Text: Daniel 1:3-8, Title: Brainwashing Believers, Date/Place: NRBC, 3/1/09, PM
A. Opening illustration: 8 Simple Rules to Date my Daughter
B. Background to passage: When God sovereignly gave Jehoiakim to Nebuchadnezzar, we must remember that it wasn’t the 586 complete obliteration of the city. And Nebuchadnezzar was determined to maintain his rule over Jerusalem through many ways, with complete military action kinda being a last resort. So one of his methods was to be that he would take the best and the brightest from the conquered people, retrain their minds, get them to think like a Babylonian, then use them to help control their own people. And so we begin the book of Daniel with this account. Satan is not always blasting trumpets to rally the troops for a frontal assault. More often he is subtle in his approach slowly leading astray with small compromises. Our culture today is driven by him to do exactly what Nebuchadnezzar did 2500 years ago.
C. Main thought: We will see the brainwashing techniques used on Daniel and us to thwart kingdom work.
A. Isolation (v. 3-4)
1. The fist step in N’s plan to brainwash the young people of Judah was to isolate them from the rest of the captive peoples. By all accounts these young men were probably about 14 years old. That’s when the Persians and Babylonians began their education/training programs for palace aids. N knew that if he could remove them from as many of the Judean influences as possible his plan would work better. Remove them from their families; remove them from regular worship with God’s people; remove them from people who lived out biblical commitments; remove them from daily religious education.
2. Heb 10:24-25,
3. Illustration: in the book Shepherding a Child’s Heart, Ted Tripp speaks to how spanking is biblical, but dealt with the qualifications of that thought, one of which was that it was carried out within a family relationship, then he spoke of corporal punishment in schools adding confusion, “In evangelical individualism people think of their personal relationship with God in isolation (“Just me and Jesus”) and forge their destiny apart from any church authority. While holding relatively low opinions of history, traditions, and the church, they turn to the experiences of self and isolate themselves from their brothers and sisters in the faith. True spirituality is perverted as it becomes a quest for inner stimulation rather than growth in biblical knowledge and the application of truth in community. Healthy Christians do not live in isolation.” –Michael Moriarty, “Sin demands to have a man by himself. It withdraws him from the community. The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation.” -Bonhoffer
4. Satan most easily preys on those among us that are young chronologically, or young spiritually. Maturity brings forth discernment, and so those that are without it are easier targets. Isn’t it interesting that when liberals desire to change the culture of a nation or people, they always speak of education, and consistently lower the ages upon which they want to begin it. Isn’t it sad that we do the same thing in the church? We take all the young people and put them in youth classes, youth rallies, youth camps, youth worship services, youth groups, and expect them to pool their ignorance and learn to be mature in isolation from every influence that would be helpful to that goal. Isn’t it seemingly the exact practice of our world? Remove children from their parents influence and care for 8 of their 12 waking hours as soon as they turn 5 years old? Even if we put the application to young believers, we usually isolate them to classes that deal with basics, or we give them no help at all, and they are isolated which our own congregations. We need the body of Christ for stimulating growth. We need older believer as examples and reservoirs of wisdom and counsel. We need strong family units that will pass on the faith to the next generation. A major element of God’s plan to pass on the faith to subsequent generations is the family. Speak about how in a few weeks we are going to come and listen to the prophet Josh McDowell. Truth is passed on through relationships, not in isolation from them.
B. Indoctrination (v. 4)
1. Clearly N wanted them to think like Babylonians. He specifically instructed his men to find these youths with top qualities so that they could learn the language and literature of the Chaldeans. Now, most of the time this word is used synonymously with Babylonians, but here it means Chaldeans. They were the priestly magic artists that counseled through divination and wisdom. This education was about far more than just being able to read and write cuneiform Akkadian. It was about getting them to think like Chaldeans, rather than like Israelites.
2. Rom 12:1-2, Philip 3:15, 19, Col 3:2, Heb 8:10, 1 Pet 1:13, Luke 6:40,
3. Illustration: When she asked me for my addresses, I pulled this envelope out of my pocket to look for them. In prison you’re not allowed to have a wallet, so you just carry an envelope. She asked, "Don’t you have a wallet?" And I said, "Well, yeah, this is my wallet." After five years of brainwashing in prison you think an envelope is a wallet. She walked into the other room and came back and said, "Here’s one of Billy’s wallets. He doesn’t need it. You can have it." "From kindergarten class on, our children, your grandchildren are being strategically targeted, psychologically abused and brainwashed by homosexual and pro-homosexual educators," "Your children are being warped into believing that same-sex families are acceptable." In that letter Boissoin called into question gay-rights curriculums permeating the province’s educational system. He said: “Children as young as five and six years of age are being subjected to psychologically and physiologically damaging pro-homosexual literature and guidance in the public school system; all under the fraudulent guise of equal rights.” All the books in recent years about worldview, ethics, thinking like a Christian—How to Stay Christian in College, Think Biblically, Beyond Belief to Conviction, Right from Wrong, Fool’s Gold, The Battle for the Beginning, “If you send your children to Caesar for education, don’t be surprised when they return and act like Romans.” -VB
4. The worlds answer to intolerance and racism, to teen pregnancy, to gun violence, to alcohol and drug addiction: education. The world attempts to indoctrinate us through public education, popular culture, news media biases, legislative means, movements like the feminist and homosexual rights movements. We are constantly bombarded with messages directly and indirectly (think about commercials and materialism and female body image) that tell us to think in terms other than biblical ones. And you might think, “that’s not so bad.” But when you are constantly hit with them, you slowly do begin to think like that. Pressure builds in peer groups, at school, at work, in the neighborhood to excel in things that the world desires—sports, education, entertainment, material possessions, many at the cost of biblical prescriptions like church, family, and time with Christ. Why can so many “Christians” believe in such unbiblical things! How can so many people sit and listen to Joel Osteen, think he is a good preacher? How can believers vote for Obama the most aggressive unborn child murderer to ever run for president? How can only 1.8% of evangelicals tithe? Isn’t a homosexual church an oxymoron? How can so many believers argue for evolution? How can The Shack and The Da Vinci Code be so popular with believers?
C. Compromise (v. 5)
1. I am sure that N thought he was providing the best food that money can buy. These boys were getting the best of the best food. But these foods would have also been offered to idols first, thus causing the partakers to indirectly sanction idol worship. Also, these foods would not have all been prepared correctly or be listed in the clean foods for the Jews. But think about it. They were hundreds of miles from Jerusalem, separated from family, the food is so good, and nobody would ever know…
2. 2 Tim 2:22, 1 Thess 4:3-5, 1 Tim 6:10-11, Heb 2:1,
3. Illustration: tell about the recent study that young people who make abstinence pledges are just as likely to engage in premarital sex as those who don’t, and less likely to use “protection,” Chuck Swindoll wrote, “Character is the moral, ethical, and spiritual undergirding that rests on truth, that reinforces a life in stressful times, and resists all temptations to compromise.” Middle School in ME distributing condoms,
4. The Satanic strategy of compromise is not new. We are all called upon daily to make small sacrifices on the altar of expediency or self-pleasure that result in sin against a holy God. The sexual revolution has given us internet pornography, high teen preg rates, and a president who thinks sex education needs to begin in kindergarten. Things we watch on TV or the internet would have embarrassed us years ago. This leads adults and teens alike to live secret lives of sin that nobody knows about. And it begins with “oh, just a little taste won’t hurt.” And millions end up paying a much higher price, separation from God. Again, the youth and young believers are most affected. They are called to compromise and don’t see it.
D. Confusion (v. 7)
1. It was a fairly common practice in the ancient world to give names to captured people that reflected the culture of the captors rather than their home country. Some commentators made little of the fact that it happened. But I believe it gets at the heart of what N is doing. He is trying to strip these young men of their faith and religion in order to get to their hearts. He is aiming at the deepest level of their being. He wants them to be reminded every time someone addresses them that they are servants of other gods now in the eyes of their captors. And that is the bottom line of the chosen names. Previously all of their names reflected Yahweh in some fashion. Their Chaldean names represented gods from the Babylonian pantheon.
2. Illustration: tell about the preamble on our will, the condition of our society…
3. This is why the bible instructs us to talk about the aspects of faith as we sit in our homes, walk in the way, as we lie down, rise up, morning, evening, on the bed in the darkness of night. This is why we are told to leave legacies, and inheritance that includes faith, leave markers and testimonies to the work of God in our lives. This is why our homes, offices, official documents, cars, computers, Facebook pages, clothing, language, etc, should be used to point to a greater and higher reality—Christ! And let me tell you that the home and the individual is where it starts! We should quit crying about prayer in schools until Dad leads in prayer daily in his home! Separation of church and state is something that Baptists have always believed in. The problem is that we have practiced in recent years separation of sacred and secular. There is no biblical separation. Your work is Christ’s work. Your office is Christ’s realm and you His sweet fragrance. Your money is His money. Everything we do should be of faith! Our lives are so compartmentalized that we squeeze God out of certain areas, rather than squeezing Him into every place that He is not. We must look for ways to include Christ into our lives, else the world will influence us to be like them and breathe the God-ignoring air, and swim in the godless cultural sea, and drink of the water of death, and smell of the fragrance of self-centered indulgence! If you are not diligent, you will fall! But if we are diligent, relational, and persistent, even if they strip rights away and completely remove God from the public sphere, we and our children will continue to love Christ, serve Him, doing whatever it takes to be faithful to Him, pass on truth to the next generations, and be salt and light in a dark and tasteless world that is perishing with the Christ that they are trying to extinguish.
A. Closing illustration: “Perhaps there has never been an age where so many Christians are so fashion conscious and so few professing Christians have been willing to dare to be different, not for the sake of being different, but for the sake of being a disciple of Christ.” –Sinclair Ferguson, Alan Melton’s testimony of his upbringing in a busy family and their own transition to a quiet home focus life in a less expensive home out of town and the joy it brings…
B. Recap
C. Invitation to commitment
Additional Notes
• Is Christ Exalted, Magnified, Honored, and Glorified?
