Hill Country Bible Church Dripping Springs Sermons

How do we live as broken people in a broken world? Should we give in to despair and assume that this is the way things will always be? Should we simply seek to numb our pain through whatever pleasures and comforts we can find in this world, looking to make the best of a bad world? By no means.

Something is very wrong here in chapter 10 of Daniel. The end of Israel’s captivity was near. Jeremiah had prophesied it; Daniel had read about it in Jeremiah, and he knows it is the end. But the end of captivity is not the crisis. Although Daniel knows that end is near, he also has been told that great hardship still lies ahead for the people of God. Generations of war and suffering are ahead, and that message throws Daniel. Things should be getting better, but they are getting worse. How can he keep going? He cannot eat; he mourns for three weeks. Daniel needs some assurance of God’s continuing care, but comfort seems distant and impossible.

What happens next is critical for understanding how God comforts Daniel and keeps him able to do as he must. A man, dressed in linen with a gold sash, appears. Who is that?

If you want to know what a person looks like who knows God, Daniel is a good example of that. He was resolute; he was a man who loved God's word; was obedient to Him. He was a man who stood against the trends of the culture in his own day. He was a man of prayer; he was a man of godliness. This is a man who knew God and knew the blessings of knowing God, and he provides a wonderful picture of what it means to know God, because Daniel was a man of prayer and because prayer reveals something very deep about us that perhaps nothing else in the Christian life reveals.

Daniel 7 is a big picture chapter (though we often get lost in the details). It is recorded and passed on so that the Israelites in exile under an evil ruler will not lose hope but, seeing God’s certain victory, will rededicate themselves to his great purposes. The text is complicated, but the message is simple: despite present difficulties, we are part of God’s big picture—so we must not lose hope but instead rededicate ourselves to his purposes.

What is the final gospel truth that a loving God will unveil in this chapter? It’s not complicated. The Lord allows the aged Daniel to face his greatest challenge in a lion’s den to say to his people then and to us now: “Trust me.”

We have a deep desire for significance.

Not only do the people in the pluralistic society get nervous about Christians, but Christians are nervous about the pluralistic society. It creates great tension. How do we live as believers in a pluralistic society?

That even in the midst of the rise and the fall of world empires and the reigns of good and bad rulers and in good times and bad times, the kingdom of God will be established.

This first chapter records for us the stage. It explains to us how these fine young Jewish nobles ended up in the Babylonian court and it records for us their first test, their first challenge living in a different culture, surrounded by a different world view, surrounded by a different pattern of living, surrounded by a very different religious belief system than the one in which they had grown up. And there are many important lessons for us to learn in this passage.

There’s nothing more certain than that you’re going to suffer, and at least people around you are going to be suffering disease, death, disaster, deep disappointment, all of the “deadly D’s.” When you suffer, it’s so natural to ask the question … Why?