Daniel Lesson 21

Daniel in the Lion’s Den (Civil Disobedience) – Daniel 6:10-17

What does a leader do when jealousy causes a shutdown of production by those under him? Does the shutdown then become the responsibility of the leader? And the answer is negative. The mental attitude sins are the things that are responsible for shutting down the production. If you have a group of people under you who can’t take authority, you basically have one of two things to do: get rid of them or slowly train them if they’re willing to go along with your authority but you can’t allow a situation to develop where you have a group of people that are incompetent, they’re arrogant, and so therefore they cannot submit to authority. So if that’s the situation you really do have a problem, but it’s not the leader’s fault.

In Daniel 1-6 you refer to the founding fathers as polymaths, what does that mean? Usually when I use those words you’ll find in apposition right after them I define what they are. A polymath is some person who is very, very learned in many different fields; the ability to, unlike most people in the university campus today, the ability to speak intelligently about, say literature, music, philosophy and science, the ability to think across different fields, the ability that is rapidly being destroyed in our system.

Some of you are very naïve and you think that you can have a debate and that the other side isn’t going to do anything, and some of you have been shocked at the antagonism that this whole thing has caused. The Bible says you’re living in Satan’s world and when Christians get up and articulate a position they are people who are nice moral people who are vicious and they are going to do their best to destroy you. This is why I have tried over and over to drill, drill, drill, drill you in the divine viewpoint framework so that you can handle these kinds of things. The Bible has many passages to straighten you out on the fact that you live in a world that is out to destroy divine viewpoint. And any time any individual steps forward and articulates divine viewpoint he is going to be a lightening rod for all sorts of people.

I’ve been in the creationist movement since 1962, thirteen years, I have known Dr. Henry Morris since 1959; I have followed his career, I have watched the reception he has received by Christians from coast to coast, I know all major groups of the evangelical faith and how they act when this kind of thing comes up. Most of them act like the yellow-bellies that they are. This is because we have so few trained believers and I’ve been told that two of the campus evangelistic organizations are going to sponsor a defusing session to try to have everyone accept evolution and the Bible too. And this goes right down the line with these kinds of groups; they cannot take the Word of God and when someone makes an issue on the basis of the Word they can’t stand the pressure. These are the kind of people that are going to do their best to defuse the situation and we’re going to do our best to keep it polarized because it’s only as you polarize a situation that an issue is created.

We have a kingdom of blackness and a kingdom of light; not a kingdom of gray. And these people cannot stand it when the light and the darkness collide; they always have to compromise. They say we want to win people to Jesus and this business of creation/evolution is sidetracking the Christian community, it’s horrible that these kind of things are going on and people aren’t going to be won to Jesus. The only way people can be won to Christ is to be won to the true Christ and the true Christ is a believer in [can’t understand word] creation. What these people are trying to do is to be dishonest and lead unbelievers to a pseudo Christ, a Christ of their own making, to make it look like we can come over gradually from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, let’s make a gray bridge across and creep inch by inch, slowly illuminating them to Jesus. This is not the way you win people to Jesus Christ.

Daniel 6:10; we’re on the last chapter of the first large section of the book. From chapter 2-6 of this book we have Daniel’s political career, and this career is based upon the use of wisdom against the kingdom of man. Therefore the principles you see in Daniel, such as the doctrine of separation, these kind of things that you see Daniel using in his life, the young men that have grown up with Daniel, you see them using in their life, we couldn’t be in a better book because Daniel faced the same thing. He faced the kingdom of man; everybody disagreed politically with Daniel. Daniel was a polarizer; Daniel was the kind of person that every one said why doesn’t that guy keep his mouth shut. There were probably thousands of believers in Babylon, Jewish believers, who compromised. And they said Daniel if you just wouldn’t make an issue over eating the food and Nebuchadnezzar’s state religion, then we could be at peace and then we could gradually win them to Jesus. And I imagine Daniel had a lot of pressure, not from the unbeliever but from cowardly believers who couldn’t take it. Daniel said no. In fact we’re going to see in this passage Daniel not only said no, Daniel said oh, they’re looking to see how often I pray, good, I’ll open my windows as wide as I possibly can and I’ll pray in front of them three times a day.

That’s how Daniel handled the problem. If he had done what most Christians would do he’d shut the door and pray silently, hiding. No, Daniel is not going to hide, he enjoys the fight so he’s going to get out there, he’s going to stick with the Word and he’s going to pray right out in the open so every man from India to Greece can see that he is praying three times a day. If they don’t like it they can lump it, but he’s going to follow the Word. That’s Daniel’s attitude, and that is the attitude that we have to have inside the kingdom of man; don’t chicken out, just stay with it. The kingdom of man is an all pervading system and Satan uses the kingdom of man as an evil system to intimidate believers to shut them up or to get them to retreat from an open conflict. Now if Satan can’t get you to deny Jesus by word, he will get you to deny Jesus by avoiding confrontation. And either way he’s won. And either way he has made you subordinate to his evil. The mystery of evil or the mystery of iniquity is a satanic principle of the kingdom of man. And any time you have Christian groups trying to defuse the situation those Christian groups are evil.

And when you have leaders on the campus that are trying to do this they are evil. They are turning from the authority of the Word; they are cowards and many of them are moral; many of them are like Saul, they are believers who could be perfectly accepted, Saul only had one woman, David had seven wives and 19 girlfriends, and yet it was David who was accepted and Saul was rejected because Saul was evil. Saul went along with the kingdom of man and David fought it all the way. Sure he sinned, when David sinned everybody knew it, but God was gracious and David relaxed in grace; David loved the Word and he moved along with it. And Saul was so concerned with his reputation that he compromised at point after point after point, and Saul basically was more evil than David, even though David, according to most fundies, flunked every test of spirituality.

Now Daniel is another kind of person, unlike David he didn’t have the overt patterns of sin, he is a demonstration of courage and in Daniel 6:10, “Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.” You see that last phrase, “as he did before.” Oh, they’re going to turn the heat on me, huh; they think I’m going to be intimidated because the detectives are watching up at my window to see, I wonder if he’s going to pray up there today. “As he did afore,” he wasn’t going to be intimidated to somebody that made some noise. He just rolled right on and left it in the Lord’s hands. Now you see, this is why few believers can do this, because the trick of doing this is that you have to have confidence in the Word. You have to have the ability to trust the Lord and since most believers fail so miserably in trusting in the simple things like the promises that they are unprepared for something like this. This really requires an application of trust. Daniel is going to have to trust the Lord with his entire career. He lays it on the line and he lays his entire reputation on the line by this act that you see him doing here; just one thing, he could have closed the screens, they had like screens, folding screens to the doors, they didn’t have windows or storm doors, they’d be folding screens and he would have had to have done was to shut the screen. That’s all he would have had to do and he didn’t; he laid his career on the line because he was loyal to the Word and he trusted the Lord to take care of the results.

Let’s look at verse 10 in detail. “Daniel knew,” he found out in some way, the perfect tense, Daniel knew because… he wasn’t at the meeting, remember in verse 7 they had the meeting and they assured King Darius that all the presidents of the kingdom… now all the presidents means all three of them, and it’s a lie, there are only two of them that went in on this plot, this conspiracy to do away with Daniel, and they went in with it because of mental attitude sins of jealousy, they couldn’t stand a superior person. They were like a lot of people today, anytime someone is outstanding they have to put them down because they are lazy and they won’t develop their talent and so they put them down, they become jealous. Daniel excelled over all of them. So Daniel finally heard about it, “that the writing was signed,” that means it had become part of the law of the Medes and the Persians, it would be true forever under their concept of law.

The Medes and the Persians were the second kingdom under the kingdom of man revival, the great revival of the kingdom of man that hit the world in the 6^th century before Christ, from then on according to Daniel 2, from Babylon, that was the first version, then you have the Medo-Persian kingdom, you would have this chapter eventually go to Greece, and then to Rome, and finally the deterioration of Rome, western Europe, and that’s the stage we’re in today, the western Europe phase of the Roman Empire where basically the world’s power is emanating from western Europe. There are plots and conspiracies to insure that the kingdom of man is going on; all sorts of people are involved, various kingdoms and governments of finance in certain ways and this is all part of the big picture predicted in Daniel 2, that there would be powerful men on earth that would insure that the kingdom of man would continue to reign and continue to crush believers, to intimidate believers. This is the battle, this is the war.

Now Daniel shows us back here under the first and second phases of the kingdom of man revival, and during these phases gives us precedent so we know how to handle ourselves when we live down here in this part of the same kingdom of man. We live in a different stage but the principles have remained unchanged. So Daniel gives us an illustration. “He went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem,” on the west side of his house he had all the windows opened. Now why this; did he just think of doing this. No, there are Biblical passages for this and we want to look at some of those.

Turn to Jeremiah 29:11; Daniel is applying the Word; Jeremiah was in his Bible so he knew this book. He knew this book and he was just following out this book. He had a promise that he was claiming, he knew this promise, he had probably memorized it, he probably used it daily, weekly, because Daniel was a man whose soul had absorbed the divine viewpoint framework, he’d meditate upon it, it was his first love, it permeated all areas of his life. Verse 11 he says, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” God says I am gracious toward you, I have chosen you nationally for a glorious destiny. And I know my thoughts and you may think that I am evil, you may resent being placed in the position where you are the victim of these plots, these conspiracies, these attempts to intimidate, to frighten believers into submission. Verse 12, “Then ye shall call upon Me, and ye shall go and pray unto Me, and I will hearken unto you. [13] And ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all your heart.” In principle it applies to the believer, actually it’s talking about the people in the nation Israel who would find Christ under these conditions. Verse 13 is a promise that’s extended in principle to the entire human race; “ye shall seek Me, and find Me, when ye shall search for Me with all your heart.” It’s a promise of Scripture.

This is a stimulus for prayer. Now there’s another reason why Daniel’s windows on the west side of his house were opened. Jeremiah 29:11 gives you the principle why he’s praying, he’s just claiming the promises that God had given in preparation for the exile. Now if you turn to 1 Kings 8:29 this is the precedent; again 1 Kings was also in Daniel’s Bible, just like with us, Daniel’s Bible is authority, Daniel was the number three man in the kingdom of man, he himself was a man of authority and even though Daniel had this tremendous authority, Daniel recognized when the Word of God tells you to do something you do it, period, regardless of who you are; the President of the United States on down to the lowest calling in life, it doesn’t make any difference, the authority of the Word is the authority of God and when God asks you to do something you submit.

In 1 Kings 8:29 under Solomon’s prayer when the temple in Jerusalem was dedicated, what did Solomon pray: He prayed “That Thine eyes,” “Thine” refers to God, “Thine eyes may be opened toward this house night and day, toward the place which You have said, My name shall be there,” “My name” refers to the essence of God shown by the Shekinah glory. The Shekinah glory indwelt the temple. “My name shall be there, that thou mayest hearken unto the prayer which Thy servant,” believers, “Thy servant shall make toward this place.” Under the Old Testament dispensation, we’re not living in the Old Testament, we’re not living in the dispensation of Israel, we’re living in the Church Age so it’s different, but under Israel part of their prayer modus operandi was to be geographically directed toward Jerusalem, no matter where they were on the face of the earth they had to pray toward Jerusalem. If they were north they looked south; if they were east they looked west; if they were west they looked east, if they were south they looked north, always praying directionally toward Jerusalem. Why? Because this is a respect, like saluting the flag, it’s a respect for the Shekinah glory. For a believer out here to pray any way would be disrespect for God’s Shekinah glory. So under the Old Testament dispensation you showed your respect to God and His glory by facing where it was, concentrating in that direction.

1 Kings 8:30, “And hearken thou to the supplication of Thy servant, and of Thy people, Israel, when they shall pray toward this place, and hear thou in heaven Thy dwelling place; and when You hear, forgive.” So we have precedent from the Word to pray; this was the modus operandi that had been given by Yahweh, King of Israel. Now here’s the interesting thing; Daniel is following a prayer instruction given by the Great King, the King of Israel, who was Jehovah. But now he is going to receive an order from the king of Medo-Persia, Darius. Now he faces two orders, one from the King of his country and one from the King of the host nation. Which order does He follow? God’s order, and he disobeys the order of the king of Medo-Persia. That’s the issue, which king’s orders do you follow. And under the kingdom of man it’s always the same issue: do we follow the orders given to us by Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, or are we going to follow orders given to us by temporal authority. When they are in collision we have a clear mandate from the Word of God that we disobey; that is bona fide disobedience because those institutions have overstepped their legitimate authority.

There’s one further passage, Psalm 55:16 that was also in Daniel’s Bible and it was this Psalm that told him how many times to pray. “A Psalm of David,” and this gave him some more information on prayer. You see what a fantastic believer Daniel was; his testimony in Daniel 6 proves that he was applying doctrine in the area of prayer. He was applying 1 Kings 8 which gave him the geographical direction, and here in Psalm 55 he is applying this principle. David says, “As for me, I will call upon God, and the LORD shall save me. [17] Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud, and he shall hear my voice.” That was David’s operation.

True, it wasn’t made normative in the Torah for every believer in the Old Testament but this shows you that Daniel said okay, David was a great believer, unlike a lot of believers Daniel didn’t say oh, I can’t look at David’s life, David was too gross. Daniel said you know, David would be a relaxed kind of guy to be around; David raised hell every once in a while, he is not one of these high and mighty types, unapproachable, a pseudo Mount Sinai, he’s grace oriented and that’s the kind of guy that’s easy to learn from so I’ll learn from him. So in Psalm 55 David’s teaching, he’s instructing through his written hymn, hey, this is how I pray. So Daniel said if that’s the way David prayed I like that, David was declared in Scripture by the Holy Spirit to be a man after God’s own heart, even with his 7 wives and 19 girlfriends. So I’ll go to David for my model and I too will pray, I find it spiritually edifying to take a divine viewpoint break from pressure three times a day. And that’s how he did it.

Remember, he would be equivalent in our society to Secretary of State. And he found himself from dawn to dusk busy with the affairs of administrating the largest kingdom the world had ever seen. Remember how big the Medo-Persian Empire was, stretching all the way to Thrace in the West, all the way to the Indus River in the east, all the way south to the border of Egypt; can you imagine the administrative task; imagine the trade alone, millions of dollars in trade. Imagine the deployment of military soldiers; imagine all the logistics needed; imagine the patrols that had to be sent out to make sure that things were okay in all the thousands and thousands of miles of frontier. Think of all that, and that was what preoccupied Daniel, yet in spite of all the preoccupations of his job, Daniel demonstrated something else: he was never too busy for the Word, and he had no place to go to learn the Word unless he learned it from Ezekiel, he had to pick it up on his own, he didn’t use the excuse a lot of men do, oh, you don’t know my job, my job is so demanding, I just don’t have time for anything. Daniel gives a pretty good argument; Daniel would say you think you’re busy, you ought to have been in my job. You thought you were busy on your job, you were too busy to take the Word of God in, I took the Word of God in three times a day; that shows you a man in a pressure type situation of leadership cannot afford to get away from the Word.

Daniel was in the word at least every 8 hours; he would not let 8 hours go by without getting in the Word and praying, so it shows you a norm and a standard; and who did he copy from? Another political leader, David. Remember Psalm 55 isn’t just written by any believer, it was written by one of the busiest believers in the Old Testament. David had to administer his kingdom; Daniel has to administer his, and yet these (quote) “busy” (end quote) men do find time daily, every 8 hours, to take a break and get in the Word. And it makes a difference in their leadership.

Those are the principles, if you turn back to Daniel 6, that’s the background for verse 10. Daniel is applying the Word and these are the kind of habit patterns that are not going to come easy. The life style that you observe in Daniel 6:10 is a lifestyle that Daniel had developed years before. Remember when Daniel came to the kingdom, he probably was age 14; by the time he graduated from Nebuchadnezzar’s school he was 18, thereabouts, a teenager. Now he is probably in his 60’s; for forty years Daniel goes over and over and over and over the Word, daily taking it in, many times during the say pausing for a time when he could be alone and talk to the Lord about things. And over and over and over and over and over he did this, and when he got in his 60’s he was a prepared believer. His ministry and impact is growing and still the greatest impact is ahead of him, and here he is in his 60’s. Daniel wasn’t like many people that say I peaked out at 25 or something. The best God saves for last; the older a person is the more productive they should be spiritually. And the younger people have a lot to learn and God will not put them in the kind of situation He’ll put an older person in. An older person will lose their lifetime partner, it’s a tremendous shock, a younger person couldn’t take that kind of shock, an older person can because an older person has lived with the Lord longer, has had absorbed the Word of God, has had much more opportunity to apply it, has had much, much more opportunity to fail, and should have by this time learned a lot and much, much more about God’s grace. So by the time a person is in his 60’s they’re really ready to go as far as Scripture is concerned. Here Daniel is, developing a pattern of behavior which probably never had been tested before, but because it had become so much a part of his life over many, many years, now he was ready as an older man.

At the end of verse 10, “he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime,” there are two words you ought to notice, the word “prayed” and “gave thanks.” The word “pray” is the word for petition and the word “give thanks” is the word for praise; petition and praise, and Daniel divides his prayer into petition and praise, he had two sections, he had areas of petitions which he had listed, and then he gave thanks for things the Lord had answered. That was the way he prayed.

Daniel 6:11, now we are introduced to the other people; now we turn to the opposite kind of people. “Then these” these are the jealous people of verse 7, “These men assembled, and found Daniel praying and making supplication before his God.” Several things about verse 11; the word [sounds like: garash or darash] is the word to conspire together; this is a manipulation kind of meeting. This is a get together to see how we can apply pressure to something; it’s conspiratorial. These men assembled, they are people, probably some believers but in this case mostly unbelievers, full of mental attitude sins. Collectively they hate people who excel; they just can’t stand somebody who excels. They are like a lot of people in our educational system, always penalize the bright students. If they get through with work early give them a lot of busy work to do; always following the least common denominator approach. Here you approach the stupidest person in the class, that way at the end of the semester everybody will be stupid and there won’t be any more competition because competition is bad from the human viewpoint. Competition is great from divine viewpoint, that’s why the Bible is for a free market; that’s why the Bible hates socialism. Socialism is an attempt to reduce everyone to moron level. We see more and more of this going on today where government is making laws to penalize, like graduated income tax; all that does is just penalize the brighter person; to try to prevent people from being rewarded for their hard work, so you penalize them, just tax them more. The Bible knows nothing of graduated income tax; the Bible has one tax, ten percent on all income, if you’re a millionaire, ten percent. Under that system the millionaires paid the ten percent too, everyone paid ten percent across the board.

In verse 11, these men assembled themselves together in conspiracy, they want to do away with the believer who won’t go along with the system. These kinds of people are always the kind of people that give you the hardest problems; they are mediocre lazy people and you’ll always get the maximum opposition from this group. They are always trying to cut you down any time you excel, any time you are better than they are. They can’t stand it.

So Daniel 6:12, watch how they show what’s going on in their souls, “Then they came near, and spoke before the king concerning the king’s decree; Hast thou not signed a decree, that every man that shall ask a petition of any God or man within thirty days, save of thee, O king, shall be cast into the den of lions? The king answered and said, The thing is true, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not. [13] Then answered they and said before the king, That Daniel, which is of the children of the captivity of Judah, regardeth not thee, O king, nor the decree that thou hast signed, but maketh his petition three times a day.”

Now in verses 12-13 you see the agitators try to manipulate a leader and they’re going to use a principle of subjectivism. They’re going to try and get Darius to think in terms of emotion first; so notice the way they approach Darius. They said, well, Daniel doesn’t regard thee O king. See, make it nice and personal, and that way you can agitate. It’s the quickest way to get somebody mad, the quickest way to get them thinking emotionally. And if you can do that, you’ve got them; that’s all you have to do, get them to stop thinking and start doing. It’s so much a part of our vocabulary today, you ask somebody “how do you feel about this,” suppose you collapse right in front of them and then get up off the floor and say that’s how I feel. They asked how you felt about it; what they really meant is how do you think about this. But it’s so much a part of our vocabulary, we are a feeling centered group; present centered, feeling centered, and it’s absorbed into the vocabulary that we use daily. If someone asks you how you feel about something say hey, do you mind if I tell you how I think, not how I feel. They probably wouldn’t get the point.

So in verses 12-13 you’ve got the agitators appealing to the pride of Darius. And poor Darius, though he’s a very good friend of Daniel, he apparently a man that if he isn’t a believer he’s the next thing to a believer, and he wants to do a good job, and there’s a lesson in here because it shows you that the kingdom of man is so great that it will crush into conformity even people who are sincere. You’ll see this again and again in your experience. You’ll find good, sincere people in many walks of life who will oppose you when the final bell descends; they’ll be on the other side, and the reason is because they have compromised, along the way they’ve gotten themselves so enmeshed in human viewpoint they can’t see their way out of it. And there are numerous examples of this, all over the place, where people are going along with the system because…don’t rock the boat! And Darius is one of these people; he’s got himself enmeshed in the system so that when these people come to him, normally Darius would be an objective man, and these people have come, they’ve played on his emotions, boom, now he’s going to go into action.

Daniel 6:14, “Then the king, when he heard these words, was sore displeased with himself, and set his heart on Daniel to deliver him: and he labored till the going down of the sun to deliver him.” At this point Darius realizes that he’s been had; probably at this point, some time after these people came to him he said, boy have I been taken for a sucker; here my best administrator, the man who is doing the most in my administration for these 120 satraps, the man who has pulled this whole kingdom together, who has given me orientation, who has given me encouragement and helped me, and now look what I’ve done; I’ve allowed myself to be manipulated by people with mental attitude sins of jealousy, maligning and gossip, and now we’re in a situation where I have to kill my best friend. So he labors until “the going down of the sun” and this is to illustrate a principle in Daniel 6 that is the converse of the principle of Daniel 3.

In Daniel 3 Nebuchadnezzar was helpless in his anger; in Daniel 6 Darius is helpless in his love, and the reason that both leaders are helpless is because both leaders are men who are enmeshed in the kingdom of man without an adequate divine viewpoint framework. They haven’t got anything in their soul to handle the pressure, they haven’t got anything developed spiritually, and they find themselves in a situation they detest. How often do you think this has happened in high areas of leadership in our country? Either Daniel 3 or Daniel 6, both ways, same principle, men who hate the Word, men who love the Word find themselves trapped when they are not adequately trained and prepared.

Daniel 6:15, “Then these men assembled unto the king,” see they keep the pressure on, same verb that was in verse 6 again, conspiracy, they’re getting together to “assemble unto the king, and said unto the king, Know, O king, that the law of the Medes and Persians is, That no decree nor statute which the king establishes may be changed.” Now Darius knew that, that’s what he was laboring about in verse 14. They didn’t have to tell Darius that; Darius well knew this. So why are they telling him? To keep the pressure on, and that’s how these people do.

Watch out for this kind of a person, you’ll meet them in your business, on the campus, in the Christian organization, in the local church; you’ll meet them all over. On the outside they are very moral; they are the Saul type, concerned how they say things, make sure everything is right, put on the right impression, always make sure they create good relationship with people and all the rest. And inwardly they are vicious, hostile people; they’d stab you in the back if you gave them a chance. The most vicious, hateful people you’ll ever run across are people who are apparently righteous on the outside, self-righteousness. Ostensibly they have the best interests of the kingdom at heart; they’re only trying to help purge the kingdom of these rebels, these believers with their higher authority to the King over there, rather than the king here. We’re just trying to level everything out and make one homogenous mass for you, Darius, so there won’t be this polarization, we don’t like polarization, we want to have unity, the brotherhood of man, fatherhood of God, all the rest of it. We like that, we want peace and we’re going to get it. That’s their attitude and that’s the way this crowd always operates. Now if Daniel is written to edify us today then we ought to learn from this. We ought to take this as a warning from the Holy Spirit, you watch out for these kinds of people. There are times when you are going to be done in by this group.

So, “the king, when he heard these words, he was displeased with himself,” he tried to deliver him; they keep the pressure on. And then in Daniel 6:16 we come down to the end and a magnificent speech, Darius to Daniel. Daniel was placed in bondage, “Then the king commanded, and they brought Daniel, and cast him into the den of lions. Now the king spoke and said unto Daniel, Thy God whom thou servest continually, He must [will] deliver thee.” It’s a nuance of necessity, not future, “He must deliver thee.” In other words, the point is that Daniel, look, you’re my friend, you’ve been good to me, you’ve helped me in my administration, we need you at the head of this kingdom, you’re one of the most efficient workers we have in the place, and now we’ve got this. Now Daniel, all I can say is I’m trapped, my hands are tied. I’ve tried to work this thing out with the lawyers and we couldn’t get a thing going so the only thing left is your God is going to have to take care of it.

Now the beautiful thing about this is Darius is forced into the position of having to trust the Lord. See how effective and efficient God works; the whole situation looks like it’s messed up; everything is falling apart, and what happens? In the end Darius has to trust the Lord; a tremendous efficient teaching system. “Thy God whom thou servest continually,” that shows you that Daniel’s modus operandi of prayer was well known throughout the kingdom. Daniel was known as a man of the Word; Daniel had a testimony before Darius and notice the testimony wasn’t because every five minutes he witnessed to him. The testimony was because he was consistent in his life; he demonstrated stability and he did witness, don’t use that as an excuse not to share Christ. He did witness, but he backed up his witnessing with a consistent lifestyle, day in, day out, day in, day out, day in, day out, three times a day. The rest of the people would take a coffee break; Daniel would take a prayer break. So Daniel was known in his business and the leader knew it and the leader was a man who understood the concept of authority and he recognized it.

Daniel 6:17, “And a stone was brought and laid upon the mouth of the den; and the king sealed it with his own signet, and with the signet of his lords; that the purpose might not be changed concerning Daniel.” So we find again the legislative logic of the Medo-Persian Empire being deployed against Daniel; Darius doesn’t like it and Daniel obviously is in rebellion against it here, and yet it goes on; he will be sealed in the cave. Now there’s a tremendous irony about verse 17. You want to back off and look at the big picture and not get lost in the forest with the details.

Think of what started this whole problem in chapter 6; people with mental attitude sin jealousy. Daniel is going to be safer with lions than he was with these kinds of people. The lions aren’t going to bother Daniel in the least, but these people have. They are vicious people, jealous, mental attitude sins all over, they are worse than lions. And Daniel is going to be put in the lion’s den and he’s going to relax, whew, I got away from them. And he is going to be in a situation where he will prefer the company of the most vicious beasts to vicious people, and there’s the comparison. That’s the irony of why Daniel gets put in the lion’s den. The lion is a symbol of Satan in Scripture, it’s a symbol of power and it becomes a symbol of Satan; also the lion of the tribe of Judah is Christ’s power. But the lion is oftentimes a symbol of satanic power, so here’s the irony: one man faces a kingdom run by a group of petty, jealous, vindictive type of people who can’t stand polarization, who hate a believer who stands out for the authority of the Word of God, and you see what happens to him; he goes into the lion’s den, no problem.

Let’s summarize so far in chapter 6. Chapter 6 begins with a principle: where you have the kingdom of man you are going to have enforced conformity. The kingdom of man is Satan-inspired, Satan-motivated. It is an attempt to impose human viewpoint on every person in the kingdom of man without exception, it is an attempt to school people and train them to produce human good. Remember the kingdom of man isn’t necessarily sinful in the overt way; the kingdom of man really isn’t that interested in sins as we usually think of it. It’s more interested in getting a satanic orientation, the autonomous mind of man. So the kingdom of man wants conformity to human viewpoint and autonomy. Therefore any believer who stands for the Word, whose authority is higher than culture, higher than society, higher than the state, will eventually find himself in total antagonism to the system.

The third principle you see is that Daniel is able to trust the Lord in the middle of it without himself getting bitter. It would be very easy for Daniel to develop a bitter attitude. It’d be very easy for him to be vengeful; these people have faked him out, he’ll fake them out. But Daniel doesn’t do that because Daniel has the ability to relax and trust the Lord with the problem.

And finally we see the fact, and we’ll see it more toward the end of the chapter, that this one act of just casting the problem on the Lord, leaving it there, letting people think what they will, praying on his west door with the windows wide open so people can see he’s applying the Word, and letting the chips fall where they may, produces salvation and blessing, not only for Daniel but for the rest of the kingdom because Daniel is going to be restored, and he is going to have a chance to help the administration of the Medo-Persian Empire. The entire kingdom will be blessed because one believer stood with the Word. So don’t get a guilt complex when somebody says you people are always divisive. True, we’re divisive only against the autonomous principle, but we’re not divisive when it comes to ultimate blessing. And Daniel wasn’t subversive toward the kingdom of man, he helped it out.

Next week we’ll finish chapter 6 and watch how this blessing came about.