Today's reading: Daniel 1; Colossians 1
While I can't speak for Christians in the rest of the world, I really feel like Christians in America need to pay more attention to the example of Daniel and his friends in how they interact with pagan governments and policies.
When we first run into Daniel and his friends, we can't miss the context that they have just been conquered and carried off by a brutal pagan tyrant. This isn't a summer camp that they signed up for, and while their treatment is certainly better than the majority of their countrymen, it doesn't change the situation they are landing in. They have been kidnapped from their home and are being trained up as government officials, likely to help perpetuate the exact kinds of policies that have already seen their people decimated and themselves carried off.
In that context, Daniel asks that he and his friends be exempt from eating the king's food. Given the extremely polytheistic/pagan nature of Babylon, the king's food was undoubtedly coming from pagan sacrifices and rituals, so Daniel, as a follower of Yahweh, doesn't want to contaminate himself with those foods. But in this desire for fidelity to Yahweh, Daniel doesn't stage a protest, make a big public fuss about the food, or try to force a policy change so that nobody among them would be eating the king's food, but quietly goes to the man in charge as asks for a concession for him and his friends to eat something different. Then, when the man shares his concerns over the request with Daniel, rather than screaming that he is infringing on his religious freedom, Daniel is happy to find a compromise that ultimately allows him to continue in his faithfulness to Yahweh while also assuaging the man's concerns.
And we are going to see this kind of behavior from Daniel and his friends multiple times throughout this book. They serve the government well, but they also serve Yahweh faithfully, and when the two come into conflict, Yahweh wins every time for them. But even then, it's not a fight or a fuss, but a polite refusal to go against their God.
The other side of this though is that, in serving Nebuchadnezzar well, these men were not justifying or validating Nebuchadnezzar's policies, actions, or beliefs. There has been a disturbing trend among some Christian groups in America to need to justify and/or validate everything about the policies and character of their chosen political candidate. Rather than saying, "This person is a deeply flawed, sinful human being, whose priority is in no way to follow Jesus, but they are making promises about this policy(s) that I really care about, so I'm voting for them despite that," the attitude seems to be, "Because I'm voting for this candidate, they must be the 'Christian' candidate, and so I will fight and argue to prove that is the case, no matter what else may be true." Nebuchadnezzar was a brutal pagan tyrant, brilliant in many ways, but brutal and godless nonetheless. Daniel never justified Nebuchadnezzar or his actions, but that didn't stop him from serving the best he could under Nebuchadnezzar.
Christians in America need to reclaim an understanding that our faithfulness to God and our faithfulness to our country or government are two separate things, and while they made overlap in some places, they will conflict in others, and we need to be okay with that if we are truly going to call ourselves members of the kingdom of God. But we can also, like Daniel, find peaceful, Godly, Christ-like ways to stand on our faith in those areas of conflict...
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