Who Are You | Harmonious Unity - Daniel 3 | September 22
GENERATED TRANSCRIPT
Let's, let's open with a word of prayer,
Father, Your Word is truth, and we want to know you would our affections be turned towards you today, God, we pray for your church across the world that's meeting right now, God in Boone, we pray for the churches in Boone that are meeting together, that we Your body would see you and worship you rightly. Amen. Today, we get to continue this journey through Daniel, and we're continuing this idea of identity. And today we are talking about identity and worship, identity and worship. And so there's a movie, a Soviet era 1979 film called The Stalker. Has anybody seen the stalker? 1979 Soviet era film? Yeah. It's a wild film. Feel free to watch it if you'd like but you will feel like you are seasonally depressed in Russia. But it follows these it's a sci fi film that follows these three men as they travel through the zone, and the zone is this ethereal place, but it's filmed in like a natural setting. So it's it feels like you're just walking through the woods, but you understand that these three men, as the movie unfolds, they're moving towards what's called the room, and along the way, one of the gentlemen says this line. He says, How do I know what I truly want? I say I want to be a vegetarian, but my stomach hungers for a juicy steak. And you're like, Okay, that's kind of a weird one off sentence. But then you realize that this room that they're moving towards, it's actually the place where one's deepest desires are realized. And these three men, they get to the threshold of the room, and I'm going to spoil the movie, so sorry about that. As they get to the threshold of this room, none of the men decide they want to go in. They're either too afraid of what their deepest desires might be, or they realize that they don't actually want what they'd most deeply desire. And so why do I share this odd, sepia toned Soviet era film? Because it's a long, drawn out cultural experience that touches on the core of what worship is. Martin Luther says, whatever your heart clings to and confides in that really is your God, and what is Daniel three? About? Daniel three is about worship. And so I want to open up as we kind of look at the beginning of Daniel three and see what, what is happening. It starts in media, res, as a literature and analyst would say, they'd say this story, it has no conjunctive adverb. There's no like nonetheless, Nebuchadnezzar, even still. Or then Nebuchadnezzar just kind of starts at the beginning of chapter three. And it seems like we're starting in the middle of things, and in a sense, we are right. Nebuchadnezzar had just had this dream about an image and this idol, or this statue, and then he immediately begins to make that statue. This statue is a bunch of different medals. He made his one medal. What medal was that? That was gold? Right? The gold of the head. And so we're not sure exactly what this statue would have looked like, but we know what Nebuchadnezzar was trying to do. He was trying to create a national religion that united His kingdom.
And I think this story in Daniel three, it actually has a lot of it has a myriad of different biblical stories that it plays off of, but we're going to look at one. So if you have your Bibles, if you would open to Genesis 11, we're going to read that together.
This is what Genesis 11 says. We're going to start in verse one. Now, the whole earth had one language and one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there, and they.
Said to one another, Come, Let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They had brick for stone and they had asphalt for mortar, and they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. But Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built, and Yahweh said, Indeed, it's funny, right there. He had to come down to see the tower, right? That's Hebrew humor for you. The tower was so small that God had to come down to see it. And Yahweh said, Indeed, the people are one, and they all have one language, and this is what they will begin to do. Now, nothing that they purpose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let us go down there and confuse their language that they might not understand one another's speech. So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there, over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building that city. Therefore its name is called Babel, because Yahweh confused the language of all the earth. And from there, the LORD scattered them over the face of all the earth. So this story, this Genesis 11 is a proto Babylon. Babel is the empire that from which the modern, in Daniel's sense, but ancient in our sense, modern empire of Babylon comes. And when I for years and years, I always thought this story was unique, this tower of Babel, because I thought unity would be a good thing.
I thought that a humanity shaped by one goal would be a good thing, a thing that God would would like, a thing that he would say, this is this is good. I like this. They're working together. But there's a Jewish scholar named Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and he kind of changed the way that I view this story. And so what he actually articulates is that this is the Hebrews Bible. Hebrew Bible's polemic, their argument against empire, this idea, in verse one, that the whole earth had one language. He articulates that isn't a natural form of language unity, but a an enforced and Imperial unity of language, right? We know that at the beginning of the 20th century, or throughout the 20th century, we have the imperialism that most of Africa was speaking either English or French, right? It's you impose these languages on the peoples that you conquer. And so he articulates that Genesis 11 is this idea of empire. And then he continues that idea with these, this tower that they built. And actually have an image of the tower here. It's likely riffing off of these Babylonian ziggurats, these mount man made mountains. And you can see here that's about 30 cubits high, which is the same as the icon in Daniel three, interestingly. So it's about 100
100 feet tall. And this is, this is what it would this is like a rendition of it. This top here, oh, sorry, this top here is actually a temple. It's a place of worship. And so these towers are not just skyscrapers, right? I like remember going to New York City and thinking, Oh, this is evil because they built towers into the sky, but that's not what it's about. It's about creating a place of worship around which the empire that enforces a language forces conformity around religion.
And so perhaps one of our first ideas that we can be thinking of, one of our first observations is that empires seek forced conformity. And how do we see that? We see in Daniel three, or in the whole of Daniel, these exiles are they come to the Empire of Babylon, and they're forced to speak the same language, read the same literature, wear the clothes and eat the same food and have the same religion. And there's only two places where Shadrach Meshach and Abednego and Daniel disagree, or say we are going to not observe that it's the king's food and and with worship. But there's this idea of empire that's spread throughout Daniel three and Genesis 11.
And if Genesis 11 is a polemic against empire, then then why would that be? What about the Kingdom of God is different? And so I think we could say that empires seek to force conformity. They seek to force conformity around a set of non essential things that they use to create a false sense of unity.
If that's what the kingdoms of the earth are like, what would the Kingdom of Heaven be? The kingdoms of heaven or the kingdom of heaven is about harmonious unity.
And we see that actually laid out in Revelation chapter seven, if you want to turn with me revelation chapter seven, you see in verse nine, the writer says, I.
Yes, after these things, I looked and behold a great multitude which no one could number of all nations, tribes, peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with right robes and palm branches in their hands, crying out with a loud voice saying, Salvation belongs to God, who sits on the throne and to the Lamb. So if empires seek this forced conformity, the kingdom of heaven fosters this diverse unity, this harmonious unity.
Scholars talk about how languages, they actually shape worldviews. And so when we see heaven and we see this plurality of languages, we actually are seeing people centered around the Lamb of God, with a plurality of worldviews, all speaking in their tongue, worshiping God. And it's not a forced conformity that says you must have this language and you must have this certain set of ritual expectations, but it's, it's this unity around the Lamb of God.
And so what is harmony? It's two distinct and different entities, two or more distinct and different entities actually working together to create beauty and melody and meaning. And so there's a show in a Broadway show in that used to be in New York called Amazing Grace, and it was the story of John Newton, and he was a slave trader who actually was sold into slavery, and then he became a Christian while in slavery, and wrote the him Amazing Grace. So this show, this Broadway play, follows it, and there's this play ends with them singing Amazing Grace. And I want us to listen to this rendition of amazing grace and hear how it starts in a solitary voice, and then you'll hear voices layered on and then you'll actually there's a part of the song. So don't be alarmed. It'll like switch to kind of an African style music to talk about that part of his or reference that part of his life. And then it'll where we'll end is with everybody singing together about being before the throne of God. And so I want to play this that we might have a an experience of harmony, of what the kingdom of God is like through through a musical encounter. So if you want to play that, the way the show ends, right there is the whole audience actually stands up and sings amazing grace in the middle of New York City. It's it's so moving. You have the the full weight of of the meaning of that song, the idea that when we've been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, We've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first began. When I say that, you're like, oh yeah, that's cool. But when they sing it with their like harmonies and their their their the fullness of their spirits invested in it, there's something that moves in us and moves over us. And so my encouragement to us is, how do we, as the kingdom of God, foster that harmonious unity?
And so we all, we believe that we live in Babylon, or if you don't believe that we can talk about it after and I would argue that we live in Babylon and we live in Babylons. We live in empires that seek force conformity. There are easy others for us to identify. Maybe some of us would be easy for us to say, well, the US government, that's an empire, or the right or the left, or this organization or that corporation, and I think all of those are true, right? I think we can, we can see empires in all of those places. But I think there's also more hidean or more hidden or covert or insidious Babylons that we create.
I think we can create Babylons in our friend groups and our families, or even in our churches, when we elevate non essential attributes, when we require people to look a certain way or talk a certain way, or have certain non essential habits, we are creating Babylons that are seeking forced conformity instead of fostering harmonious unity. And what's what's the issue with this? If we're actually doing good, let's say there are good things that we're creating that we're elevating to the place of essential. Well, I think what happens when we do that? When we create these, create these false empires, it can destroy the value or tarnish the value of the essential. So let's say we have in a church, church, I don't know x, or we can say mountainside, I don't know, but a good Christian does A, B and C, let's say a is they they love God, B is they have a certain evangelistic technique, and C is they have a good sourdough starter, right? Their family has a good sourdough starter, and that's what makes them a good Christian, a good member of our church. Well, when B and C.
Be When, when, when having a certain evangelistic technique and having a sourdough starter are realized as fraudulent essentials, then someone might be inclined to say, well, is the essential thing even essential? And it creates these, this confusion. And so when we create empires, we actually are creating confusion and creating false gods for ourselves.
And so if we have that tendency, if one we live in Babylons, and we need to figure out how to not how to be like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who don't bend the need to the need to the gods of Babylon, but then we also can create our own gods of Babylon. What are we to do about it? Well, I'm glad you asked, because that's what the next part of the story is about. In Daniel three, these three Jewish exiles, they live in Babylon, and they're see and seemingly recently, in Daniel two, they were just promoted because Daniel, if you ever want to know what a good colleague is, look at Daniel, when he gets promoted. He says, Hey, how about my guys over there, right? That's a good colleague, but they just get promoted, and then they have to figure out, what are they going to do in Empire.
And what's interesting is, when I think of empires after that last sentence that we just said about we can be creating empires, and we need to figure how to be subversive. I would think, well, stay the heck out of dodge. Don't have anything to do with an empire. But as exiles Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and Daniel, they offer a different perspective. They actually learn the language, they wear the clothes, they study the literature, and they work for the government. So completely, staying outside of it, isn't it? One isn't necessarily possible, and two isn't what this story necessarily encourages.
But up to this point, all that Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and Daniel have done differently in the empire is eat the king's food. But here in Daniel three, the temperature gets turned up and tried a little too hard. I too hard. But when when confronted with the gods of Babylon, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, they refuse to bend the knee. They subvert the kingdom of Babylon, and they shirk their positions of power, these newly attained positions of power. And this is fascinating, and it's so like Christ, if I were in their shoes, I might have the tendency to say, if I was in a corporation that said, if you want to be a good corporate man, you'll do these three things, and your work will become your God, I might say, Well, I was just promoted to a position of power, and I think I could actually do good here. So maybe I'll, I'll bend the knee here and I'll just so I can, like, maybe affect good later, or maybe I just because I crave power.
But these three men, they don't do that. They like Christ. They do not grasp after their power. They give it up knowing that worship of Yahweh is so far supreme to any position that they that it would be worth giving up anything to have that. And this is where, this is where that first movie, The Stalker, that Soviet film, comes back up. The three men. Their deepest desires were not for power. They weren't for comfort, they weren't for safety, and they weren't even for their own lives. Their deepest desires, if they would have stepped into that room, their deepest desires would have been that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob would have been glorified.
We see in their response. After they get sold out by their friends, as James highlighted, or their colleagues, they say, oh, Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this way. If this is the case, our God, whom we serve, was able to deliver us from the burning and fiery furnace, He will deliver us from your hand. But if not, let it be known, oh king, that we still will not serve your gods.
They know that their God can save them, but they're not dependent upon the
immediate saving from their immediate persecution, these three men are so confident in the glory and person and character of God that they're willing to lay everything on the lines for it. And so this leads us to to a great question, are we like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, is our deepest desire, the glory of God, or are there other counterfeit gods that we might have elevated? And in Tim Keller, Keller's book, counterfeit gods, he identifies three cultural we could think of Gods of our own Babylon, and he identifies power, sex and money as the big three, and as he is writing, he treats it with greater care and riffs off of Augustine, who says that when we worship anything other than God as ultimate, we are creating counterfeit gods.
Idolatry is not always bowing down to an icon or an.
Idol, it can be having disordered priorities. And CS Lewis, he explores this theme beautifully in his book The Great divorce, and I highly recommend it. Our small group knows that I really have enjoyed this book this year.
It's compact. It really packs a punch, but it's a metaphysical journey to the outskirts of heaven, where people are confronted with their counterfeit gods. One man, he made his theology as God. And CS Lewis says this, you are so concerned with spreading Christianity that you don't care a sting for Christ.
Another man made lust his God.
A wife made her husband her God. But I think the most chilling encounter that we have as we are reading this book is when a mother makes her son her God. Her mother love, which she claims is the purest virtue, has actually become a vice. It's a false religion for her. And after a long conversation, CS Lewis concludes that story with this. He says, There is but one good, and that is, God, everything else is good when it looks to him, and bad when it turns from him, and the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demonetic it will be if it rebels. It is not out of bad mice or bad fleas that you make demons, but out of bad Archangels. The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of Mother Love or patriotism or art, but lust is less likely to be made into a religion. So the question is, what? What are we worshiping? And I think we all here would actually agree that we all worship, and we want our deepest desires and affections to be for God. But if any of you are out there and you're like, I'm not sure that we worship, I think you can have a life where you live that's not in worship. David Foster Wallace, a notable author from the 2000s he was no longer with us. He's not a believer, but he says this about worship. He says, In the day to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. The compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of God or spiritual type thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or a Wiccan mother goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.
On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, Proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables, the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up in front of your daily consciousness was Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego teach us is that we worship, and that there are gods of the Babylons that we live in today that crave for our attention, that crave for our worship. And if we're not careful, we can subtly move into these, as CS Lewis puts it, these virtues become vices. And so we want to examine, as the people of mountainside, we want to examine, what are our deepest affections? What do we love most? And Tim Keller encourages us to ask two questions. One, well, he encourages us to ask two questions, because it's so challenging to figure out, what is it that our ultimate loves like that question in the stalker, I want. How do I know what I want? When I say, want to be a vegetarian, but my stomach still hungers for a steak, right? How do we know what our deepest affections are? And Tim Keller says, ask two questions. One, what are the material of your nightmares? And two, what if you lost would cause you to lose the will to live?
These questions, they play off each other that, but they can be helpful for us understanding what we love most.
So how does the story of Daniel three end Nebuchadnezzar? He the three men they come before him, and he gets really mad, and he says, in my translation, he says,
Now, if you are ready to hear the sound of the Horde, the loop, the flute, the harp, the lyre and the psalter, and you will bow down good like that's just good, that's good. But if not, then I will cast you into the fiery furnace in our minds that might conjure up this image of a bunny loving chocolate, Bunny loving cucumber, right? Who wants to throw some veggies onto the grill, but the reality of the story is not near as kind.
It's grotesque and violent. It's PG 13.
Sometimes when we're inundated with these stories, they're the intensity of the stories actually lose their weight. But this is.
Such a severe response. And these three men, they had no idea how the story would end. So they say that they will not bow. And Nebuchadnezzar heats the furnace up seven times hotter, and it says that the image of his face changes, and in his fury, he throws them into the fire. And so just picture you are either Shadrach, Meshach or Abednego, and you have no idea what's happening, but as you're walking, or you're tied up as you're being carried towards the fire, the men around you, these Navy Seals of that day, they're actually being burned alive as they're approaching the fire. And you have no idea what's happening, and you get tossed in and then your ropes burn off, and you stand up, and then in you, with you, in the fire is this Divine Presence, this divine being. And Christians throughout the centuries have interpreted this to be Christ, and I think that's a good interpretation. I'm not a biblical scholar, so people who disagree with that, you probably have good readings on that, but I think it's good and a fair assumption or a fair interpretation for us to see Christ as the one in the fire.
So what is this story telling us? What is the wisdom of Daniel three? Is a story giving us a promise that if we subvert with wisdom and we don't bend the knee to our God, the gods of our culture, that God will will save us from the experience of persecution, that we won't even smell like fire, as Daniel three says.
And I think that's there's you can make an argument for that. But I think the totality of Scripture actually would disagree with that certain conclusion, that if we do it right, then we'll be saved from persecution. The totality of Scripture and the whole of church history actually paints a different story, that when we worship Yahweh, when we have our lives submitted to Christ, we actually will endure persecution. So what is, what is the hope? The hope might be in Matthew five, where Jesus says, Blessed are the persecuted for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, and with a little bit of poetic license. So I'm not saying this actually happened. I don't know, but with a little bit of poetic license. What if, when Christ was in the fire and he sees these three Jewish men, he said to them, Blessed are the persecuted for yours is the kingdom of heaven.
And what does that mean? Blessed are the persecuted for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I think that's a whole other sermon that we don't have time to get into today, but perhaps the end of Revelation seven will be instructed for us. So we'll kind of bring it to a close with this. It says,
Then the elders in Revelation seven, verse 13, answered saying to me, who are these arrayed in white robes, and where did they come from? And I said to him, Sir, you know. So he said to me, these are the ones who come out of the Great Tribulation and washed their robes and made them white and the blood of the Lamb, therefore they are before the throne of God, and they serve Him, day and night in his temple. And he who sits on the throne will dwell among them.
They shall neither hunger anymore nor thirst. The sun shall not strike them nor any heat, for the Lamb, who is in the midst of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to the living the fountain of living waters, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. This idea that, though we will endure persecution, it is Christ, the blood of the Lamb, that washes the robes white.
It is that Christ, who is the great sufferer, the one who is persecuted. He is the One in whom our hope lies. He is the exemplar of our enduring persecution. He entered into the fire. And yet, unlike Shadrach Meshach and Abednego, Christ felt the full weight, felt the full pain of his persecution, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were spared the pain Christ was not yet. He endured it willingly so. Christ our suffering, one who endured the greatest persecution that we might know God.
Yet his was not the final persecution that we know.
It was the fulfillment of it, but it was not yet the completion of it. And we have brothers and sisters today who are actually living in persecution, who have empires around them, be they governments, be they towns, be they families, and they actually really do suffer a very real persecution, and we, in our current social, economic, religious moment, don't actually have such an experience of that. We might hear stories of it, but we have an opportunity to share in the sufferings both of Christ and our brothers and sisters around the world.
And so I.
I want to close today praying for our brothers and sisters in Christ around the world who do endure persecution, who, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, are cast into the fire, yet they might be feeling the fullness of the weight of it, and they might have their hope of heaven, of being have having Christ among them and being with him, but in this moment now, they feel the weight and they feel the pain of persecution. And throughout the centuries, Christians have prayed together for the persecuted church.
I would love for us today to gather in groups of two or three with the people around you, and I want us to be praying for the persecuted church, for the church who say we are not going to worship the gods of Babylon, but we're going to choose to worship Yahweh. So there's two points that I want us to pray over. And the first is that's a lot of text, and I should have edited that, so I'm sorry about that, but when, when the three were in the fire, they met Christ. So I want to pray that our persecuted brothers and sisters would meet Christ in their persecution, that they would see him and hear him say, Blessed are the persecuted for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. That they would have a real encounter with Jesus as we're praying that we would believe that they would know and experience the nearness of Christ. And then the story of Daniel three, it actually it ends in a really unique way. It ends with the worship of the of Babylon changing. And so the Empire, actually its worship changed, and it wasn't a full change to complete rightness right because Nebuchadnezzar said, If you don't worship this way, I'm going to cut you in half and burn your house down. So that's not what we're going for. That's not the aim, but it's a movement in the right direction, a movement towards the glorification of Yahweh. And so we want, we want to pray together that that the persecuted church, when persecution comes, that we would have our sights set on glorifying the kingdom of God, that our deepest desires and affections would be turned towards God, that we would seek to create a harmonious unity around the essentials.
And so Bree is going to play guitar for a few minutes. These are up there for you. We're going to pray, and then we're going to move immediately into a time of communion. So whoever's doing communion, you can bring it up. And the last note I want to make is when we dip the bread into the cup, or when we take of communion, we are sharing in the sufferings of Christ. We are making his story our own, and we are taking on the story of Christ, and we are being clothed in it. It is our sustenance, it is our source, it is our fuel for our obedience in the kingdom of God, and so we're going to pray, we're going to do communion, and then we're going to worship.