tanner
Series None Like Him
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1 In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. 2 And the Lord delivered Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, along with some of the articles from the temple of God. These he carried off to the temple of his god in Babylonia and put in the treasure house of his god.
3 Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring into the king’s service some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility— 4 young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace. He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians. 5 The king assigned them a daily amount of food and wine from the king’s table. They were to be trained for three years, and after that they were to enter the king’s service.
6 Among those who were chosen were some from Judah: Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. 7 The chief official gave them new names: to Daniel, the name Belteshazzar; to Hananiah, Shadrach; to Mishael, Meshach; and to Azariah, Abednego.
8 But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way. 9 Now God had caused the official to show favor and compassion to Daniel, 10 but the official told Daniel, “I am afraid of my lord the king, who has assigned your food and drink. Why should he see you looking worse than the other young men your age? The king would then have my head because of you.”
11 Daniel then said to the guard whom the chief official had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, 12 “Please test your servants for ten days: Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. 13 Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food, and treat your servants in accordance with what you see.” 14 So he agreed to this and tested them for ten days.
15 At the end of the ten days they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. 16 So the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead.
17 To these four young men God gave knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning. And Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds.
18 At the end of the time set by the king to bring them into his service, the chief official presented them to Nebuchadnezzar. 19 The king talked with them, and he found none equal to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah; so they entered the king’s service. 20 In every matter of wisdom and understanding about which the king questioned them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom.
21 And Daniel remained there until the first year of King Cyrus.
Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.
Thank you.
So the reading is the first chapter of Daniel, which is on page 884 of the church Bibles.
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 delivered Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand, along with some of the articles from the temple of God. These he carried off to the temple of his God in Babylonia and put in the treasure house of his God.
Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring into the king's service some of the Israelites from the royal family and nobility. Young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand and qualified to serve in the king's palace. He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians. The king assigned them a daily amount of food and wine from the king's table. They were to be trained for three years, and after that they were to enter the king's service.
Among those who were chosen were some from Judah, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. The chief official gave them new names to Daniel, the name Belteshazzar, to Hananiah Shadrach, to Mishael Meshach, and to Azariah Abednego.
But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself in this way. Now God had caused the official to show favour and compassion to Daniel. But the official told Daniel, I am afraid of my lord the king who has assigned your food and drink. Why should he see you looking worse than the other young men of your age? The king would then have my head because of you.
Daniel said to the guard whom the chief official had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, please test your servants for ten days. Give us nothing but vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then compare our appearance with that of the young men who eat the royal food and treat your servants in accordance with what you see. So he agreed to this and tested them for ten days.
At the end of the ten days they looked healthier and better nourished than any of the young men who ate the royal food. So the guard took away their choice food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables instead. To these four young men, God gave knowledge and understanding of all kinds of literature and learning, and Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds.
At the end of the time set by the king to bring them into his service. The chief official presented them to Nebuchadnezzar. The king talked with them and he found none equal to Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. So they entered the king's service in every matter of wisdom and understanding, about which the king questioned them. He found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom.
And Daniel remained there until the first year of King Cyrus.
Thank you so much, Chris, for reading that for us. Please do keep your bibles open. And why don't I lead us in a prayer to ask God to speak to us through his word. Heavenly Father, thank you so much that you are ruler over everything, and that means these next few minutes as well. And so, father, I pray that by your spirit you would show us why that's such a great thing.
Show us why we try to be rulers in your stead, and show us why there is a joyful submission to you, even when that is in hard and difficult times. Amen. It is Father's day, isn't it? And that will mean that we will be here today with all sorts of emotions. For some of us, today is a day of great, great joy.
We delight in our dads, and maybe we're going to celebrate with them later. Maybe we are a dad and we're celebrating with kids later today, and we want to rejoice with you in that rejoicing. I'm aware, too, though, that there'll be people who have come today who will be slightly anxious even about this service. Maybe actually our memories of our dads isn't great. Maybe they weren't there for us, or if they were, frankly, we wish that they hadn't been.
Maybe today we would long to be dads ourselves. But for whatever reason, that has not happened yet, and that can be deeply, deeply painful for us today. We will come with all sorts of emotions. And yet, as we've gone through this series, thinking about ways in which God is different to us and why, that's a really good thing. I've been surprised, even as somebody put together the series, by just how deeply pastoral and helpful these verses and these things have been for me.
Today we're thinking about a God who is a God of infinite authority, and it might be actually even there that putting authority and fatherhood together feels kind of dangerous for us. But my hope is that as we look at God, who is sovereign over all things, we're going to see that actually, that's a really delightful thing. And it's where we try and be sovereign that we hurt ourselves and hurt other people as well. What do I mean? Well, let's take this as a little example.
The other day there was a play date going on at our house. I was merrily chatting away to the other parent, and two of my kids turned to me to resolve an issue of justice. They were playing with a particular toy and one of them wanted to do things one way and the other the other way. And of course, coming at me was two separate and different accounts of what happened. And I'm thinking, they've appealed to me and there's another parent here.
So I feel kind of on the spotlight. How am I going to respond to this? And wonderfully, mercifully, the other parent turned to me and they said, don't you just sometimes not have a clue what to do in times like this? And I was like, thank you. Yes.
I don't. I don't know what the ruling should be because I wasn't really concentrating on what the game was. I don't know all things. And even if I had have been there, I wouldn't have known their hearts to know which of the children's account of the situation was perhaps more accurate than the others. You see, I'm limited, and as somebody who is limited, there should be limits to my authority as well.
That's certainly true of being a vicar as much as it's true of being a dad or anything else. And yet, God. God is a bit different. Let me read to you from this book, this nonliken book that goes alongside some of the things that we've been talking about over the past few weeks. It says this, the idea of God's infinite rule is not only difficult to grasp, it's difficult to trust.
Unless we first spent time considering the other aspects of his nature. It would be out of order to present a God of infinite authority without first pointing to his omnipotence, his all powerfulness. While God's all powerfulness asserts that there are no limits on his ability to act, God's sovereignty, his infinite rule asserts that there are no limits on his authority to act. So his omniscience, his seeing all things, his being in all places, his being at all times, and his unchangeableness, not only single amount as being capable of ruling, but as imminently qualified to rule. This is the key sentence.
Every attribute we have considered thus far has been moving us towards this inevitable conclusion, the most right and logical place for God to inhabit throne. No wonder the Bible portrays him there so often. The God who sees all things, knows all things, can do all things, never changes, is never inconsistent, is the one who is rightfully in authority over all things. He's a consistent and good, unchanging father. And my prayer is that that's going to help us today.
And actually, as Jen really wonderfully said, we can see him on the throne in all sorts of places in the scriptures, but we've come to Daniel one today because what I want to do is to see where that hits the road for us in the grittiness and mess of life today. And here, let me just bring you up to speed. We've seen God's people up to this point in the Bible. God's people saved out of Egypt in the exodus. Remember, we had the thing with the tabernacle here where we saw God's presence with them.
And since then, what God's done is he's then given them a land in which they're living. And the tabernacle has become a temple, which is this kind of permanent place, this permanent embassy for God right at the heart of Jerusalem, the capital of their land. And it brought about stability and it brought about God at the centre. And in one verse at the start of Daniel, all of that comes tumbling down. Do you see little number two?
And the Lord delivered Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his. That's Nebuchadnezzar's hand, along with some of the articles from the temple of God. He carried off to the temple of his God in Babylonia and put treasure in the house of his God. All of a sudden, in the space of one verse, we see calamity, disaster, tragedy like we can only imagine here today, a people invaded by another nation. We can just about begin to get our head around that horror.
But this was a people whose king, whose president, whose prime minister and the House of Lords and the House of parliament were all led out in December, disgrace to another land, their sense of nationality destroyed. It would have been a painful time because this was a bloody war that would have cost them friends and relatives. And what's more, it humiliated not just them and their country, but their God as well. Do you remember how precious it was only a few weeks ago when we were looking at this building? God's embassy, God there, right with them.
And what does Nebuchadnezzar do?
Raids. The temple itself, empty. Took those precious things that we were looking at and put them in his God's temple. Disaster, humiliation of God and of God's people.
And yet even in the midst of this humiliation, what do we see? Three times in our Bible reading, we saw these words or words that are similar, verse two and the Lord delivered, or verse nine. Now, God had caused verse 17. To these four young men, God gave knowledge and understanding. You see, even in the calamity, even in the disaster here, we've got a God whose rule is still not watered, his plans still aren't frustrated, even in his own humiliation.
Now, some of you may be sitting here and thinking, well, this is exactly the problem with authority. You see, if that God's really ruling in an authority, that's not very reassuring to me today. Look at what's happened to his people. Look at what's happened to him. We live in a world where stuff gets messed up and broken so often and often we don't fully understand why or what God's doing through it.
Our tears are shed and we don't understand how God is possibly going to use that. In this instance, though we do. You see, God, the unchanging God, has spoken again and again up to this point, and he's warned his people. He said, look, I am a holy God. I really care about justice.
And so you need to stop oppressing the weak and the fatherless and the widow and the poor. This injustice that is going on is going to cause you to fall out with me. This worship of other gods is a bit like adultery to me. It's serious and it's going to bring with it serious consequences. One of those times, actually, is back in Isaiah.
And in Isaiah, chapter 39, we looked at chapter 40 a little while ago, but in Isaiah 39 five, it says this. Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, who is a king, hear the word of the Lord almighty. The time will surely come when everything in your palace and all that your predecessors have stored up to this day will be carried off to Babylon. Nothing will be left, says the Lord. And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood, will be born to you and will be taken away, and they'll become eunuchs.
In the palace of the king of Babylon. God even says, look, this is the place that you're going to go. You see, God, like a good father, doesn't just threaten and threaten and threaten and never follow through. Like the good father who says to their kid, if you carry on kicking your football on the pavement, I'm going to have to take it away from you. Eventually that comes to a point where you have to bend down and pick up the football and take it away.
God has promised. Look if you continue this injustice, this spiritual adultery, there will come a time. And here it comes.
You see, even at this terrible time, God's plans are not thwarted. And that should bring us some reassurance, because there are times that we go through that are terrible, aren't they? And that's not times when God's plan is going to be thwarted. It's not times when God's dropped the ball. It's times when God is still in control.
So when you get that diagnosis and you don't know how long things are going to last, God is still in control.
When today you look at your children who don't yet know Jesus, and you say, God, what's going on? God is still in control.
When we look at events on the world stage, we say, God is still in control. You say, how can you have such confidence?
Well, because heres the thing. I imagine that if you came with me and stood on a hillside in the dark as the sovereign God of all rule was abused and beaten, had his hands stretched out and nailed to a cross as we crucified God, do you know what you would say? And I would say, this is not only traumatic, this is terrible. What good could possibly come of this day? This is awful.
And yet that very day was the day God was allowing us to become his children by forgiving us our sin.
You see God, even in the midst of tragedy, God's plan is not thwarted. And that should help us. It should help us, therefore, to live differently. We see Nebuchadnezzar. He's a wise guy.
He's got these people who he's brought away from Jerusalem, and he knows if I get in with the young ones and I educate them, then that's the way in which I can change things around. I can make a difference. Education, education, education. If we're thinking politically about things at the moment, and what does he do? He takes them and he says, I'm going to train you in the babylonian ways.
I'm going to take those names that have got the name of God in them, Daniel, Azariah, I'm going to change them to names that don't have God's name name in them. And you're going to come. And you can imagine day by day they would go into the babylonian temples and hear about the babylonian gods and be called babylonian names and speak babylonian language. This aim of indoctrination is right there.
And again, we don't experience what Daniel and his friends have gone through. And yet we know how difficult it can be to live in two kingdoms, don't we? To say, yes, God is truly king and live in a world that challenges that all the time. We live in a world that wants to do to us and does for itself the very thing that we've been thinking about in this series, wants to take something that's true of God. He is ruling and in authority and give it to us.
So our world says, you are in authority. You can do whatever you want to do. You're in authority over your body. You want to feel a certain way on a night out, drink what you want. It's your body.
You do what you want with it.
You want to look a certain way? Well, why not just modify what you eat slightly, do the coffee overloading thing, or perhaps exercise to the point of. Of over exercising. That will sort you out. You're in authority over your body.
Use it as you see fit. You want to comfort yourself. Why not do so through what you're eating, through what you're drinking, through how you're living? It says, you want to be in authority. You can be in authority over the relationships around you.
You can be sovereign over that. How often do we see on tv that witty comeback, that person who just puts that person in their place and we think, oh, I like that. If only I could do that to the people around me. If only I could manipulate the conversation to make me look good and to put them in their place. What are we trying to do?
We're trying to be in authority and we live in a world that longs to do that to us.
It's true in the world. It's actually true in the church as well. This week was chatting with some of my colleagues and one of them said, it's not quite been as brash as this in the past, but they've said, ben, it would be a whole lot easier for you if you just didn't really talk about God caring about sin and judgement. Like, lots more people would be interested in coming to church. If you just downplayed that a little bit, that would be a very easy thing to do.
And there's a part of me that would quite like that, if I'm honest. And there's another part of me that thinks I can't do that because I'm not sovereign. I'm not ruling over what God says. Actually, he says that, not me.
Daniel is in that same place. What does he and his mates do? They trust that God is sovereign. And so for Daniel, what he does is he says, I'm going to find an area, a place that I'm going to say, look, this is my area where I'm going to say, I'm going to trust the in God as the ruler and not be ruler myself. For Daniel, he says, look, I'm going to go teetotal and veggie.
That's my thing. You know, it's a sacrifice. When somebody says, I'm going to give up meat here, Daniel does that good on him. I pray that the Lord doesn't ask me to do the same, but he does now, he's not kind of arrogant about it, he's not kind of weird about it. He says to ash Panaz, look, you know, let's try it out.
Let's do it for ten days. Cheque me out. You know, I'm not trying to make your life difficult, but this is an area where I need to know that God is sovereign and I'm not.
What are those lines for you? What are those places where you're not just going along with the world around you? It's work. Nights out over the summer. Is it a case of saying, I'm not going to drink at all?
Because I want to say, look, I'm not here to get drunk with my work colleagues. I'm here in order to spend time with them. I'm here and I rejoice that God is sovereign over what I do and say. Or is it in my language? I'm not going to go along with what they say and how they say it.
Actually, there are words that I think are holy and good and right, and I'm going to use them to speak of God and nobody else.
I don't know what area it is for you. Maybe if you're a dad, there are areas in your father being a father, but there's more, because doing that has eternal effects. Very briefly, we see at the end of the passage that Daniel and his mates, they're there until after the kingdom of the Babylonians actually goes the year of King Cyrus. But before that happens, if you flick forward just to chapter four, we see there somebody making a bit of an exclamation. You might recognise his name.
His name is Nebuchadnezzar. He's the very king who enslaves others. And what does he say? How great are God's signs? How mighty his wonders.
His kingdom is an eternal kingdom. His dominion endures from generation to generation. You see, God uses Daniel's acts of faithfulness in a really terrible and difficult time to bring this king, who otherwise wouldn't know God, to faith in him, what is it that your friends will see in the way in which you are living for Jesus? That they will say there is something different there about them. How is it that they are able to face such difficulty with hope?
Why is it that they dont go along with others and it will bring people to know him? The other meeting I was at this week, I don't know what's the collective noun of vicars? A gaggle? A sermon of vicars? I'm not sure, but I was with a sermon of vicars and it was the vicars in the churches that are growing and are reaching out with the good news of Jesus, those ones that have seen the most growth in our diocese.
And it was interesting chatting with them. And one of the things that each and every one of them said is it's really challenging, because what we want to do is to not talk about a God who takes sin seriously in judge and judgments, but we're not suffering to do that. And what that's happened universally in every one of those growing churches, is that the Lord has brought people to those churches to come to know him, to trust him, to, yes, have difficult questions, but to experience the Holy Spirit changing their lives, setting them free to know a God who rules over all things, in all places, at all times. Let me pray. Heavenly Father, thank you so, so much that even in the tragedy, even in those times that are hard, even in those times when you are humiliated, and never more so than at the cross, your plans are not thwarted.
Help us to trust you as the sovereign king of all. Amen.