Just As He Had Done Before

Daniel was an extremely high-ranking official in the empire of the Medes and Persians. But he was an outsider and his fellow officials wanted to get rid of him (Daniel 6:4). However, he was so scrupulous in all his work that they could find no fault in him. The only way to remove Daniel, they conspired, was to drive a wedge between his love for God and his loyalty to Darius the King (verse 5). The conspirators went to Darius and persuaded him to set into law a diktat that demanded that no one in the empire could pray to any other god or man during the following thirty days than to the king himself on pain of being thrown into a den of ravenous lions (verse 7).

It was when Daniel (seemingly absent when the plotters visited the King) heard of this decree that he did what he had always done and ‘three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before’ (verse 10). Surely there must have been a tremendous temptation for Daniel to compromise! He could have prayed in secret for the following thirty days and nobody would have found fault with him. He could have just stopped praying as he had. But that would have meant compromising his daily pattern and giving way to intimidation and fear. So, Daniel carried on as he had before. And that continuation meant he was seen, reported, and sentenced. All seemed lost, but though thrown into the lion’s den, (verse 16) the following day when King Darius went to check on Daniel’s fate, he found him unscathed and unharmed (verse 23).

How was it that Daniel had the courage to face such a life-threatening prospect? When he was a young man exiled to the Babylonian court we read: `Daniel resolved in his heart not to defile himself` (Daniel 1:8). As a young man he decided to put his loyalty to God over every aspect of his life. And so, as an old man, as he was in Daniel Chapter 6, that life-long determination to put God first was ingrained in his life and no threat of danger was going to persuade him to do otherwise. And the very thing (his prayer life) that brought him into danger, became the thing that helped him walk out that life of dedication to God.

When we determine to live a life free from the defilement of the world around us, and when we make daily prayer a mark of that determination, maybe we too will find the strength and determination to take our stand for Jesus, even when the cost of doing so is daunting. Will you dare to be a Daniel?