'He is the living God': When King Darius ordered a prayer lockdown, Daniel didn't comply

During covid lockdowns, did your church follow man's law, or did it answer to a higher power?

Church is God’s business. Covid lockdowns were man’s law. How did your church spend the pandemic?

How did you spend the covid lockdowns? How did your church spend it? Did it comply?

Did your pastor follow the governor’s orders, to “Stay Home and Stay Safe”? Or did he, and you, continue to preach and learn Scripture, together?

What to do? At the time, many preachers and leaders of the flock treated the lockdowns as a curveball. But we were given the answer to this test long ago.

What would God have us do? What might Jesus have done?

The best answer comes from Daniel 6, the story of Daniel in the lion’s den.

Daniel, one of the Israelite elite who served the Babylonian king in exile, was wise and respected. His ability to interpret dreams made him a type-of Joseph.

Daniel was trusted under King Nebuchadnezzar, but became a top man under King Darius, after the Persians overtook Babylon.

While “there is no man that sinneth not,” Daniel’s rivals couldn’t find anything good to use against him. He was rising fast under Darius, and other men wanted what he had.

“They could find no corruption in him,” reads Daniel 6:4, “because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent.”

But there was one thing about Daniel that he couldn’t change, and would not, if given the choice.

Daniel was a Jew. His ultimate loyalty was not to this ruler or that — men, all — but to the God of Israel.

In Daniel 6, the rivals scheme, and present King Darius with a plan. They tell the king that the experts “all agreed” he should ban prayer in his kingdom for the next 30 days — except to the king himself. Oh, and violators would be thrown in the lion’s den.

To an observant Jew in a foreign land, this is idolatry as public policy. Since praying to King Darius was out of the question, this was really a lockdown on prayer, carrying a penalty of death.

Throughout Israel’s journey, it has been eager to worship foreign gods.

Now, in Daniel, a Jew who had every excuse to turn away from God was refusing to do so.

He could have seen the lockdown as temporary. He could’ve paused his relationship with God, or prayed to Darius and told himself the words were meaningless. It was just a month, right? Why not be reasonable?

But Daniel didn’t ask for a faith-based exemption. He took it.

“We will never find any basis for charges against this man,” Daniel’s rivals said in Daniel 6:5, “unless it has something to do with the law of his God.”

In Esther, Mordecai was guilty of the same offense, of Judaism. He would not bow to man, only to God.

That was a problem for Haman, one of the king’s top aides, who wanted his deference. Haman tries to use Mordecai’s Jewishness against him. But God acts through Queen Esther, who speaks up and declares her own Jewishness to the king.

King Xerxes instead protects the Jews, and Haman is hanged in the same gallows he built for his nemesis.

We all think we have the faith, like Daniel, to survive the lion’s den. The consequences of breaking covid “orders” in 2020 were much less severe. How did you spend your pandemic? How did your church spend it?

When Daniel heard about the prayer lockdown, he want home and prayed about it.

He prayed not to Darius but to the God of Israel.

But that’s exactly what his rivals want him to do.

When Daniel prays, his rivals catch him in the act, and report him to the king.

“Daniel, who is one of the exiles from Judah” — one of them — “pays no attention to you, O king, or to the decree you put in writing,” his rivals tell King Darius in 6:13. “He still prays three times per day.”

The king is upset on hearing the news. He likes Daniel and does not want to hurt him. But the law is the law. Into the lion’s den Daniel must go.

"May your God, whom you serve continually, rescue you!” King Darius tells Daniel in 6:16, with Daniel tossed in among the lions.

A stone sealed the den, and that was that.

After one foodless, restless, sleepless night, King Darius checks on Daniel.

“Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually, been able to rescue you from the lions?” King Darius says in 6:20.

The king, in his mind, is talking to a dead man.

What reads like a question is actually a mockery. “Where is your God now?” is always said with a sneer.

This is the second time in four verses that King Darius refers to Daniel serving God “continually.” By that he meant: Even during my lockdown, you served your God.

Then Daniel does what the king thought impossible. He answers.

“My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouth of the lions,” Daniel said. “They have not hurt me, because I was found innocent in his sight. Nor have I ever done any wrong before you, O king.”

Daniel's accusers — and their families — are then fed to the lions, given the same punishment they arranged for Daniel.

The word “martyr,” in Greek, means “witness.”

Under Roman rule, Christians who witnessed to a relationship with Jesus, rather than deny him, were put to death.

Some were fed to lions. Unlike Daniel, most were not spared from death by angels.

As with Christianity itself, the first martyrs were Jews. Daniel was supposed to be one of them.

Under Roman rule, the early Christians were fed to lions.

But after Daniel survived a night in the lion’s den, King Darius held him, and the God of Israel, in a new esteem.

In Daniel 3, after trying to make martyrs of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon promotes the trio and forbids “the people of any nation or language” from insulting the God of Israel.

In Daniel 6, King Darius goes a step further than Nebuchadnezzar’s namaste.

He doesn’t just see Yahweh’s divinity, he issues a decree “that in every part of my kingdom people must fear and reverence the God of Daniel.”

“For he is the living God and he endures forever; his kingdom will not be destroyed, and his dominion will never end.

He rescues and he saves, he performs signs and wonders in the heavens and on Earth.

He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions.” — King Darius, Daniel 6:26-27

Twice in the first six chapters of Daniel, rulers of Babylon plotted against Israelites, trying to use their Jewishness, and their observance of tradition, against them.

And twice those stories end with those rulers bowing before God.

Twice, King Darius uses the phrase “the living God” to describe the God of Israel.

The first time was as a mockery. Yahweh was dead. If he were not, Israel never would have been exiled.

The second time was in reverence. “For he is the living God.”

During covid lockdowns, did your church leaders have the lion heart of Daniel? Or were they reasonable?

Did they do everything possible so keep the church as open as airports were, or as well-attended as Black Lives Matter protests?

Did they invoke their First Amendment right to worship, or their God-given right to fellowship?

Or did they follow man’s orders, and then apply for PPP loans?