Daniel, The Lion’s Den, and American Christians

Many years ago, I asked a gentleman from Japan why he had come to the United States.  His reply startled me. He said that he had come to the U.S. to find Christianity because it is the religion of love and therefore had to be the right religion!  He saw a connection between Christianity, the love it manifested, and the United States.

America has never technically been a “Christian nation,” but was founded largely on Christian principles, making it the freest and most inviting place to live in world history, as witnessed by the millions who still desire to come here! There is only one reason for the hatred of the Left for this country, and it has to do primarily with power.  Leftists hunger for power, but America’s Constitution, political philosophy, and Christianity make tyranny difficult to implement here.

Christianity is probably their biggest obstacle. As poorly as we Christians have followed Christ, Christianity is still a visible representation of God, and God stands firmly with the “meek and humble,” not the totalitarian.  The optics of government crushing people known for compassion, sacrifice, and patience is not good!

Therefore, Leftists understand that Christianity must be weakened and corrupted in order to destroy its public image and reputation before they can gain the control they seek over the American people.  But how can that be accomplished when the public’s view of Christianity has been mostly positive for centuries?  It has been known as “the religion of love” worldwide!  Estimates put U.S. Christian charitable giving at fifty billion or more annually; so how do you turn the tide of public opinion against compassionate, loving, and law-abiding citizens?

Besides the obvious question of why anyone would want to destroy the greatest, freest, most generous country in history, is the question of how it would be possible to fool enough Americans to cause them to join in bringing their own country to its knees.  How does one turn a nation that has been considered “Christian” from its infancy, four hundred years ago, against itself?  How does one successfully malign a religious philosophy known for promoting kindness, love, generosity, patience, and “turning the other cheek?”

As we have seen, they did it by getting control of the nation’s cultural forums, normalizing lying and creating a false narrative about Christianity.  They invested heavily in magnifying individual Christian’s failures and glossing over and ignoring Christianity’s and the nation’s virtues and successes.  They have managed also, with help from a complicit, dishonest media, to turn good into evil and evil into good.

We will discover an amazing parallel situation in the Book of Daniel. That great Jewish man, Daniel, was taken as a teen to Babylon and trained to stand in the palace of the king. He was wiser than his age would suggest, and he became a trusted adviser not only to Nebuchadnezzar but also to subsequent rulers, so much so that not many years later, Darius the King was giving serious consideration to making him the second ruler over the entire Median empire.  This plan was not well received by other political leaders who had their own ambitions; so, they hatched a plot to destroy Daniel’s credibility and possibly end his life.

This is where we find an interesting connection to current politics.

In Daniel 6, we discover these conniving politicians gathered to discuss how they might undermine Daniel’s favor with Darius.  However, the text notes that concerning Daniel “they could find no charge or fault, because he was faithful; nor was there any error or fault found against him. Then these men said, ‘We shall not find any charge against this Daniel unless we find it against him concerning the law of his God.’”  They deduced that the only way to defeat Daniel was to place him in a situation where he had to choose between God and the king; and they knew what his choice would be!

Thereupon, these power-hungry politicians advanced their plan. Behind a façade of concern for the King, and under the guise of promoting unity and harmony in the kingdom, (Does their virtue signaling and flattery sound familiar?) they convinced Darius to sign a temporary law requiring everyone to pray only to him. This seemingly innocuous requirement, of course, put the Jehovah worshipping Daniel at odds with the law of the land! Instantly, the most faithful aid to the King had become a criminal facing punishment in a den of lions!

Did America’s Leftists read the book of Daniel to learn how to turn America’s most compassionate community into outcast “haters and bigots” virtually overnight?  Who knows, but if they did, they did not read far enough!  Regardless, their tactic is apparently working for the moment.  With the Left’s juggernaut of “wokeness” and “tolerance” for aberrant behavior they have temporarily placed anyone with Christian convictions in the position of appearing to be unloving and divisive!

And, like the Median politicians’ ploy of forcing everyone (specifically targeting Daniel, a worshipper of God) to accept idolatry or pay a price, the Left is creating a political landscape in America where failure to worship at their altar will also be costly.  (Interesting that nearly three-thousand years later the target of the Left is also worshippers of God; and like Daniel’s situation, a basis for accusing Christians must be created from nothing!)

In the same way that Daniel’s coworkers sought to force him to irrationally worship a mere man or face death, so Leftists today demand that Christians celebrate a number of destructive lies or suffer serious consequences.

Sadly, corrupt political ambition, like all sin, blinds those who are governed by it, and in Daniel’s situation the efforts of the corrupt politicians to destroy him came back to bite them, (no pun intended).  Their plan to have Daniel eaten by Lions became their own destiny!

I do not know the short or long term consequences of the Left’s efforts to normalize immorality and gain political supremacy in the United States, but I do know that God will bring every work of every man into judgment at some time; and the consequences of the Left’s deliberate destruction of so much that is good, and their obstinate rejection of truth and godliness will not go unnoticed by God.

As for us Christians?  By God’s grace we will grow in our convictions, in our numbers, and in our Christlikeness, and through grace and mercy reflect the holy, good, and righteous character of our Great God and Savior Jesus Christ to people who desperately need Him but have not yet recognized it!