Daniel: Standing Strong for God in a Secular Society - John Lennox

good afternoon or good evening or good morning to all of you it's an extraordinary situation that we find ourselves in today and i want to share with you for the next while a story from scripture that has had a huge influence on me as i have sought to live for the lord in the academic world it is of course the story of daniel because daniel's book is the only book in scripture that begins in a university setting with daniel and his friends as students in what i call king's college babylon they were born about 25 centuries ago young members of the nobility probably still teenagers when they were taken captive by nebuchadnezzar when he overran jerusalem and they were taken to be trained in babylonian administration the story is utterly remarkable because daniel and indeed his friends rose to the very top echelons of power not only in the world empire of babylon but also in the medial persian empire that succeeded it both of them having their capitals in the same place so daniel turns out to be the only man in history that i know of that rose to be in charge in the administrative sense of two world empires now why should we take seriously this story well because daniel and his friends didn't simply maintain their private devotion to god that they had developed i suppose at home in judah what they did was to maintain a very high profile public witness in a pluralistic society that became increasingly antagonistic to their faith in god and that's exactly why i believe this story has such a powerful message for all of us today in the academic world because where we live there are very strong currents of pluralism and secularism there's a paralyzing political correctness in certain parts of the world and it increasingly pushes expression of faith in god to the margin and confines it if at all possible to the private sphere so that even mentioning god in university circles can be difficult let alone confessing that we believe in something exclusive and absolute such as the uniqueness of jesus christ as son of god and savior our societies particularly in the west tolerate the practice of the christian faith at least they do so still in private devotions and in church but increasingly we find huge difficulty in public witness because for a relativist or a secularist public witness to faith in god sounds like proselytizing and fundamentalist extremism so the story of daniel and his friends who maintained their witness throughout life is a call to your generation and my generation to be courageous not to lose our nerve not to allow the expression of our faith to be diluted and squeezed out of the public space and their story will tell us straight that we're not likely to achieve this objective without cost now of course atheism is more and more vocal in the public arena but even though dawkins does not seem to have the pulling power he used to have the late stephen hawking has a great influence in harnessing the immense cultural power of science to promulgate atheism but his arguments are very thin indeed and i've written about them elsewhere indeed at the moment i'm revising my book god and stephen hawking now i imagine if daniel and his three friends were here today they would be speaking at elf and the importance of his book is that he tells us in it what the secret was that gave the four of them strength and conviction to be prepared to swim against the flow and to give a courageous public expression to their faith and i want to speak with you about several things most of them from the very first chapter that set the compass bearing that guided daniel through his whole life the history very briefly is that nebuchadnezzar he went to jerusalem and he conquered it of course and judah and his educational policy was to take the best people from his conquered territories train them in babylon and send some of them back but to keep in babylon the very best of them and daniel and his friends proved to be top level now think about it they were taken forcibly from their families their society and their culture and taken to a very strange and unfamiliar land many miles away and so they had to cope with a lot of stress emotional trauma leaving their parents and then the strange new city of babylon vast the cultural center of the ancient world they had to learn a new language new customs new political system new laws new education system and then they were faced with a huge avalanche of new beliefs from a polytheistic culture it must have been absolutely overwhelming and the first point to be made about it is that they were transported physically from one culture to another but many of us we haven't moved physically we're still in the town or university where we've been for years but the culture has changed around us and the net effect is the same and we are trying to come to terms with all kinds of thinking that was certainly not familiar to us from any church background that we may have so daniel faced all of this and he starts his book with a very interesting reflection of a key event that shaped his life of course his deportation he starts by saying this in the third year of the reign of jehoiakim king of judah nebuchadnezzar king of babylon came to jerusalem and besieged it and the lord gave jehoiakim king of judah into his hand with some of the vessels of the house of god and he brought them that is the vessels to the land of shinar to the house of his god and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god and then it tells us that the chief eunuch we could call him the dean of students brought in these young people who were clever and competent to stand the king's palace and they were to be taught the literature and language of the cold days three years education a bit like oxford and cambridge and then they were to stand before the king as administrators now it's a very brief summary and i'd love to know more nothing about daniel's childhood nothing about the political intriguing turmoil in the years leading up to his deportation but daniel simply starts with the fact that jerusalem city was taken the king of judah yahya kim became a vassal king and the first waves of deportation to babylon began jerusalem city itself survived for a while until nebuchadnezzar eventually came back and destroyed it in 586 bc it was devastating of course and the jewish virtual library says the exile was unexplainable hebrew history was built on the promise of yavi to protect the hebrews and use them for his purposes in human history their defeat the loss of the land promised to them by yahweh seemed to imply that their faith in this promise was misplaced this crisis a form of cognitive dissonance when your view of reality and reality itself do not match one another can precipitate the most profound despair or the most profound reworking of a worldview for the jews in babylon it did both but it didn't for daniel and his friends as we will see but what were they to do with the promise of messiah who would come and rule the world in righteousness and god could he survive this kind of catastrophe how could daniel and his friends believe any longer that there was a god who'd revealed himself to their nation in a special way and look if god is real how could a pagan emperor like nebuchadnezzar violate the sanctity of god's unique temple in jerusalem and get away with it why did god do nothing and this is the hard question and it's still very much with us today in a thousand different forms but particularly with covet 19 why we ask does history so often take a turn that shakes confidence in the existence of a god who cares now yesterday i you saw an interview between me and michael ramsden uncovered 19 and i have a book available in many languages called where is god in a coronavirus world so i'm not going to repeat that today but what i'm going to talk about is daniel's view of history now we are academics we are thinkers and one of the most important dimensions in orientating ourselves to our culture is to know something about history the conquest of judah for a secular historian was nothing strange it was a mighty superpower babylon wiping out a tiny little power after all there's no contest between a peashooter and a tank was there nothing more to it than that well many people would say no indeed a cynical secular historian might say of course if the victory had gone the other way and judah had put babylon to flight then perhaps you could begin to talk about god being involved but it didn't it went the way anybody could have predicted so they would respond and say look your whole idea of the specialness of the nation of judah and israel the claim of revelation the historical progress the prophets all of that the temple just a building its vessels are just artifacts however beautiful and the idea that god would be interested in such insignificant stuff is utterly absurd so why don't we conclude from this that there's no god for the temple in any sense to be his well that seems very plausible because it's the only logical view open to an atheist but here is daniel making now his first bold statement of faith in god the first words the lord gave jehoiakim king of judah into his hand that is nebuchadnezzar's hand principle number one for daniel and for us today is to get a grip on the fact that there is a god who rules over human history you see daniel is not content to inform us simply what happened he's very much more interested in why it happened he's interpreting history in a way that would be very provocative for a contemporary mind because to assert as i would assert that there is a god behind history is to invite pity if not ridicule certainly in the university history department yet as leslie knew biggin said and i quote from augustine to the 18th century history in europe was written in the belief that divine providence was the key to understanding events that's amazing because those days are long gone when for example a leading historian such as herbert butterfield of cambridge is well worth reading could readily speak of god's providence as i quote a living and active agency both in ourselves and in its movement over the length and breadth of history it is an illusion to think that the interpretation of history that rejects divine action is objective while daniel's view is subjective all history is interpreted history and the real question is is there any evidence that daniel's interpretation is true why should we believe him and why did he believe that god was involved so here the book introduces indirectly one of the biggest questions that we face as academics and that is the very widespread misunderstanding of the nature of faith in god you will notice in your contact with your colleagues and others that faith is a word that tends to be used in isolation they speak of me for example as a person of faith and of course to dawkins that is not a compliment it's an insult because what he said was that faith being belief that isn't based on evidence is the principal vice of any religion and then he wrote atheists have no faith whereas scientific belief is based upon public checkable evidence now i want to say that looking back over 50 years or so involved in the academic world this is one of the biggest problems i face the new atheists so-called although they're old now have been very effective in getting across the idea that faith is a religious term and it means believing where there's no evidence indeed you know there's no evidence and science of course is the exact opposite of that this is huge confusion because faith is an ordinary word in english it comes from the latin phi days which conveys ideas of fidelity of trust of reliability and faith in its normal sense is only credible according to the evidence that lies behind it and that is so important because we need to ask when people use the word faith and i will stop people constantly and suggest you do the same because you get a good conversation out of it when people say use the word faith i say please faith in what what are you talking about because as a scientist and academic we are all people of faith for example in science itself for the natural sciences the pioneers of modern science believed that science could be done now all scientists believe that all historians believe that history can be done and they believe not only that but they can give evidence for the truth of their historical conclusions that is their trust in their interpretation of history is evidence-based the same applies to every other academic discipline so we need to be very clear and not ashamed of it that we are all people of faith and of course in natural science you cannot do it unless you believe that the universe is rationally intelligible accessible at least in part to the human mind now as a scientist i would i constantly say that the pioneers of modern science like galileo kepler newton believed that they could do science because they believed in god and that's exactly what c.s lewis said summing it up he said men became scientific because they expected law and nature and they expected lower nature because they believed in a law giver so our work in science is faith based and einstein no less said that he couldn't imagine a scientist without that faith what we need to be so clear about is that christianity expects the same level of faith evidence-based otherwise we wouldn't have the new testament because it is evidence think of john 20 31. other signs jesus did in the presence of his disciples which are not written in this book but these are written so that you might believe that jesus is the messiah the son of god and that believing you might have life in his name in other words john's saying here is the evidence upon which faith can be based and sitting in the academic world we need to be very clear about this because getting it across i find one of the most difficult things because it cuts through so many very deeply ingrained atheistic notions dawkins crazy atheists have no faith and yet he writes a whole book on what he believes it is a very dangerous confusion in the academic world in which we work faith reason and evidence belong together and so it is in the world of our christianity faith reason and evidence belong together and that can help us make a bridge so that we do not end up living a dichotomized life that is one part of it in the church and one part of it in our universities and the two never meet it's very important for each of us to learn to build bridges to find out what is common in the way in which we think about god and christ and the bible and the way in which we think about our academic subject so that we can make credible inroads in building bridges with our friends now daniel to go back to the matter of history why should we believe him well the interesting thing is he doesn't explain uh why he believed the lord was behind nebuchadnezzar's deportation but in chapter 9 he does explain it and chapter 9 of daniel is quite remarkable because it is really daniel's reaction to prophecy of jeremiah and daniel had been brought up presumably in jerusalem reading scripture reading the prophets and his reading of the prophets had led him to expect a babylonian invasion and conquest and so when it happened it was tragic for him but in that sense it didn't surprise him because it confirmed the word of god through the prophets if there had been no invasion that would have raised problems for his faith in scripture the central problem then for daniel was the relationship between history and morality and the prophet said look this is a moral universe and god isn't a cosmic kind of magician who's going to protect you no matter what you do he's not neutral towards human immorality and idolatry and jeremiah and the other prophets told them that if they didn't listen to god's word they would be overrun by babylon and that's what happened now these are very important and deep issues and they would need to be uh investigated at a lot greater length but i simply want to conclude this little bit by pointing out that there are two levels there's the global history and daniel believed that god was sovereign so in the end perhaps not at the beginning he understood what was going on but then there's his personal history the trauma of moving to babylon and the way in which he saw god's hand in his life and history moves in those two levels for each of us there's what's happening in the world and we're suffering from a particular instance medically of it at the moment but then there's god the god of my personal history and this is hugely important are we confident firstly that there is a meaning in history now many secular thinkers just write that out john gray who's a professor of the history of european thought the london school of economics says that if we speak of the history of the species it is only to signify the unknowable sum of these lives there's no meaning beyond itself looking for meaning and history is like looking for patterns in clouds well i disagree very much but that idea that history is meaningless globally and your personal history is meaningless is again another thing we have to fight against and you know the bible comes in here the eminent cambridge historian butterfield that i mentioned before says this that the significance of the connection between religion and history is momentous in the days when the ancient hebrews there were very small people found themselves between the competing empires of egypt then assyria or babylon and they became actors and in a particularly tragic sense proved to be victims in the kind of history making that involves colossal struggles for power and then he says this all together we have here the greatest and most deliberate attempts ever made to wrestle with destiny and interpret history and discover meaning in the human drama above all to grapple with the moral difficulties that history presents the religious mind so history is enormously important and the heart of christian monotheism is that god who is outside history is the guarantor of meaning as one who stands outside the unfolding history of the cosmos he and he alone is qualified to give it meaning and these are things that of course we grapple with so the very first his issue in this story is the matter of history which i deal with in much more detail in my book but then you will notice that we're not quite finished that sentence the lord gave jehoiakim king of judah into nebuchadnezzar's hand with some of the vessels of the house of god so the king and the vessels were given into nebuchadnezzar's hand and that's a very odd detail i wonder if i'd been writing this would i've even mentioned it what earthly interest can these vessels have but they went to babylon and we're told not only did they go to the temple of nebuchadnezzar's god from the temple in jerusalem they were put in the treasure house of his god now babylon was an absolutely spectacular city and it's well worth reading some literature like the book by rue roux on ancient iraq just to get the impression of this absolutely staggering and swinging city educationally it was right at the top most of the temples and there were over a thousand of those had libraries there were centers devoted to the study of law astronomy astrology architecture engineering medicine art mathematics it was a thriving university city and that must have raised a question for these people how could there be anything wrong with it when you've got all this idolatry permeating society and yet you've got this technological advance intellectual advance that made jerusalem looked like a tiny little obscure backwater and they would have to come to terms of that how could such a culture emerge from such completely false religious ideas or now the next thing that is brought to attention that helped them to cope with all of this was this taking of the vessels now what is that all about well nebuchadnezzar put them in the treasure house of his god and that begins to open a window because he counted them as valuable there was a lot of treasure as you will read in nebuchadnezzar but these were the golden and silver vessels from the temple of jerusalem what were they symbolic of well the psalmist reflecting on the temple says every white of it said glory they were symbols of god's glory that is they were symbols of value and when you think of that then you see that for daniel and his friends they were symbols of goddess absolute value nebuchadnezzar took them and he put them in his treasury that is he gave them some value but the treasury was a museum and presumably there were displays from all the various places he had conquered and judo is only one of them and if we step back from that then what i think nebuchadnezzar was doing is taking something which to daniel represented the absolute value of god and making it of relative value and i'm sure the moment i say that you recognize this this is characteristic of our society today the pervasive relativism even post-modern relativism and to say in the academic world today that you believe in an absolute is very difficult so this is the next thing we need to latch onto the whole question of values are there any absolutes and is not everything just relative and you know this is central for us as believers in the academy i i can imagine daniel and his friends from time to time going to look at these vessels on display and daniel turning to them and saying look chaps this is what we stand for let's never forget it it's in christian language it's our father in heaven hallowed be your name that is you are of supreme value jesus christ is lord and i would suggest to you all that we need to bring this back into the central focus we need first to realize that god is sovereign over global history and personal history no matter how painful part of that personal history has been but secondly god is our supreme value and we are there as his ambassadors in the academy to represent those values and it's very important that we are aware of that and seek to do so because you see what happens later in the book shows daniel's very sharp perception of the nature of culture nebuchadnezzar takes those things that symbolized absolute value he relativizes them in chapter 3 he does the opposite he takes something of relative value and he makes an absolute out of it it's gold again but in chapter 3 he makes a vast statue of gold which is really a thinly disguised symbol of himself his state and his power and he says that everybody including daniel's friends will have to bow down to it so what he's done is taking something of relative value the state and himself and make it of absolute value now if we think about that we can see that this is extremely perceptive and important people cannot live without values and they without absolute values and when they relativize one thing they'll absolutize another thing and i think that daniel is telling us in the academy we need to be aware of this kind of thing happening in our world the danger of relativizing the absolute and absolutizing the relative and that is showed in these vessels but there's another thing the vessels reappear in the book they appear in chapter five at belshauser's face because belshazzar if you recall took them out off the temple of the treasury where they'd been put and then he put them on his table in his palace and he forced his elite and you will see they are there late from every walk of life to drink wine out of them and that really shows why daniel starts by mentioning them are they important yes because what happened to them caused the empire to collapse that's huge isn't it belle schauser what he did with those vessels he destroyed his own empire and the middle persian took over that night and god wrote on the wall of his palace and it was a statement of values you are weighed in the balances and found wanting you have weighed god at zero god has weighed you at zero so this makes the study of values a very serious business indeed and i can only flag it up really but it is hugely important but i want to move briefly on to to something else obviously when we talk about absolutes and relatives we'll be talking about truth and everything else but there's something more that daniel introduces us to in the first chapter and that is the education system three years study and the first thing we read is a very clever bit of social engineering these men had hebrew names daniel's name meant god is my judge and the others had names that would have enabled them had folks ask them what they meant to talk about god but the babylonians didn't want them to talk about god so they gave them babylonian names now that is a most interesting thing it was an attempt at social engineering to eradicate any outward distinctiveness and any drawing of attention to the meaning of their hebrew names in other words nebuchadnezzar wanted them all to be the same and you know that pressure is in our society today cut down the tall plant is one of the cries we hear don't let anybody be distinctive keep your head down and we're going to be forced to do this now one of the wonderfully encouraging things in the book is although they changed daniel's name it came back again the second part of of the book he was still daniel towards the end of the book now it's important because this business of changing names is not innocent because it's happening in babylon and if you look back to genesis and this is an intriguing study i'm only going to sketch it briefly the issue with babylon was what well it was an attempt at engineering a skyscraper a huge big ego pointing into the sky and the idea was as scripture says let us make a name for ourselves and immediately i responded saying exactly this is what's going on if you ask what the base philosophy of babylon was it is the self-made person let us make a name for ourselves and you may react and say look i'm working hard in the university i want to make a name for myself i want to be recognized is there anything wrong with that no but you see look carefully let us make a name for ourselves what's wrong with that well contrast it with what happens in virtually the next paragraph in genesis chapter 11. god calls abram from that same culture and shows him his glory and says abram you leave that culture and follow me and i will make your name great now i want to encourage all of you because this has meant a lot to me in my life we live in a society where people will trample over each other to get recognition but abram was told look you follow me follow my glory and i will make your name great and one of the battles we have in life if i might put it that way is to really accept the significance that god gives us that's faith that's trust to understand that god doesn't make any mistakes although we sometimes think he has and he will give us the significance he wants us to have and as i come to the close of this talk i would want to just warmly say to you that here is where our trust will be tested in all this pressure around us to publish or perish and everything else to have those words of scripture burning in our hearts i will make your name great we've seen that daniel was able to cope with the trauma of the deportation and everything you why because he believed in scripture and my final word to you is this whatever you do with all your involvement spend time with scripture when we're active in christian work and apologetics the danger is and let me be honest with you it's a real danger for all of us and i've seen it in my own life the danger is we're always preparing things for other people and we do not spend the time to search the word of god before god and allow god to speak to us directly through it and that is hugely important because the ultimate conviction that this stuff is real is not because we've developed a whole lot of arguments from archaeology science philosophy important and all as they are the most important thing is that our conviction that the bible is the word of god comes from within itself that god authenticates his word in that we hear and speak when we read it so god bless you all thank you for listening to me and i trust that i'll meet many of you lord willing when things open up

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Length: 40min 20sec (2420 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020