The Daniel Files: 01 – Introduction

This is not my home. How do I cope?

October 1996. To do the degree I needed to be stationed near the lecture facilities. That required relocating from everything that I knew into somethng very different. I had not considered what it was like to be in a strange place because home and church life and created an effective cocoon. There was that world outside, which we were told about, but there was the safe haven of the bubble that we had. Not that I appreciated it at the time. I certainly got to know it when I left to relocate in October 1996.

Thousands of years earlier, however, a group of people were forcefully displaced from their home. Part of the consequence of generations of disobedience came to effect this generation of the people of Israel. They were now forced into exile.

This is not my home. How do I cope?

The book of Daniel is one of those written in the light of the exile of the children of Israel to Babylon because of their rejection of the God who had placed them in the promised land. It is about a young man growing to an old man grappling with the questions of coping far from home. Living out something of the sentiment that you can take the man out of Jerusalem, but you can’t take the God of Jerusalem out of the man committed to Him.

It’s a fascinating book for so many reasons. The structure of the book, the voices in the book, the perspectives in the book. How we study and take on what’s going on in the book. It’s narrative, it’s prophetic, it’s visionary, it’s political, it’s personal and it’s so much more. It is not just a man and His God. It is about cosmic issues as to who rules in the affairs of man. It’s not just the broadstrokes, it’s how a man deals with jealousy by his peers and challenges to compromise his faith. It is about who God is and who we are.

It’s a book I approach with great humility because I don’t claim to be an expert on it. I don’t want to approach it as if I’m an expert on it. I want to read it and hear God through it as to what was going on then … and how it applies to me – to us – now. It’s worth reading today, because for some reason such is the affinity to the world, to national/ethnic/cultural identity, that those who follow Jesus do not always remember that the sense of being displaced is the lot of every believer.

This is not our home. How do we cope?

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

C. L. J. Dryden