Daniel 6:19-23 “Us”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹⁹Then the king in the dawn arose in the daylight and in haste to the pit of the lions he went. ²⁰And approaching to the pit to Daniel, the king cried in a grieved voice answering and saying to Daniel, “Daniel, servant of the living God, your God whom you serve constantly, was He able to deliver you from the lions?” ²¹Then Daniel with the king said, “O king, live to ages. ²²My God sent His angel and He shut the mouths of the lions and they have not hurt me because before Him innocence was found to me and also before you, O king, I have done no harm.” ²³Then the king was very good upon him and he said to take up Daniel from the pit and Daniel was brought up from the pit and all of harm was not found in him because he trusted in his God.

On the one hand, this is, of course, a marvelous story of God’s miraculous power to protect His people and to turn even complete injustice into victory. On the other hand, I think it is worth noting that all of this is just one more expression of the fractal of our very existence. As believers, we live in a world where our “adversary, the devil, roams about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour” (I Peter 5:8). Whether we encounter his malignancy as a pit of lions or a fiery furnace, or if it is just the aches and pains of old age, we all face hardships every day. Just like Daniel, our hope is not that somehow we’ll escape such troubles.

We’d all like to believe, since we know the Lord, He will somehow shelter us from troubles and make our lives “easy.” Then, like poor Job, the freight train of this world’s evil comes crashing through the living room of our souls, and we’re reminded Jesus said, “In this world, you will have trouble…” (John 16:33). No doubt it is a direct reference to Daniel when the writer of Hebrews says, “By faith, some shut the mouths of lions…” (11:33), but we should all note, that is in the middle of an entire chapter recounting heroes of faith. Even that writer, after 31 verses, exclaims, “What more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about…!” My point is that the history of God’s people is a history of faith, a history of many, many people who faced evil in a myriad of different forms, trusted God through it, and won the victory, whether through life or through death.

In this very world, the Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy, “At my first defense no one supported me, but all deserted me; may it not be counted against them. But the Lord stood with me and strengthened me, so that through me the proclamation might be fully accomplished, and that all the Gentiles might hear; and I was rescued out of the lion’s mouth. The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed, and will bring me safely to His heavenly kingdom; to Him be the glory forever and ever. Amen” (II Tim. 4:16-18).

What happened to Daniel, in reality, happens to you and me all day every day in a million different ways and on a million different scales. It is the fractal of our existence. It is not a question of whether we’ll face our own dens of lions, but rather what form they’ll take and when and where, and then whether we will or won’t be people of faith through it all. Peter tells us, “So then, those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good” (I Peter 4:19).

I suppose I’m writing all of this because I fear we too often read accounts like this in the Bible, are awed by the great faith of these Bible heroes, then go back to our own workaday worlds never realizing the story was really about us! The Lord Himself specifically says these things “were written for our admonition, upon whom the end of the ages has come” (I Cor. 10:11), and “Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Rom. 15:4).

As we would ponder this wonderful Bible story, may we take from it the encouragement that we can have that same faith, trust this same God, and be “heroes” of faith in our own little worlds. We will face our own lions’ dens in a million different ways, but, if we will but trust Him, we will find our God just as faithful to us as He was to Daniel.

Lord help us.

 

Daniel 6:19-23 “Blessed Assurance”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹⁹Then the king in the dawn arose in the daylight and in haste to the pit of the lions he went. ²⁰And approaching to the pit to Daniel, the king cried in a grieved voice answering and saying to Daniel, “Daniel, servant of the living God, your God whom you serve constantly, was He able to deliver you from the lions?” ²¹Then Daniel with the king said, “O king, live to ages. ²²My God sent His angel and He shut the mouths of the lions and they have not hurt me because before Him innocence was found to me and also before you, O king, I have done no harm.” ²³Then the king was very good upon him and he said to take up Daniel from the pit and Daniel was brought up from the pit and all of harm was not found in him because he trusted in his God.

What different worlds Darius and Daniel live in! Darius lives in a world he cannot control and which leaves him miserable. Even though he is the king of arguably the richest empire in all of human history and he would seemingly have all power at his disposal, yet his own nobles have deceived him and his own legal system has bound him to execute the one man he knew he could trust. Now that one man is in a pit full of ferocious hungry lions and all Darius can do about it is lie awake in misery and worry, waiting for the dawn. He lives in a world which, in the end, he cannot control, and he has no assurance how things will turn out.

Daniel lives on the exact same planet, yet he lives in a completely different world. The difference is summed up in those last words of v.23, “he trusted in his God.” Daniel also lives in a world he cannot control, but he knows the Someone who does. Daniel lives in God’s world. He lives in a world where he can return again and again to the promise, “I know the plans I have for you, plans not to harm you but to give you a future and a hope.” Those words were the OT equivalent of our Romans 8:28, “And we know all things work together for good to them that love God…”

Daniel lives in the marvelous assurance that whether in death or in life, His God is carefully, minutely, and very deliberately working everything for His glory and for Daniel’s greatest eternal good. I don’t know at Daniel’s age if he felt any fear as they carried him to the mouth of that den and threw him in. If he did, I’m sure he was wrestling with his own heart, telling himself to just trust the Lord, that the Lord would either deliver him from the lions or use those very lions as the means to free him from this vale of tears and deliver him instead to heaven. In truth, Daniel could be quite happy with either prospect. He could say with Jesus, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not My will, but Thine be done.”

It would be so interesting to know more about Daniel’s night. All we know is what he tells Darius, that the Lord “sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths.” I’d like to think that angel actually appeared to him and spent the night with him there in the pit. If so, wouldn’t it be interesting to know what they discussed? We’ll see from chapter 7 on that Daniel has many interactions with angels, so he certainly is familiar with them. On the other hand, it only says the angel shut the lions’ mouths. It’s possible that’s all that Daniel ever knew. He literally might have just crawled up against one of those big warm beasts and went fast to sleep, only to be awakened by the poor king’s anguished pleas the next morning. Either way, Daniel spent a pleasant night in this world, while Darius’ world was a miserable prison. And again, the difference? Daniel “trusted in his God.”

Interestingly, the word translated “trust” is the same word from which we get our “Amen.” Daniel “amen-ed” in his God. He could say his prayers and be done with them, be done with the fears, be done with the doubts, and simply step out of the boat and walk on the water with Jesus. Darius is left still asking the question, “Has your God been able to rescue you from the lions?” Able? Able? That isn’t even a question in Daniel’s mind. He’s already said “Amen” to that question. He only had to watch and see the turn of events, knowing all the while His good God was quite in control.

The wonderful news for you and me is that, once again, Daniel has nothing on us. We may not be prophets, but what made the difference for him was not his gifts, but rather that simple little phrase, “he trusted in his God.” He did what you and I can do too. If we would be more like Daniel, let us realize what we need are not his actions, but rather the reason behind them. As you and I would learn more and more to trust our God like Daniel did, we’ll, in fact, ourselves become more and more like him.

What Darius didn’t have, but Daniel did, was “blessed assurance!”

Daniel 6:19-23 “Touched”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹⁹Then the king in the dawn arose in the daylight and in haste to the pit of the lions he went. ²⁰And approaching to the pit to Daniel, the king cried in a grieved voice answering and saying to Daniel, “Daniel, servant of the living God, your God whom you serve constantly, was He able to deliver you from the lions?” ²¹Then Daniel with the king said, “O king, live to ages. ²²My God sent His angel and He shut the mouths of the lions and they have not hurt me because before Him innocence was found to me and also before you, O king, I have done no harm.” ²³Then the king was very good upon him and he said to take up Daniel from the pit and Daniel was brought up from the pit and all of harm was not found in him because he trusted in his God.

There is tons of encouraging truth to gain from these few simple verses. However, I’d like to inject a little personal anecdote here, in the event my grandchildren ever pick this up and read it. This story—Daniel in the lions’ den—is particularly special to me. When I was probably only four or five years old, my mother sent my brothers and me to a Vacation Bible School that was being held in a little church in the small town where we lived. I remember very little about that week, except that I really enjoyed doing the crafts! In addition to that, I have the briefest memory of a lady standing and teaching us using an old-fashioned flannel board, and she was teaching this very story. I can still see the flannel Daniel character with the flannel lions around him.

There are two things that were highly significant to me. First of all, I just liked the story. There was something about it that “stuck” in my heart. It was a Bible story and I really liked it. The second thing was the lady herself. I very specifically remember that everything about her was love and kindness. There was some kind of glow about her that also “stuck” in my heart. To me, there is no doubt now that glow was Jesus. Whoever she was, that lady knew Jesus and she was there to teach us little tikes because the love of Jesus was in her heart.

I have often lamented that I was 22 years old the first time I ever met a real born-again Christian. However, when I’ve said that, I have been forgetting this one lady whose heart touched me so early in my life. I feel I can’t overstate the significance of that moment when someone imparted to me a love for Bible stories and who lit that little tiny spark of having literally met Jesus. When, at age 22, I met another real Christian, I was seeing a face I’d seen before—and liked.

I really believe that God Himself touched me that day, marked me as His, and began the long process of actually melting my heart and drawing me to Himself. That was an important moment in my life and, because of it, this particular story—Daniel in the lions’ den—has always been very special to me.

If I could inject, could I also say my experience can be enormously encouraging to all of us? What I mean to say is that lady had no idea how God used her that day. She was just teaching another flannel graph lesson to a bunch of little cherub faces. She’d no doubt obtained the flannel sheets, cut out the little characters, prepared herself, prayed, taught the lesson, then put it all away, went home, lived her life, and by now she has certainly gone to glory. She lived her whole life, never even knowing that her simple little effort that day in a little church in a little town touched a little life for all eternity.

And what did she do that had all that impact? She just lived the love of Jesus. She didn’t have a microphone. She wasn’t speaking to thousands in a football stadium. She just lived the love of Jesus. I’ve often found it amusing in Matthew 25 where the King says to those on His right, “When I was hungry you fed me, when I was naked you clothed me…,” and the people respond, “When did we do that?” They don’t even know. They did something the King of kings noticed and they didn’t even know it. If they knew it at all, they’ve forgotten it completely. No doubt when that lady met Jesus in glory, He thanked her for touching that little boy’s heart and she replied, “When did I do that?”

Oh, may you and I realize that’s all it takes. If we enjoy the presence of Jesus in our hearts, all God asks of us is that we let it shine. “Love God, love people.” It’s that simple. He’ll do the rest. We ourselves will only find out in glory the good we did—not because we were “trying” so much as that we simply touched our world with Jesus. Only then will we find out how much it meant to someone just to see our smile, to hear our kind words, to sense our sincere sympathy in their difficulties.

“For God so loved the world, He gave His Son.” May we pass Him on!