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A few years back, John Brandon and
I went to do housework at my mom’s for a few days. Mom lives on 2.5 acres, so there is quite a
bit of yardwork to be done, and since she is so busy a little extra help is
appreciated. John and I cut down a few
trees and took care of some other things in the yard, and by the end of a day
we had a rather large pile of branches to be burned. It was in the middle of a large open space,
and so we lit it on fire and sat back to watch.
Well, it didn’t light very well,
and we kept trying to get it to start.
It wasn’t taking very quickly, though, so we shifted the pile a bit and
then stood back to watch. It wasn’t too
long before the tiny little fire we had started had flames shooting thirty feet
up into the air, threatening the trees that had once seemed far away from any
potential danger. We had thought that we
were safe and that the fire would be pretty small… and then things got a bit
out of hand.
A situation like this one has
probably happened to each and every one of you at some point in life. You start with something small, something
manageable, something you can handle, and before you know it, things have blown
way out of proportion. You turned around
for one second, and suddenly it’s out of control and has picked up momentum of
its own. It’s the proverbial snowball
that seemed so harmless when you started rolling it and suddenly threatens the
life of everyone below it as it picks up steam and heads downhill. Things we believe we can control often don’t
stay that way.
I’d like to suggest that sin works
that way. Sin often starts out as
something that seems harmless, something that just looks like innocent fun, and
we engage in it because we think we can control it, we believe we can manage
its influence in our life. We think we’re
in charge. But all sin, each and every
one, intends to lead us deeper into its grip.
All sin, whether it’s greed or lust or addiction, starts small,
seemingly benign, and then takes us deeper and deeper. Often, we don’t realize that things are out
of our control until it’s far too late.
We suddenly see that what we thought we could manage is actually
controlling us. This is why we’re
constantly urged to hate sin, to flee from sin.
Any sin, no matter how small it seems, leads us into this spiral. The letter of James tells us that sin leads
to death, and while it’s hard to understand how a little white lie can lead to
death, it’s easier to see that one lie leads to another, to another, and then
to another, until the lies have taken over our lives and we can’t see any way
out. Sin has consequences, and often we
end up losing what we value, despite the fact that we thought it was something
we could easily manage.
In today’s reading from Daniel 6,
we start out with King Darius. He’s in
charge of the massive Babylonian empire, and to help run the country he’s
decided to let Daniel govern the whole kingdom.
We read that Daniel did his work so much better than everyone else that
it was an easy decision for the king to put him in charge. Here we have our first lesson for today: if you do your work better than everyone
else, you’ll end up in positions of influence.
As Christians, we’re called to work hard and to do good work, to work as
though we are working for Christ, because our work brings glory to him.
The other men were jealous of
him. They couldn’t find any fault in his
labor, so they decided to attack him because of his religion. They knew that his faith in the one true God
made him an oddity in a land where people would worship whatever they were
told, so they singled him out to get him into trouble.
To do so, the others went to the
king with a seemingly innocuous request.
They asked that the king make a law that would make it illegal for
anyone to worship anyone but the king for the next 30 days. If anyone did so, they would be thrown into
the lions’ den.
The King didn’t see the harm in
this. He was considered to be like a god
anyway, and he couldn’t imagine the consequences. He didn’t recognize the danger down the road,
and he was pretty sure he could manage this request.
Until it led him somewhere
unexpected. Daniel was unwilling to
worship anything but God, and the other men were only too happy to turn Daniel
in to the king for punishment. They knew
the law couldn’t be broken. The
punishment had to be served.
Darius wasn’t happy about this, but
he couldn’t find a loophole. He couldn’t
make an escape for Daniel, and so what he thought was harmless was going to end
up costing him his most valuable worker in the kingdom. The one person he couldn’t afford to lose
would be lost because Darius had led things spiral out of control. His sin had consequences he hadn’t
anticipated, like all sin does.
Daniel, then, is thrown into the
lions’ den, which is sealed with a large rock, leaving Daniel to do battle with
hungry lions. The rest of the story
should be fairly predictable.
But notice how the King
reacts. He could not sleep all night,
and he refuses to eat a thing. He was
miserable because Daniel could be lost to the lions.
First thing in the morning, though,
he gets up and runs to the lions’ den.
He shouts into it, asking Daniel if he was saved by God from the
terrible destiny that awaited.
Now, think about this for a
moment. The king goes to the lions’ den
and expects Daniel to be alive. Why
would he expect this? He’s thrown Daniel
into a pit of lions. That’s not
something that any reasonable person would be expected to escape from. This is as certain a death punishment as you
could have.
Except that Daniel has indeed
survived. Miraculously, God sent an
angel to keep the lions from eating him.
God has saved him.
But why would Darius expect this? What would lead him to believe that a God he
doesn’t worship could save a man from lions?
Daniel must have lived his faith in
an extraordinary way. Clearly, the
stories of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego have filtered down to Darius. But Daniel must have been an extraordinary
person. He must have lived his faith as
though it truly and deeply mattered. He
must have prayed in such a way that he expected his prayers to have
results. He must have sought after God
with such passion and energy that it was clear his entire life was dependent on
God alone. This was not a half-hearted
faith—it was a passion for God.
And Darius clearly saw in Daniel a
faith that could move mountains. He saw
a man whose God could save.
Now, you and I probably will never
be thrown into a lions’ den. No one is
going to come and peer into the jaguar exhibit at the zoo to see if we survived
a night of punishment.
But people are watching how we live
and how we pray. They’re watching to see
how our worship of God affects our lives.
So the question we need to ask
ourselves is this: what kind of God does
my life proclaim? Does it proclaim a God
who has conquered death, who has rolled the stone away and revealed life? Does it portray a God who is constantly
involved with my life, who cares deeply about me and will stop at nothing to protect
me? Does my life proclaim a God who will
suffer the very depths of hell so that I might not perish? Do my prayers reflect a constant expectation
that God will intervene in my life and lead me forward into abundant life?
If we were thrown into the lions’
den, do we live our faith in such a way as to proclaim a God capable of saving
us from such a grisly fate? Or do we
proclaim a tame, mild God who exists merely to help us scrape through and enter
heaven?
Let us pray
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