Do you remember the Sunday school song Dare to be a Denial?
Dare to be a Daniel
Dare to stand alone
Dare to have a purpose firm
Dare to make it known
Standing by a purpose true
Heeding God’s command
Honor them, the faithful few
All hail to Daniel’s band
I find it amazing that these four young men, facing tremendous pressures to give up their faith and assimilate into the Babylonian culture, stood firm for God. Daniel was entirely alone, but he was able to stand alone and lead his friends to stay true to the God of Israel.
Last week we began to look at how Nebuchadnezzar was attempting to indoctrinate these young Hebrew youths into becoming good Babylonians—not only politically, but religiously, psychologically, mentally and emotionally. Like Satan, Nebuchadnezzar wanted to capture their hearts, their deepest loyalties to himself and his gods.
Thus, we saw last week that he ripped them from their homes and support systems, leaving them vulnerable to suggestion and temptations. He chose impressionable youths that he could train in his system. He very possibly made them eunuchs, which would keep them undistracted at least and more docile and submissive at best. And we saw that he trained them for three years in Babylon U, immersing them in the polytheistic religion and practices of the “magicians and enchanters” (Dan. 1:21). As youth are always fascinating with new ideas, the old truths of Judaism would become irrelevant, or maybe even no longer worthy of being believed.
What else did Nebuchadnezzar do to try to capture their loyalty?
Fifth, they were treated with kindness, receiving from the king “a daily portion of the food that the king ate, and of the wine that he drank” (Dan. 1:5). D. A. Bayliss reveals the temptation:
To assume that the world has only one angle of attack, or to assume it will play in a straightforward manner is always a mistake. In this passage the young men had been taken from their homes and permanently mutilated. The hopes and aspirations they might properly have had had been taken from them. At this point the cost of being in Babylon would have been very clear to the young Jews and resentment would readily have built. And thus the world switches tactic. Suddenly the king is taking a personal interest and providing them meat directly from the royal table. It is not difficult to imagine how readily an uncertain person would have grasped at this sign of potential favor. It is a long distance from a poor, besieged, tributary nation to the sumptuous luxury of Babylonian life. Yet the king had kindly offered to feed these young men food that would make them healthy.
Iain Duguid comments: “This provides us with a picture of the world’s strategy of spiritual reprogramming. At its most effective, it consists of a subtle combination of threat and promise, of enforcement and encouragement. Those who are totally recalcitrant may be sent to prison camps or gulags if necessary, but the majority of the population are more easily assimilated if they are well fed and provided for. After all, more flies are caught with honey than with vinegar. The fundamental goal of the whole process, though, was in one way or another to obliterate all memory of Israel and Israel’s God from the lips and the minds of these young men, and to instill into them a sense of total dependence on Nebuchadnezzar for all of the good things in life” (Daniel: Reformed Expository Commentary, p. 9).
In the words of David Jeremiah, “He wanted them to get accustomed to the good things of the palace so they would never be satisfied to leave the king’s service” (Agents of Babylon, pp. 18-19). This would place them under a sense of obligation as well as accustom them to luxury, lavishness and comfort.
And isn’t this still Satan’s way today? With some he may violently persecute them, but for many of us he works more effectively by seducing and deceiving us into desiring his dainties that he sets before us rather than the riches of Christ. It reminds me of that great quote by C. S. Lewis in his “The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses” when he said: “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Sixth, Nebuchadnezzar changed their names.
Verse 7 says, “the chief of the eunuchs gave them names: Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, Mishael he called Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego.”
This was part of the psychological and spiritual reprogramming; and was this a clever tool. It was all designed to encourage them to forget about the past and become “new men,” to put their race and their religion behind them.
We all have names. We’ve all received names throughout our lives, some of them unwanted, like fat, ugly and stupid.
It is important to remember our true name, our real name, especially our spiritual identity. The names you allow to label you often title the scripts you live by.
In the Bible, names were given to show the ownership or sovereignty of the name-giver. Adam named the animals; God changed names to indicate new destinies. In the Bible, names were vitally important.
This explains why the number one goal of your Enemy, the Devil, is to attack your identity. He wants to give you a different name, one that stands in direct contrast to the name God gave you when He created you. He wants to give you the name “Ugly” or “Stupid” or “Worthless.”
We live in a world where people have become adept at doing what is right in their own eyes, defining their identities according to their own constantly shifting desires. From school-age children who want to change their genders to couples of the same gender planning their weddings, it’s increasingly acceptable to pursue what feels right.
But there are limits as to how far we can go to reinvent ourselves. Our created bodies provide some limits, but also the fact that we have been created by God, in His image.
God knows who He made each of us to be, and in the end his design is always better than what we come up with on our own. Daniel understood this even though Babylon U gave them new names.
This was not an innocent attribution of nicknames, but an intentional strategy to try to fully acculturate these men into Babylonian culture. In those days, when victors integrated enslaved captives into their own culture, it was customary to change the captives’ names as a sign of new ownership. These new names are meant to obliterate the old identities.
In colleges and companies today people will applaud and even promote you taking on a new name, like Gay Christian, or Trans Christian or White Fragility Christian, or to apply new pronouns to yourself.
Their original Hebrew names of these four young men had been given to them at birth to reflect the glory of God. Now, their new names are intended to remind them, every time they hear their name called, that their God is as good as dead.
Rodney Storz sees this as an attempt to change their worship. It wasn’t just about them and their self identities as much as it was about the way that they would see God. It was to enforce a total break from their past lives, to make them believe about themselves and about their god something new and different.
The Hebrew names of these young men were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. They were changed to Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. It should be immediately evident to anyone with even a limited knowledge of Hebrew that the Jewish names of these men each contains a name of God and has a spiritual meaning. Their parents named them to remind them of their spiritual heritage in relation to the one true God.
The name Daniel means “Elohim is my judge.” Elohim is one of the Hebrew names for God. The name Belteshazzar means “May Bel protect his life.” Bel is one of the gods of Babylon.
The prince of the eunuchs decided that his life must be spent under the shadow of the Babylonian God Bel, the patron God of Babylon, otherwise known as Marduk. He was the sun god and believed to be all-powerful.
“Imagine this young man, while striving to remain true to his Lord, being labeled with the name Baal, the one false god who had likely been the greatest stumbling block for wayward Jews over the centuries” (Amir Tsarfati, Discovering Daniel, p. 27).
Hananiah means, “Yahweh is gracious.” Yahweh is the personal name of the God of the Bible. Shadrach means, “Aku is exalted.” Others believe that “Shadrach” is an Akkadian term meaning I am fearful, command of Aku.
Again, this was designed to directly contradict the meaning of his original name – “Under the gracious care of God” to “Under the enlightening care of the sun/moon god.” This might seem to be an improvement because they were now living under God’s wrath. Hananiah needed to remember that God was gracious, even in the midst of judgment. But that is the rub, isn’t it? I think we all struggle with that.
More than a thousand years earlier, Abraham had turned his back on this very god and chosen to worship the true and living God instead.
Mishael means, “Who is what Elohim is?” while Meshach means, “Who is what Aku is?” Surely this was a form of insult. Phillips believes that this goddess was also known as Ashtoreth, Astarte, or Ishtar, the goddess of sensual love and fertility (Exploring the Book of Daniel, p. 33).
Azariah means, “Yahweh is my helper,” and Abednego means “The servant of Nebo,” another Babylonian god. Would Azariah continue to remember that God was his helper? Would he keep looking to him for strength?
Now, instead of looking to God to be his help, he would feel enslaved to the service of a new god.
Did this rebranding work? What is interesting is that, with just a few exceptions, whenever Daniel is mentioned using his Babylonian name, he used some variation of the formula, “Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar.” Nebuchadnezzar changed the men’s names, but he could not change their hearts. They remained faithful to the true God of Israel, as the story shows.
By giving these four young men these names, Ashpenaz hoped to eradicate Hebrew culture and inculcate Chaldean culture into their thinking. The new names indicate that they were subject to the Chaldean gods.
After awhile they would be asking: Are our Jewish names for real? Was it all make-believe? Is our God the true God? Is He gracious . . . wise . . . all powerful . . . able to care for us?
Doesn’t look like it!
John Lennox tells us, “This name-changing was no innocent action. It was an early attempt at social engineering, with the objective of obliterating inconvenient distinctions and homogenizing people, so that they would be easier to control. Throughout history such attempts have often been marked by the undermining of human dignity. A contemporary example of this phenomenon is political correctness which, though originally intended to avoid offence, has become an intolerant suppressor of open and honest public discussion” (John Lennox, Against the Flow: The Inspiration of Daniel in an Age of Relativism (Oxford: Monarch Books, 2015), 69
The Babylonians changed the Hebrew teens’ names in an attempt to make them forget the true God and change their worship, but it appears throughout the entire book that Daniel never did forget the name he was given, which honored the true God. Even the king (in chapter 6), when Daniel was in the lions’ den, came to him the next morning and used his Jewish name saying, “Daniel, servant of the living God. . .” “Nebuchadnezzar wanted Daniel and his three friends to forget Jerusalem, their god, the temple, and everything related to their Jewish heritage and culture. But Daniel and his friend didn’t forget” (David Jeremiah, Agents of Babylon, p. 20). After noting Daniel’s faithfulness to pray even when it was against state law, David Jeremiah says, “Nebuchadnezzar could change their names, but he couldn’t change their nature. Though much of David’s life was assimilated into Babylonian culture, his heart remained centered in Jerusalem” (Agents of Babylon, p. 20).
“Across the Babylonian’s whole futile exercise of trying to wean these young Judean princelings from their loyalty to the living God by changing their names, God wrote the word folly! ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ So ran the law (Exod. 20:3). Little weight would these Babylonian gods have with these four committed believers!” (John Phillips, Exploring the Book of Daniel, p. 34).
Like Babylon, our culture wants you to forget who you belong to. They want to encourage you to “be yourself,” “be true to yourself,” “be anything you want to be,” thus untethering you from your God-given identity, given first through creation and then through redemption.
The world wants you to forget who you are and where you have come from. The world will encourage you to change your identity, to encourage you to live to impress others rather than living for God.
Can you remain faithful to God under such pressure? Will you?
The purpose of the food, names, and education was simple. This was an effort at total indoctrination, with the goal of making these young Jewish men leave behind their Hebrew God and culture. Undoubtedly, Nebuchadnezzar wanted to communicate to these young men, “look to me for everything.” Daniel and his friends refused, insisting that they would look to God. (David Guzik)
ow, not only are they at a new location far from home, learning lots of exciting new things, living under aliases, they will face a brand new temptation.
What was the response of Daniel and his friends? We will see some of this in the next scene, but I think Iain Duguid captures their thinking when he writes:
“To be sure, they did not outwardly resist the Babylonian system. They did not refuse to work for the Babylonians, perhaps because they recognized the hand of God in their situation. They understood the word that the Lord gave through Jeremiah, that those whom he had sent to Babylon should labor there for the blessing of the place in which they found themselves (Jere. 29:4-7). As far as possible these young men sought to work within the system in which they had been placed, being good citizens of Babylon as well as of heaven” (Daniel: Reformed Expository Commentary, p. 10).
He goes on to say however, “they also inwardly resisted the assimilation process of the Babylonian empire in a number of specific ways. In the first place, they resisted the total renaming program of the Babylonians. They didn’t refuse to answer to their Babylonian names, to be sure, but they did maintain their Jewish names (and identities) as well. Daniel did not become Belteshazzar, even though he answered to that name, nor did Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah become Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego. They preserved their Hebrew names amongst themselves as a marker of who they really were (see 1:11, 19; 2:17); they lived with dual names as a reminder of their dual identities, and more fundamentally as a reminder of the true nature of their God” (Daniel: Reformed Expository Commentary, pp. 10-11).
We also have to live with a dual citizenship. We are “citizens of heaven” but we live also in Mena, Arkansas. While our ultimate loyalties lie with heaven, we are still to be good citizens here, engaged in this world for the glory of God and the good of our neighbor.
And we come together every week to remind ourselves of our true homeland. The goal of our worship services should be not only to be equipped for more effective service here on earth in our home towns, but to remind ourselves of who were truly are in heaven’s eyes and the importance of remembering our heavenly destiny and judgment. If our heavenly identity is strong, it will change the way we live within our families and communities.
As the Word is preached, a heavenly wisdom is proclaimed that runs counter to the wisdom of the world around us. In baptism, the sign of heavenly citizenship is acknowledged by us, reminding us of where our true citizenship lies. In the Lord’s Supper, we eat and drink the elements from the earth, but we remind ourselves of the cost at which our citizenship was bought and to look forward to the ultimate feast that awaits us at home. All of these aspects of our worship services should help us to preserve and remember our true identity.
Grace Still Amazes 