Suffering Well--Hope for the Homesick

When we first got married we moved to Mississippi so my husband could go to graduate school. While there we joined a church that was gifted with excellent teachers and loving friends. I felt more at home there than any place I've lived. Eight years later we moved away and I've adapted and had a lot of joyful experiences, but there has always remained a tinge of homesickness for my former church. When I read Daniel, I can't help but wonder if he experienced that same feeling I do.

Daniel and his young friends loved God and were committed to following hard after Him when King Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem and took them captive because they were among the healthiest, brightest, best looking, and wisest young men in Israel. The king commanded the men to be taken to Babylon where he changed their names, and ordered them to learn a new language and the ways of the Chaldeans.

I can't imagine being a captive and having my name changed. It would be like having someone try to wipe out my identity, my heritage, and my past experiences. Nor can I imagine what it felt like being taught about false gods and being expected to embrace them. This kind of indoctrination indicated that there wasn't plan for the young men to ever return home. It was a wise plan for a king, but a hard plan for the captives. In an effort to win the young men over, he ordered them to be housed in the palace and served from his own rich foods. But Daniel didn't want to be defiled by palace foods and requested the Jewish menu with which he has been raised. It was an important step, because the dietary laws were closely tied to worship and Daniel was subtly taking a stand and clinging to His God.

Daniel was made a ruler over a province when he interpreted a dream for the king and he placed three of his friends in leadership positions, stirring jealousy in the hearts of the locals. When the king made a statue to be worshiped, the Chaldeans  saw their chance to turn the king against Daniel's friends who refused to bow to the statue. The Chaldeans and told the king they wouldn't bow. The king became enraged and ordered Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to be brought to him. He threatened to make them fuel for a hot furnace and they still refused to bow so they were bound and cast in a furnace so hot it killed the guards throwing them in. But when the king gazed into the furnace He saw four men very much alive standing in the flames. In awe, he called the men out and gave glory to God who had stood with them, forbidding anyone to speak evil of their God.

When Darius came to power, the Chaldeans saw an opportunity to get rid of Daniel. Because they had seen Daniel praying, they asked the king to forbid people to petition anyone but Darius for a period of time. Faithful Daniel did as Daniel always did. He prayed to His God and as a consequence spent the night in a lions' den. When the king returned, he found Daniel unscathed and ordered the nation to fear Daniel's God.

Daniel and his three friends faced their suffering courageously and remained faithful to God despite their captivity and mistreatment. Their faith-life was so noticeably different that it irritated some and intrigued others. The young Jews stood strong in the face of persecution. We must remember, as humans, Shadrach, Mesheck, and Abednego didn't know if they were going to be burned or saved and Daniel didn't know if he would be eaten or or protected, but they chose to remain faithful to God.

Daniel 9 shares one of Daniel's prayers. It shows where his heart is in regard to God and the long captivity he endured. I am summarizing the prayer as I want to learn from it and I believe its appropriate for our time: "O Lord, you are great and awesome! You keep your covenants and love with a steadfast love. We've sinned, acted rebelliously, and turned aside from your commandments. We've not listened to the prophets who spoke in your name. Lord, to you belongs righteousness, but to us open shame because of the treachery we've committed against you. To you belongs mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against you. Because we transgressed your law and refused to obey your voice, the curse and oath written in the Law have been poured out upon us. You confirmed your words, which you spoke against us, by bringing upon us a great calamity, yet we have not entreated your favor by turning from our iniquities and gaining insight into your truth. Because of this you have kept the calamity upon us, for you are righteous in all your works. You brought your people out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and made your name great, but we've done wickedly. Lord, according to your righteous acts, let your anger and wrath turn away from Jerusalem. Because of our sins and iniquities of our fathers. Jerusalem and your people have become a byword among those around us. Please, God, listen to my prayer for mercy, and for your own sake, Lord, make your face shine upon your sanctuary. God, incline your ear and open your eyes to see our desolation. We don't plea because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. Lord, forgive, pay attention, and act, because your city and your people are called by your name." 

There are several lessons we can learn from Daniel and his friends. When given the choice of to obey man and live or obey God and die these men chose obedience, making it clear they trusted God and His plan for them. They didn't have foreknowledge; they simply knew and trusted their God. They didn't see captivity as an abandonment by God and chose to draw near to Him during it. Daniel's prayer showed us God was faithful and true to His word. He also came to realize that captivity wasn't due to a flaw in God's character, but a sin problem with Israel who lived in open rebellion at the time. Even though Daniel was obedient and faithful, he identified with the sin of his people and he humbly confessed it to God and pleaded for mercy on their behalf. As a faithful person, Daniel didn't show a sense of entitlement and demand justice for himself, Instead, he prayed for the restoration of Israel because she bore God's name and he wanted God's name to be magnified, not mocked.

When we face hardship, the enemy wants us to believe we're abandoned by God. When we're obeying and trusting, we may believe we are entitled to a life of ease. Oh, how we often forget we live in a country where babies are daily slaughtered, where families are disconnected from each other, where sexual integrity is challenged on every front, where gain is obtained through dishonest means, where more humans beings are being trafficked than ever before, and where the church has allowed itself to be more influenced by the world than the Word. If we are honest, we will admit we live in a culture not much different than Daniel's and many people who claim to be believers have resorted to bullying, shaming, and rejecting instead of loving and sharing the gospel of grace. I want so bad for us to be "Daniels" who look at the suffering and persecution beginning to happen as an invitation to return to the heart of our great God. I would hope we let suffering humble us and that we would begin to pray fervently, not for an end to our suffering, but for the suffering to do its godly work in us, in our churches, and in our nation. Suffering is never just about us, it is about a family,communities, churches, and countries and through suffering we know God is calling His people to trust Him and display His grace as never before. Whatever God has in store for us as a nation and whatever we endure, we will be blessed if we trust Him and respond to the calling to be intercessors and faithfully confess the sins of our families, our churches, our communities, and our nations. We tend to talk about "they" instead of realizing we have a shared identity with the "they" who carry out atrocities that bring on all of our heads great shame.

Daniel's prayer showed, as aged man, he still had a heart for his original 'home" much like I do for my Mississippi home. But as ambassadors of our great King, maybe the suffering and discontentment we feel living in a Godless nation will be used to draw our hearts and minds to our heavenly home so the prayers we pray will be from an eternal perspective instead of earthly, fleshly perspective that wants easy and wants safe.  In God, there is always hope for the homesick heart! In God, there is always peace and purpose to be found in the suffering.

God Meets us in our Faith

 "These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were stranger and exiles on the earth." --Hebrew 11:13

I have been mulling over the third chapter of Daniel this week. The events in the chapter take place shortly after Daniel had interpreted a dream the king of Babylon had in which he saw a great statue made of different elements. Unsettled by the dream, he had called in his wise men to both recount the dream and tell him of its meaning. Sounds impossible and it was! Instead of listening to his advisors, the prideful king ordered them to be executed.

When they came to get Daniel for execution, he asked to have a meeting with the king to explain the meaning. In the meantime he had an emergency prayer meeting with his three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, asking God to reveal the dream and its meaning. Daniel was shown the dream and its meaning by God and was able to explain to the king that each element in the statue represented different kingdoms which would come to power. The head of the statue was made of gold, representing Babylon. The other parts of the statue made of different elements represented subsequent kingdoms that would come to be after Babylon fell.

The King seemed thankful, declaring Daniel's God to be the God of gods and the Lord of kings. Daniel remained in the king's court, requesting that his prayer partners be appointed over the affairs of the province of Babylon. It even looked like the king had a change of heart towards Daniel's God.

However, the more the king thought about the dream, the less he liked the outcome. He was not willing to accept Jehovah 's sovereignty over the beginnings and endings of kingdoms. So he took matters into his own hands in an effort to thwart the plans of God. He built a huge statue, but unlike the statue of his dream, he made the statue entirely of gold -- the element depicting Babylon in the dream.

What happened to the truth he had previously stated, "Daniel's God was the Lord of kings?" Did he not mean it? What a bold statement of rebellion the statue was! He then commanded all the leaders of all the provinces in Babylon to bow down and worship the statue every time they heard music, making the consequence of noncompliance death in a fiery furnace.

That's one way to win loyal friends and weed out potential enemies! Just have them worship a god of your own making and vow to kill them when they fail. That is one way to thumb your nose at Jehovah and His sovereignty over nations. Make your own statue in defiance of the vision he had been given. The king's religion, like pagan religions tend to do, used fear to manipulate compliance. I bet the smoke of the ever-ready furnace motivated many people to bow down to the stone idol. But not everyone! Daniel's prayer partners refused to bow to the statue and were brought to the king by some manipulative men and the king enraged demanded the soldiers throw them into the fiery furnace. And just to be sure they were punished well, the furnace was overheated, instantly killing the soldiers, but to the kings surprise it did not kill the prayer partners.

The king was the first to see it. As he smugly gazed into the furnace he saw the three men who had been bound standing with their God, the God who Himself is a consuming fire. They stood unharmed. The king called the men out. The once bound men climbed out of the fire -- their skin unburned, their hair  not singed, their clothes in tack and free of the smell of smoke! Astonished the king promotes them and declares that no one would be allowed to speak evil of their God.

What I find interesting is that the king only called the men out of the furnace. Why didn't he call the Lord out as well? Was it because he didn't want to face the Lord of kings? Was it fear because of his own defiance? Was it because he expects God to react like he does?

There are several things that come to mind when I think about this story.

The king's pride kept him from accepting the sovereignty of the Lord of kings.

The king's pride drove him to openly rebel and assert his own will over the Lord's.

The king's pride kept him from listening to wise advisors.

The king's pride drove him to lash out in anger when people didn't comply with his edicts.

And in the end, God put the prideful king in his place.

Oh, that God will continually expose my pride...pride that refuses to listen to wisdom, pride that wants my own will more that His, pride that get enraged when I am challenged by another, pride that too quickly writes off others when they have an opinion differing from my own.

The self absorption of the king makes me sick. But that only is because it exposes my own. Oh, my pride doesn't look just like the kings, it looks a whole lot more like self-contempt...but to be perfectly honest it is just as consuming and just as seeped in unbelief.

Oh, that I would be faithful like Daniel's three friends. Faithful in prayer. Faithful in the small decisions. Faithful in seeking God's face every day no matter where I am at. Faithful in the face of the hard, fiery things. Faithful even when the outcome isn't climbing out of the fire. Faithful enough to look for him in the fiery places.

 

I have had a few fiery experiences in which prayers were graciously answered my way -- a child who survived a ruptured spleen, a grandchild born way to early who survived and thrived, two sons and a daughter-in-law who have survived military deployments and returned home in one piece. But I have also seen others far more faithful than I who didn't get the results prayed for. One dear friend who, like me, had five children, but three of hers were living with Jesus from infanthood. A week before she died she told me she was blessed beyond measure with her two living children, knowing without a doubt that God has been good to her. I have watched faithful, praying parents stand at the grave's of their children fully believing God could heal but He had every right to chose how he healed . They at times did wish it had been here, not in heaven. But in the midst of grief trusted God's sovereignty over their lives. And I have friends who attend our church and who have a solid faith whose child didn't make it home from the same war my sons fought. We grieved, but we grieved with hope.  

 

Hebrews chapter 11 makes it so clear to us that what is important is that we be found faithful and that God honors faith in different ways. Sometimes He honors it through miracles, promises fulfilled, and in answered prayer and sometimes not.

 

I have got to remember the key verse today..."These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth."

 

Oh that I would hold, loosely the things of this earth. Understanding that verse frees me from the irrational guilt of wondering if I prayed hard enough, often enough, or sincerely enough when God answers prayers differently than I asked. Maybe the key to accepting God's sovereignty is accepting the truth that my real home is heaven and that the here and now is, well, essentially living in exile and to be His child means living with the desire for a better country, while being contented in the here and now. 

 

Our God is so different than the king in the story. He didn't throw us away when we have failed to worship Him with our words, our actions, or our lifestyles. Instead, He sent His son to bear His wrath for our sin by having Jesus die in our place on the cross. He didn't draw us to Himself by instilling fear in us. Instead, He used His perfect love fulfilled in the cross to cast out our fear of judgment. This enables us to worship in adoration instead of fear! And that, in a nutshell, is the grace and the mercy that flowed from the heart of our God.