Pressure To Conform

Train these young men in the language and literature of Babylon.   Daniel 1:4

Daniel had grown up under the care of his parents and the influence of godly people. Now suddenly he was taken out of that environment and placed in a new situation, where he had to stand on his own two feet and make his own decisions.

He and his friends were placed by the king under the care of a tutor named Ashpenaz to teach them a new language using a completely different set of textbooks than they were used to. Back in Jerusalem, they would have studied Hebrew and learned the Bible, but neither was on the curriculum in Babylon.

Daniel was exposed to a whole new spectrum of learning. Much of it would have been quite foreign to him, and a great deal of it would have been in direct conflict with what he had been taught from the Scripture as a child. Learning the literature of the Babylonians would have meant learning about their history and culture, as well as learning about the myths of their gods—Marduk, Bel, and Nebo.

There would have been all the usual discussions among the students over coffee. And there would have been challenges like these from their teacher and from the other students: “Do you seriously believe that your God is the only god?” “Don’t you understand? Every culture has its own religious stories. They all point to the same spiritual reality.” “Do you think you’re the only ones who have the truth?” “These Bible stories are simply a way of describing the author’s personal beliefs.” It is not very different for many Christian young people in secular universities today.

Parents are sometimes distressed over the things their children are taught in secular schools. And students are often required to read books that are in direct contradiction to the truth. This is nothing new. It is exactly the situation Daniel faced.

God has given us a model of how one godly young person and a group of his friends stood against that pressure. Their secular education, far from overwhelming them, was actually the making of them. In the goodness of God, their Babylonian education became the anvil on which their faith was hammered out into maturity.

For further reading, see 1 Peter 1