And You Thought 2020 Was Bad...

In the third year of the reign of king Jehoiakim of Judah, king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came to Jerusalem and laid siege to it. The Lord handed Jehoiakim of Judah over to him, along with some of the vessels from the house of God. Nebuchadnezzar carried them in the land of Babylon to the house of his God and put the vessels in the treasury of his God. — Daniel 1:1-2

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

You know the story of Chicken Little? We're going to put this up on the screen real quick. So a little visual from Chicken Little, the kid's story. Chicken Little's out one day in the woods, and an acorn falls from the tree and plops on Chicken Little's head. And Chicken Little says, "The sky is falling." And Chicken Little runs off and comes across Henny Penny. Says, "Henny Penny, Henny Penny, the sky is falling. I've got to go tell the king." Henny Penny gets upset. So they go together and they run along the path and they come across Ducky Lucky. And they say, "Ducky Lucky, Ducky Lucky, the sky is falling." Ducky Lucky's like, "Oh, no. We've got to go tell the king." Right? So Ducky Lucky and Chicken Little and Henny Penny go together, and they run into Goosey Lucy. And they say, "Goosey Lucy, Goosey Lucy, the sky is falling." And they run down the path, all panicked about this. And they come across Foxy Woxy. They say, "Foxy Woxy, Foxy Woxy, the sky is falling. Oh, no. We've got to go tell the king." Foxy Woxy says, "Do y'all know how to get to the king?" And they're like, "Oh, I don't know how to get to the king." Foxy Woxy says, "Well, I know a shortcut." And takes them down into his hole, and they were never seen again. The end.

You all know the story? Did I just ruin something for some of y'all?

Now why do I tell you this story? Because there is a lot of Chicken Little right now. There's been a lot of Chicken Little for the last couple years. There's a lot of Chicken Little in the Christian community. There's a lot of Chicken Little online. And I've titled this sermon, and actually the beginning of this whole sermon series in the book of Daniel, "And You Thought 2020 Was Bad."

And here's why. It's because 2020 was bad. It was really bad. It was incredibly difficult. But it wasn't the first or the worst bad time for the people of God. This fall, we're going to start this series in the Old Testament book of Daniel. My hope is that we don't become Chicken Littles again.

Now, I know that this book may be very familiar to some and very unfamiliar to others. If it's unfamiliar to you, let me tell you, this is a book that's about halfway through the Bible. But there's a lot of common phrases we get out of this book. Have you ever heard somebody say, "The writings on the wall"? That's from the book of Daniel. Have you ever heard somebody being thrown to the lions? That's from the book of Daniel. Have you ever heard about a leader that had feet of clay? From the book of Daniel.

For others of you, this is overly familiar material. This is VBS material, Sunday school material, flannelgraph material, and especially VeggieTales material. And it's easy, therefore, if you are familiar with these stories, to think of them as children's stories. Yet I want to warn you, this is a very adult book. This covers very adult themes, and we need the message of this book more than anything else right now.

So our larger goal in studying Daniel is that we would be people who don't freak out this year, no matter what happens. Now there's a lot of reasons to freak out right now. There's a lot of reasons to be afraid. And I'm not going to do the preacher trick of saying there's no reason to be afraid. But no matter what happens with the election, no matter what happens with the economy, no matter what happens with the environment, no matter what happens with shootings in schools, no matter what happens with our health, no matter what happens with your job or your finances, your personal wealth, no matter what happens with your extended family, my hope is that we would be people who are so grounded, who are trusting, who know who our God is, and who know what God is up to. And so we would not be Chicken Littles.

An End or a Beginning?

Here's where I'm going this morning if you take notes. First point: An end or a beginning? The book of Daniel is a story that begins with an ending of another story. Daniel picks up with the fall and the failure and the destruction of Jerusalem.

Now, I want to remind you, the story of the Bible is a story of the history of God making a kingdom. Now, if you're going to have a kingdom, you have to have a bunch of things. Right?

You have to have a land. You have to have people in that land. You have to have a king, and you have to have a law. Let me remind you of the history of the Bible in thirty seconds.

God calls Abraham to come and leave the land of his forefathers, and he takes him and says, "I'm gonna lead you to another place, and I'm gonna create a new people." Abraham leaves Ur and travels over and ends up in what's now the promised land. God says, "This is gonna be my possession and this is where you, Abraham, you're gonna be the father of nations. I'm going to start making a people."

Fast forward. Abraham's descendants are in the land for a long time. There are the patriarchs, and finally, there's a famine. They go to Egypt because of the famine. They're there for four hundred years, and the Israelite people become slaves in that land. Moses comes along. God sends Moses, and Moses delivers the people through all the plagues, going through the Red Sea. They come to Mount Sinai at 1500 BC. God gives them the second thing that they need. There's now a people, but they need a law. God gives them the law at Mount Sinai.

After this, they go to the promised land all through Numbers. We looked at this last year, going all the way into the promised land. Over years and years, there's a time of Joshua and then Judges, and finally, they ask for a king. God gives them a king, and we know the best king, the preeminent king of Israel, King David around 1000 BC. So you've got a land, you've got a law, you've got people, you've got a king, and then the wheels begin to fall off.

There's a division between the Northern Kingdom (10 tribes) and the Southern Kingdom (where Jerusalem has 2 tribes). Israel, the northern tribes, wander far away from God and his law. God sends the Assyrians, and they come and wipe out Israel. It does not exist anymore—it becomes Samaritans later on.

The Southern Kingdom exists for a number of years, but they also begin to wander away from God and his law. What happens is Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon come. Nebuchadnezzar shows up in Jerusalem, brings his whole army, and lays siege to the city of Jerusalem, beginning this process of conquest. It goes through several stages.

First, there's a military defeat. They lay siege and destroy the city walls in a way that makes sure the surrounding nations, especially Egypt, know that Nebuchadnezzar and Babylon are mighty. You can't mess with us. We're a world superpower.

Then there's a spiritual vacuuming. He goes into the temple and takes everything that's gold, everything that's art, everything that's beautiful, and takes it far away back to the capital city of Babylon and puts it in his own treasury and temples.

Finally, he removes the next generation of leaders. This is a very astute way of controlling and dominating a culture. He takes what historians believe is about 10,000 young people—the up and coming teens and 20-year-olds of the culture. Anybody who's got gifts and education and any kind of leadership is taken away to Babylon for a reprogramming campaign.

Finally, the entire city is laid to waste in 586 BC.

The Book of Daniel

So the book of Daniel begins with an ending. It's an end of everything. The king is gone, the land is gone, there's not really even a people, and there's definitely not a law. It's all the end—or is it?

The book of Daniel is written to a people in exile about exile and defeat. Put yourself in the place of these people. Everything that they've known, all these people are taken away a thousand miles to Babylon. Daniel and his friends—Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego—are taken a thousand miles away, and everything that they know is gone. They are in exile. It seems like everything is over.

But here comes a timely word. A timely word.

If you're going to look at this book, Daniel, I'm going to give you a little introduction. It's a little bit nerdy this morning, but you all are a nerdy church. I'm not going to apologize for that. There are a lot of nerds here.

This is one of the only books in the Bible that is written in two languages. Not just a word or two, but huge chunks of it are written in two languages. The first chapter is written in Hebrew, which is the language of the Israelites. The whole Old Testament is written in Hebrew. I had to take Hebrew in seminary.

I don't really know it very well, but I had to at one point. So that's the first chapter. But it's interesting—in chapters two through seven, the language switches. It switches to Aramaic. Now Aramaic is also called Chaldean by some people. Aramaic was not a language of any particular people group. It was the trade language. It was the common language of all the Semitic people who lived in that area of the world. It was like a common language that was used. It had no reference to any particular people group. And then chapters eight through 12 switch back to Hebrew.

Now, if you were reading a novel, and it started off in English, and it switched to, I don't know, French or Spanish or Italian or Swahili for a big half of the book, wouldn't you say, that's weird, and that's probably deliberate? Now think with me. I know it's hard to think during a sermon. Why in the world would the author of this book change the languages? Why would you be reading along? You're like, okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Wait. Wait. What? Chapter two through chapter seven is in a completely different language.

Now, I want you to think about this book. This book contains really kind of two parts. The first half of the book is all the stories that some of you know about Daniel and company. The last half of this book, starting in chapter eight, is all these stories, all this prophetic kind of end times sounding weird stuff—this is what's gonna happen. And it neatly corresponds to that dividing line. I think this is maybe what's going on when you read Daniel.

There's an intro in Hebrew that the people would have known—the covenant language of God's people. They would have said, yes, this is our language. But starting in chapter two, if you're reading this book, you're experiencing in your reading what it's like for Daniel and company to have their language taken away from them. The heart language of Israel. And these are the hard years. This is what it's like to be alienated. And then the last part of the book, chapter eight and following—all the stuff about God's prophecy—he's gonna take you back home. It's interesting how it switches back to Hebrew. Almost as if to say, God knows your heart, and he's gonna bring you back to what you know. He's gonna bring you back to a place of safety. God will bring us home.

The Chiastic Structure

There's a second message here in the structure of this book. And again, getting kinda nerdy with you this morning. So there's a Hebrew writing uses a literary device called a chiasm. Now I want you to picture a butterfly. Right? Two wings and the insect parts in the middle. Right? All the wiggly parts are in the middle that matter. Right? And the two wings match one another. They fold together neatly, and they're supposed to be mirror images of each other. That's how every butterfly looks. That's what a Hebrew chiasm looks like. It has mirrored parts with something really important in the middle.

So let me walk you through this. The first half of the book, chapters two through seven are a chiasm. Chapter two mirrors chapter seven. Both have four parts. Four parts of a statue in chapter two, four beasts in chapter seven. Chapters three and six mirror one another. Daniel and friends thrown into the furnace, Daniel thrown into the lion's den. And then chapters four and five mirror one another. The fall of king Nebuchadnezzar, the fall of king Belshazzar.

And the center of the chiasm is chapter four verse 37. Now, again, this is really nerdy, but think about your butterfly. The important part's the middle. So what's so important about Daniel 4:37? This is where Nebuchadnezzar, the pagan king, comes to a realization about how mistaken he's been. He says:

Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and exalt and glorify the king of heaven because everything he does is right, and all his ways are just, and those who walk in pride he is able to humble. — Daniel 4:37

Do you get this? Do you hear what an incredible message for people who are far away from their home, who their main question is, where is our God? What has happened to us? And they get this message coming out of the mouth of a pagan king saying, God is just and God is in control. Man, what a timely word.

But like they say in advertisements, that's not all, folks. Because there's another chiasm. The second half of the book is also a chiasm—also a butterfly. Two butterflies in the same book. How about that? So chiasm B has a similar structure. Chapters eight and eleven are mirrors. Eight is about prophecy about beasts. Eleven is prophecy about kings. Chapters nine and ten are mirrors too. Trials and forgiveness in chapter nine, trials and mourning in chapter 10. And lo and behold, another butterfly with a little insect in the middle.

The middle of chapter nine goes through this weird statement about this. It says, chapter nine, verse 25 to 27:

From that time, the word goes out to restore and build Jerusalem until the anointed one. The ruler comes, there'll be seven sevens and 62 sevens. It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After sixty two sevens, the anointed one will be put to death, and have nothing. The people of the ruler will come and destroy the city and sanctuary. The end will come like a flood. The temple will be set up with an abomination that causes desolation until the end that is decreed and poured out on him. — Daniel 9:25-27

Gosh, that sounds kind of familiar. I know we'll come back to that later. You'll get a lot of this. That's another timely word. It's all about these weeks. God's saying, I know exactly what time it is. I am absolutely in control of the future. You do not need to fear.

Let's put this all together. We get two butterflies—one more slide here. Chiasm A plus Chiasm B. We get this nice little butterfly, giant butterfly. And again, it's the stuff in the middle that matters. And what's in the middle of all this is the end of chapter seven.

The Son of Man

Now, seven contains this really odd turn of phrase, and it's a phrase that's repeated over and over in the Bible. In fact, it's the one phrase that's quoted all the time in the New Testament. And it's this phrase that joins everything together. It's the how. How is God going to do this? How is he going to take us through the first half of the book with all the sadness, and then the second half of the book to bring us all the hope? How is God going to be faithful with what looks like an ending, what looks like God is gone, what looks like God has failed? How is God going to bring us to a place of knowing He's in control of everything?

Well, the end of Daniel seven contains a phrase that if you've read, particularly the Gospel of Matthew, you know: The Son of Man. The Son of Man.

Eighty-two times. Eighty-two times in the New Testament, Jesus refers to Himself as the Son of Man—the anointed one, the one who's going to bring everything together, the messianic king who will usher in the kingdom of God, the one who will bring an end to the exile of his people, the one who is the security of our hopes. Eighty-two times. This is the most common phrase. You wanna know what Jesus calls himself? He calls himself out of Daniel. That's his favorite quote for who he is. When he's telling people who he is, he says read Daniel, Daniel seven. This is who I am.

Now that was incredibly important to the first people who read this book. And I hope it becomes incredibly important to you this fall.

Daniel in the Second Century

The first people who read this book—there's a debate about when this book was written. Some people say it's written in the sixth century BC, at the time when Daniel was alive. Some people said these stories were handed down and it was actually written in the second century BC. Doesn't really matter to me all that much. But what really matters is what happened in the second century BC and why the people of God really needed Daniel.

Because in the second century BC, there's yet another empire on the rise: the Greek Empire. There's a king who's a Seleucid king, just one of the smaller entities within the Greek Empire, named Antiochus Epiphanes the Fourth. Now do you all know how Kanye West calls himself Jesus Everlasting? He's comparing himself on some level like, "I'm divine." Antiochus had nothing on Antiochus Epiphanes. He called himself Epiphanes—and Epiphanes is a word you might recognize from the church calendar: epiphany. Right? The appearance of God. Antiochus Epiphanes thought he was God. He shows up in the temple in Jerusalem and sacrifices pigs on the altar. Now if you remember, we don't even eat pigs in Israel. That's not even on the menu. He is defiling the temple.

And this is a time when people are like, "What is going on?" And you know what they drew strength from? You know what they drew encouragement from? You know what they looked back to and said, "Hey, this isn't the worst hard time"? They looked back to Daniel. They looked back to Daniel like, I hope we do. Because this book is given to you today, just like it was given to those people in the second century, to help you walk through hard times.

When it looks like the economy is going down the drain, when it looks like the environment is going berserk, when our president is in jail for the first time that's ever happened in American history, when our questions are "will we have a country?", when our questions are "will I have a future and a job?", when our questions are about all the unknowns and things that keep us up at night and make us scared—right? This is a book for us.

Welcome to Life in Exile

So my last point here this morning is this: welcome. Hey, welcome to life in exile. I wanna ask you if you can feel or identify with what it's like to be a person in exile. Let me give you a couple of for instances.

When you feel like a stranger in a strange land, you're feeling the exile. When you're understanding that your life and what you value differs so much from people around you, welcome to life in exile. When you feel like you're not at home here, welcome to life in exile. When you feel like there's a seeming unreality to the spiritual life, welcome to life in exile.

What about this: when you can't see God? When we can't see God in your life, in the lives of other people, whether you see loss, you see devastation, everything around you says God is gone. Welcome to life in exile. You're experiencing it. When there's a lack of God's fruits and a lack of ability to see His faithfulness, it looks like nothing is happening. Welcome to life in exile.

Our third: when we watch the people of God fail. We watch churches, we watch church leaders, we watch people and institutions we put trust in fail. Welcome to life in exile.

This book speaks to the agony of life in exile. And here's my encouragement for you: nobody likes to feel agony, but don't sweep that stuff under the rug, and don't pretend. We're so good in this culture of pretending. "How are you doing?" "I'm fine." No, you're not, right? We're so good at sweeping that stuff under the rug because we don't like to feel this.

Here's my call to you: embrace exile life. Embrace the crazy invisible kingdom. The message of Daniel for us this morning is this—don't you dare worry that the cause of God is thwarted, that somehow He's gone. He's not. God is still here. He's with us.

Three Tools for Life in Exile

This book gives us three tools for life in exile that I want to pass on to you this morning.

First is Exile Edge. The story of Daniel 1:2—just that second verse we read there—is much more than the story of Nebuchadnezzar cleaning out all the nice dishes out of the temple. He comes and takes those gold things away to Babylon. But if you were an ancient Near Eastern reader of this book, you'd be like, "Oh, no." Because the way that they thought about the world is to defeat a country or to defeat that people, and particularly to walk into their temple and defile it, that means you defeated their God. Israel's God is no more. Our God has been defeated.

Don't we know what that's like? It was probably twenty years ago that the governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, said this: "Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak minded people who need strength in numbers." But if we're honest, don't we sometimes feel this? Like Christianity feels kind of like a loser religion for losers.

What we see in Daniel is this: God doesn't mind. God doesn't seem to mind people not knowing that He's in charge. God doesn't seem to mind not being mainstream. God doesn't seem to mind being misunderstood sometimes.

You know, it is actually good for God's people. It is really good for us to be out of positions of power and influence and dominance and authority. This is the story of church history. Have you read church history? It's the time when the church was at the top in power that actually the church got fat, sick, and weird. But it's times when the church has been at the bottom, has been the underdog, has been in a position of cultural obscurity that the church has thrived. The people of God have thrived on being marginalized, persecuted, misunderstood, perceived as a loser religion. That's actually when we flourish.

Exile is a good place for the church, and it's good for God's people. It's good for our church to get a little edgy again, to have a little bit of that exile edge—like, hey, it pushes us to be a little bit more risk taking, a little sharper in how we think, a little more bold in our prayers, a little more needy about fellowship with one another. We need some edge. Nothing wrong with a little grit under the fingernails.

Second, exile choices. Daniel and his friends as teenagers are displaced all the way over in Babylon, far from everything that they know. Their lives are surrounded with a culture that's diametrically opposed to their belief system. Everything from what they speak to what they read to what they're called to their sexuality to even what they eat is changed. And they have to make decisions.

They have to make decisions like: where are we going to draw the line? They have to make decisions about what parts of this they take into themselves and what parts they reject. What parts of the culture around them that they bring in and what parts they push away? Where are they losing their identity? And where are they simply trying to make it in a foreign place? These are exile choices. These are exile choices for us today.

This is also where we live—wrestling with how much do we look like people around us? How much are we weird? Where do we draw the line? How are we faithful to God in this place and still love it and care for our neighbors and be culture positive and not just anti-culture? Exile choices. We'll talk about that more.

Finally, exile hope. The book of Daniel can either be read as a source of incredible hope for you, or it can be kind of neat stories depending on who you think is the hero of this book. Any of you grow up singing "Dare to be a Daniel"?

One person here. Thank you. Yes. So the song goes like this—it used to be sung in VBS all across America: "Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone, dare to have a purpose firm, dare to make it known." The theme is like, Daniel's awesome. Be Daniel, man. Go be Daniel. And I gotta tell you, that's a pretty discouraging song because I don't know any Daniels, and I certainly am not one. There's no superheroes in the Bible. There's one and only one hero in this book. Daniel himself wouldn't say, "Hey, look at me, I'm the point." Rather, the whole theme of this is like, "Hey, there's a real king, and there's a real kingdom. And we want to look to that, not to Daniel."

That's a message right here in chapter one verse one. See what it says? Nebuchadnezzar's might, though considerable, was not the reason that Jerusalem fell or was put to siege. It says this:

The Lord delivered Jehoiakim, king of Judah, into his hand. — Daniel 1:2

What? The Lord's behind this? The Lord orchestrated the fall of his own country? God's in this? Yeah. Because the book of Daniel previews the whole gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Daniel and his friends, they trusted in the King of Kings even when they didn't know how the King of Kings was going to show up or what he was up to. But this whole book—we're going to see—are signposts to us of the real hero of the story: Jesus.

In Luke chapter 24, right after the resurrection, Jesus appears as two of his disciples are walking down the road from Jerusalem to a city called Emmaus. They showed up among them—now remember, he's dead and been resurrected. He walks with them, and they don't even recognize him. They are so convinced their savior is gone. I think that's what's going on in that story. And it says that Jesus opened up all the scriptures—all of the Old Testament—and bit by bit talked about how the writings and the prophets and all the history, all of it pointed to him. All of it told the story of exactly what happened with the cross and the empty tomb.

There's an old saying about the Bible. It goes like this: "The new is in the old concealed. The old is in the new revealed." The New Testament is in the Old concealed. It was all there. It's all the same message, and the old is in the new revealed.

Daniel and his friends, they had no idea what God was up to, but on this side of the cross, we can read exactly what God was up to. Remember, we read that God was the one who allowed this whole thing to happen. He was the one orchestrating the events so that his own capital city was destroyed, his own temple was desecrated, his own people taken away. What in the world? And the holy things of God, the things he had told them to build—all the stuff in the temple—He took it all and it was profaned. What in the world is going on?

The same way, look, Jesus Christ came as the only perfect holy person, the only holy person who's ever existed on the planet. He's the only person of whom you could take chapter and verse throughout every moment of every day of his life, and everything he could stand in front of us and not blush. Every one of us, if somebody read our thought life, read our history, read our internet search history, all of us would blush. None of us are holy, and yet the Holy One was taken and profaned. He who knew no sin became sin for us. Jesus was put on a Roman cross. All human corruption, all human pollution, all human death, all the stuff that's in your internal history was put upon him on the cross. All of it.

And Acts two tells us:

This man, Jesus, was handed over to you Jews by God's set purpose and foreknowledge. — Acts 2:23

God was in control of it even when he was destroying his own very own son on the cross. God knew exactly what he was doing. Why? For your hope.

Exile hope—that's concealed in the book of Daniel, where they're like, "I don't know what God's up to." No. He's up to something. It's fully revealed in Jesus. There's an invisible kingdom. There's a real people of God. There's a real God on the throne. He has not left us alone, and He is the orderer of our histories. He is absolutely in control. You need not fear.

Here's this word of hope: This thing we come every week and we talk about, we read from, we sing about—it's real, y'all.

It's a real king, and he's really in charge, and we can really trust him. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Let's go to the word in prayer together. Father, we thank you for this book. Thank you, Lord, for this book of Daniel that likewise speaks into our world. When we feel the exile and we are weighed down and we are discouraged and we can't see you at work, thank you, Lord, for these words that remind us that you're good, that you're in control, that you have not left us.

Thank you, Lord, that you who orchestrated the book of Daniel and all the events of that, Lord, you also were behind every event of the cross. And Lord knew that we sitting in this room today would need hope this day to see Jesus in our circumstances.

Father, lift up our heads this fall. Help us to be bulletproof as a congregation. Protect us from being chicken littles. We pray this all in Jesus' name.

And would you please stand, and let's respond to God's word together in song.