Day 215 – Daniel & the Lions’ Den

• There are few stories in the Old Testament, except perhaps for that of creation and Noah’s Ark, that are as well known and familiar as the story of Daniel and the den of lions. What new shall we learn from it this time, with the whole of God’s One Story in our minds from our half year of reading?
• Daniel is now serving the new king, Darius. He’s in an extremely high position, due in part to the excellent, honest and distinguished way he worked for the king. Daniel is now about 70 years old and the other high officials could find “no fault in him”.
• Imagine you had been in Daniel’s position, taken away as a teenager, and living through the experiences we have been reading about over the past five readings or so. Do you think you would have been able to say that the others around you could “find no fault in you” in the way you lived and worked?
• Why do you think the other high officials wanted Daniel out of the way? The passage doesn’t say, but you should be able to come up with several possibilities. What do they get the king to do?
• How did Daniel respond to the new law? Look at Daniel 6:10. Did he start praying in secret or in public?
• How would you respond to a law that told you to do something contrary to your faith? This is a serious question. It may well happen in your lifetime, and it already happens in other parts of the world right now. How do you think you’d handle the situation?
• What happened in the den of lions? What is interesting about the thoughts, feelings, words and actions of the king throughout Daniel 6:14-23?
• Do you think Daniel would have been scared?
• How did the king respond when Daniel was brought up alive? What happened to Daniel’s accusers?
• We’ve dipped into 1 Peter several times recently for our complementary passages in the New Testament. What connections can you make between this story and the wise advice in the passage in 1 Peter 3? Think about both Daniel and the people who set the trap for him.

As we look at those New Testament words, I wonder if people were to give me a score for how well I’m doing at “living blamelessly” what sort of score I might get. I wonder what score you’d get too! We’d like to assume we’d do all right!

Perhaps rather scarily, it isn’t our friends and family that get to make such a decision though. We might not live blamelessly at all, but we do have a habit of trying to make it *look* like we do, to other people at least. So when people in church see you or me, we hope that they would think we’re doing super well in our spiritual lives.

Of course, living to please fellow men and women is a rather pointless task in the grand scheme of things, because it’s God that sees what’s happening in the grittiness of our 24-hour days. I expect that God found things that were wrong in Daniel’s life too, despite the excellent example we read today of true God-focused living.

If it was up to our friends and family who were “good enough” for God, we might stand a chance. With God Himself as our judge, however, we’re stuffed. He knows, and we know, that we are nowhere near blameless enough. We fall way short of the mark.

It’s with that realisation of the depth of our hidden sin that we can truly wonder at the amazing news that we have to share about Christ’s substitution for us on the cross. In that moment, all the stain of our murky, secretly held sin was transferred onto him, and he took the judgement in our place.

This knowledge should transform and renew us to try and be more Daniel-like. When we see the depths that our Creator stooped to to bring us home, our challenge is to take that awe and wonder and channel it into living Daniel-like lives, which put our God before our fellow man, or before any of the other idols which swamp our lives.