HUMILIATION AND EXALTATION

HUMILIATION AND EXALTATION
HOW GOD USES OF AFFLICTION TO PRESERVE HIS PEOPLE
DANIEL 1

Read Daniel 1:1-7

The world is becoming a crazy mixed up place. I can’t say how many older people have told me that they would not want to raise children in this day and age.

The other day I was getting ready for bed and I happened to catch the first few minutes of the news. There was the Cambodian Hostage taking, Dr Kervorkian was given an honorary doctorate and The prime minister lamented the delay to pass Bill C-38.

But the world today is not much different than it has ever been. Look at Israel, God’s chosen people, His Church in the Old Testament; delivered by His mighty hand from slavery in Egypt and brought into a land of milk and honey. They became the dominant power in the region during the reigns of David and Solomon, but their prosperity and easiness of life corrupted them.

Soon, their Princes were marrying Egyptian and Syrian Princesses and adopting foreign gods. They began to sacrifice their own children to Baal and instituting male and female temple prostitution in the Temple of God.

Isaiah describes the social condition of Israel:
As for my people, children are their oppressors and women rule over them. …the daughters of zion are haughty and walk with outstretched necks and wanton eyes, jingling as they walk. The Lord looked for justice, but behold, oppression…. [They] call evil good and good evil. [They] put darkness for light and light for darkness…. Therefore my people have gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge (Is 3:12, 16; 5:6b, 20, 13).

And so the message of Jeremiah and Isaiah and other prophets time and time again was that Israel should repent of here evil ways because they were about to be judged. They warned Israel that God was going to give them into the hands of the Babylonians.

Israel refused to repent and Daniel 1 shows the fulfillment of those warnings and reminds us that God is the author of history. He builds kingdoms and established kings; he also tears down kingdoms and humiliates their princes.

Verse 2 says that the Lord gave Jehoiakim into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar. There is an irony in Jehoiakim’s name. It means the Lord raises up. The Lord raised up Nebuchadnezzar against Jehoiakim.

There are three things about the nature of God and His people that I want to point out from this chapter. First, no matter how long He delays, God punishes rebellion and brings justice to the oppressed. Second, God is pleased by purity of heart. And finally, God is the author and originator of providence.


I. Let’s look at the first element: Punishment: we have just read a brief narrative of the invasion and captivity of Jerusalem. They were warned for a hundred years that captivity was coming.

1. God’s Punishment is promised. Way back in Genesis chapter 2, God promised punishment for eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. “In the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.” And as a result of our parent’s rebellion, all die.

There are things that we are commanded not to do. But Let me state those commandments positively: In the great commandment, Jesus commands Christians to Love the Lord your God with all of your mind and with all your heart and with all your strength and love your neighbour as yourself.

Any act- such as idolatry or believing and teaching false doctrine for example- that do not stem from love for God is an act of hatred toward God. Just like any act that does not stem from love for people, such as greed, hatred, murder- they are acts of hatred. Disobedience produces punishment.

Punishment is promised for sin.

2. Punishment is deserved. God is a perfect judge. He does not act in a way that is belligerent. If you are suffering under the hand of God and being punished, you can be certain that it is deserved and more importantly, that God is doing it out of love for you.

He is preserving you through affliction; working all things (including afflictions) for good to them that love Him. What appears to us now as suffering will one day on heavens celestial shore appear as pure gold purified in the furnace seven times.

II. God is pleased by purity when it comes from our hearts. (Read vv 8-16).

Daniel decided not to defile himself with the Kings delicacies because he was aware of his own hearts tendency to stray and that the liberality of the king are a premeditated effort to entice Daniel and his friends to abandon their people and their God.

Daniel and his friends opted instead for simplicity. Better to have a few dry crumbs in the desert than a feast where there is strife. Better to live like Mother Theresa with a bucket and uprightness than to have a multi-million dollar home like Benny Hinn under a fog of suspicion and misconduct.

Notice in verse 3: God gave them the favour of the chief eunuch. God has the power to turn hearts for us or against us because He has power over the wills of men. God could just as easily have hardened that eunuch’s heart and Daniel and His friends would have been dead in an instant.

Daniel managed to convince the eunuch to test them for ten days with the simple diet.

Daniel was not trusting in His outward activity to please God. That is the doctrine of the Pharisees. Remember how Jesus chided them because they concentrated so much on external righteousness but they missed the fact that what comes out of a man, not what goes into him, makes him unclean. Jesus called the Pharisees whitewashed graves because they looked so good on the outside but their hearts were cold and black and dead.

Purity comes from the heart. “Who may ascend to the hill of the Lord? …or stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted his soul to an idol, nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive blessing from the Lord.” (Ps 24:3-5).

How do we purify our hearts and keep them that way? We are purified through the word of God. Peter says that we purify our souls when we obey the truth (1 Peter 1:22).

“The Law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; …making wise the simple. …rejoicing the heart; [and] enlightening the eyes.” (Psalm 19:4ff).

III. The final element that we see demonstrated in the event of Daniels humiliation and exaltation is the Providence of God. (Read vv. 17-21).

God was about to bring judgment upon Israel for their rebellion, but the ultimate humiliation of being taken captive did not fall on the most corrupt of Jerusalem society. That humiliation came upon the most noble. The corrupt population of Israel had fallen into paganism, but that surely was not the case with Daniel and his friends. They were the remnant.

Look at their names: Daniel means God is my judge; Hananiah means God is favoured; Mishael means “Who is what God is”; and Azariah means “Jehovah has helped.”

These boys came from Godly families. Although they were surrounded by a nation that was declining into paganism and social injustice, they were like Joshua who said, “Choose this day whom you will serve, but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

By all appearance to these righteous boys were being chastised- and you can bet that the wicked people of Jerusalem taunted the followers of Jehovah saying things like, “if your God is so great, why have so many of your people been taken into captivity.”

And their captivity was painfully humiliating for them. Look at the Psalm they wrote when they arrived in Babylon:
By the rivers of Babylon-
there we sat down and wept
when we remembered Zion. 2 There we hung up our lyres
on the poplar trees, 3 for our captors there asked us for songs,
and our tormentors, for rejoicing:
"Sing us one of the songs of Zion."; 4 How can we sing the Lord's song
on foreign soil? 5 If I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget [its skill]. 6 May my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not exalt Jerusalem as my greatest joy! (Ps 137)

But what appeared to be humiliation to the remnant was actually for their preservation. “The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them.

Nebuchadnezzar found the humiliated remnant ten times better than his own wise men and he placed them in positions of power and influence for the preservation of the captives in Babylon and those same captives prospered there and the world came to hear about the God of Israel.

Many of these Jews who were taken captive by the Babylonians remained in exile after their country men returned to Jerusalem. In fact, as a result of the exile, the Jews spread across the known world. They are believed to have gone to China, and Korea and Japan, as well as to Russia and Rome and even Ethiopia so that when the Gospel came to those places, the Jews were often the first to hear and convert to Christianity.

I will close with this encouragement; If God has brought you low it is for your exaltation and for His glory and the advance of His kingdom. God is glorified in the hearts of unbelievers when His people bear affliction in the same Christlike way that Jesus bore the cross.

“Thus Daniel continued [in the courts of Babylon] until the first year of Cyrus.”