26 July 2026

The Faithful Exile Story

Daniel 1:1-21

We read now the first chapter of the Book of Daniel.

1 In the third year of the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. 2The Lord let King Jehoiakim of Judah fall into his power, as well as some of the vessels of the house of God. These he brought to the land of Shinar, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his gods.

3Then the king commanded his palace master Ashpenaz to bring some of the Israelites of the royal family and of the nobility, 4young men without physical defect and handsome, versed in every branch of wisdom, endowed with knowledge and insight, and competent to serve in the king’s palace; they were to be taught the literature and language of the Chaldeans. 5The king assigned them a daily portion of the royal rations of food and wine. They were to be educated for three years, so that at the end of that time they could be stationed in the king’s court. 6Among them were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, from the tribe of Judah. 7The palace master gave them other names: Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, Mishael he called Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego.

8But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the royal rations of food and wine; so he asked the palace master to allow him not to defile himself. 9Now God allowed Daniel to receive favor and compassion from the palace master. 10The palace master said to Daniel, ‘I am afraid of my lord the king; he has appointed your food and your drink. If he should see you in poorer condition than the other young men of your own age, you would endanger my head with the king.’ 11Then Daniel asked the guard whom the palace master had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah: 12‘Please test your servants for ten days. Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. 13You can then compare our appearance with the appearance of the young men who eat the royal rations, and deal with your servants according to what you observe.’ 14So he agreed to this proposal and tested them for ten days. 15At the end of ten days it was observed that they appeared better and fatter than all the young men who had been eating the royal rations. 16So the guard continued to withdraw their royal rations and the wine they were to drink, and gave them vegetables. 17To these four young men God gave knowledge and skill in every aspect of literature and wisdom; Daniel also had insight into all visions and dreams.

18At the end of the time that the king had set for them to be brought in, the palace master brought them into the presence of Nebuchadnezzar, 19and the king spoke with them. And among them all, no one was found to compare with Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah; therefore, they were stationed in the king’s court. 20In every matter of wisdom and understanding concerning which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom. 21And Daniel continued there until the first year of King Cyrus.

As you know, our Bible was written over the course of many centuries, and different books were aimed at different eras in the history of our faith. For instance, many of the books in the Old Testament were written for what we could call the “Kingdom Era,” when Israel was definitely a religious nation. The nation had been founded as such at Mount Sinai, when God made a covenant with them and gave them the law through Moses, and now Israel ruled by kings who – in theory, at least – served God. So during the Kingdom Era, everyone except a few foreigners living among the Israelites were officially followers of the God of Israel. That was the default setting for the whole nation. Now, not every Israelite, or even every Israelite king, kept their part of the covenant, but that’s why God appointed priests and prophets: to call the people back to covenant. The point is that during this time, the worship of Israel’s God was the expectation, the standard that all were supposed to meet. The Book of Daniel was not written for that era.

No, Daniel was written for a time when the worship of God was the exception, not the rule. The “Kingdom Era” ended when the Israelite kingdoms were destroyed, first by Assyria and then by Babylon. Now there were no kings of Israel, no temple to God, and no one to worship there anyway, because nearly everyone had been carted out of Israel into captivity in Babylon. Call this the “Era of Exile.” In this new era, the script had been flipped: now the followers of God were the “few foreigners.” Their religion was no longer the standard that all were supposed to follow; their religion was the weird foreign cult. For those new exiles in Babylon, this must have been like religious whiplash. Suddenly the rules had changed, and they faced new challenges. [Ask: What religious challenges can you imagine the exiles facing?] Where do we worship now? The temple’s gone. How do we worship? What do we even do in worship now? And then, even more fundamentally, is it even safe to worship our God? What will our Babylonian masters think about that? And how about this one: What if our Babylonian masters order us to do something that is against our covenant? The Book of Daniel was written for Israelites in the Era of Exile, and it deals with questions like these – largely by means of telling stories.

So let’s look at some of those stories and see how they deal with the challenges of the Exile and what they might have to teach us today. You’ve just heard the first one. King Nebuchadnezzar, the one who destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, took an early batch of Jewish exiles back to Babylon, and from that group hand-picked four promising young men to train for the Babylonian Civil Service. So these four young men are brought in along with others from all the other nations that Babylon had conquered and put to school for three years, with full room and board. Ah, but there’s a problem, right? The Jewish law has clear restrictions on what they can eat – especially which kinds of meat. What do our four youths do? Well, I’ll tell you what they don’t do: they don’t complain or claim religious persecution. Something about being captives in exile makes it hard to maintain a sense of entitlement. No, they go privately to the chief steward at the school and ask if it would be all right if they ate just vegetables and water. But notice how they ask: the leader of the four, Daniel, asks if they can avoid “defiling” themselves and just eat veggies, but he doesn’t mention their religious rules. He doesn’t mention religion at all. As far as the steward knows, they’re just vegan. The steward hesitates – if they waste away on their salad diet, he’ll be blamed – but eventually he agrees to let them try. It works. At the end of a ten-day trial, Daniel and his friends are more fit than any of the others. (Actually, it says they were “fatter,” but I’m having trouble getting my head around that.) What Daniel and his friends do in this story is model what we could call “stealth religion.” They had a religious conflict, but they make no show of their faith, claim no privileges because of it. Instead, they quietly try to accommodate their religious needs without mentioning faith at all.

The rest of the stories of Daniel, which make up the first half of the book, take on these same themes in different ways. We’re going to look at chapters two through four over the next two weeks, so I’ll leave those stories alone for now except to note that each successive story represents a slightly harder challenge. You see, while you can avoid superficial conflicts by quiet diversion without bringing up religion, as Daniel and his friends did in the salad story, not every challenge is so simple. Sometimes, it doesn’t work at all. For instance, as we’ll see next week in Daniel 3, Daniel’s friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are given a black and white choice between bowing down to a statue or be thrown into a fiery furnace. They choose the furnace. (Spoiler alert: they come out all right.) 

But let’s look at one more story, from Daniel chapter 6, probably the best known in the book. Nebuchadnezzar has died and been replaced by his son, who was then replaced by someone called Darius the Mede, but Daniel is still at court, now a highly respected wise man. Now kings’ courts are often places of intense rivalry, and Daniel has enemies who want to get rid of him, but they can’t find anything to pin on him. The guy is squeaky clean. So they come up with a plan. “O King Darius, we were just thinking that you’re so wonderful, people should pray to you instead of to the gods. Why don’t you make a law saying that for the next thirty days anyone who prays to any god other than you should be thrown into a den of lions.” Kings in Daniel tend not to be the sharpest tools in the box, and so Darius says, “That sounds great! I see no way that could go wrong! Let’s do it and place an irrevocable seal on the law!” The law is passed, and Daniel’s enemies rush off to spy on him. Sure enough, at his usual time for prayer, Daniel goes into his room to pray toward Jerusalem, and he (apparently intentionally) does not close his windows. He is seen. He is denounced. He is arrested.

“Oh no!” cries King Darius. “Not Daniel! How could I ever have known that such a perfect law could go wrong?” But the law was stamped with an irrevocable seal, and so Daniel is thrown into the pit of lions and left all night. It’s all right. He’s fine. As Daniel tells Darius later, “The Lord sent his angel, who closed the lions’ mouths.”

Again, quietly following your religion in private can be helpful, but it has limits. Sometimes you have to take a stand, and worshiping anyone other than God is a red line that must not be crossed, whatever the cost. I’m not sure what to make of the interesting wrinkle that this story adds: that Daniel didn’t even close his windows, allowing people to watch him. Me? I would have closed the windows. But in both the story of the fiery furnace and the story of the lion’s den, at some point even stealth believers have to own up to their faith and trust God to protect them from the consequences. Or not.

These lessons for the Era of the Exile have continued to apply throughout the. The question of how openly to observe your faith in a hostile environment has been meaningful to Christians in Communist nations and to Jews for most of their history. But it doesn’t apply quite so directly to us. We don’t live in a world where our faith is persecuted, whatever anyone says. (I continue to be amazed at people who claim that Christianity is persecuted in America – making those claims to millions on their constitutionally-protected podcasts and prime time news shows. Wow. How do they even cope with such oppression? So brave!) But, while we aren’t actually persecuted under any meaningful definition of the word, it is nevertheless true that to some extent the script has flipped for us, as well. Our context has changed. As with the Jews in exile, our faith which used to be the standard for nearly everyone, is no longer our society’s default setting. We, too, are moving into a new era. So what do these stories of faithful exiles have to say to us in our new context? 

Here are a few brief thoughts: (1) A purely public faith will not survive a change of eras. In times of overt religiosity, as in the Kingdom Era or the 1950s in America, some people will go through the forms of faith because it’s socially beneficial. Those people will not hang around when there are no longer any external perks. To do that requires a deeper faith, one that informs your whole life. (2) Religious grandstanding accomplishes nothing. Many of the skirmishes in the so-called culture war today have been about superficial things – Christmas greetings, non-religious Starbucks cups, mandatory classroom posters of the Ten Commandments – external gestures toward faith rather than faith itself. Those who have the kind of deep, personal faith that will survive changing times, like Daniel and his friends did, neither require such displays nor want them. And (3) in a world where our faith is increasingly marginalized, there is all the more chance that we may be expected to do things that are contrary to our faith or conscience. Sometimes we can quietly deflect those expectations, as our exiles did in Daniel 1, but not always. We need to know where our red lines are, and we need to be ready to be faithful to God first.