The king decides that the best way to treat the people of
Israel is to make them good Babylonians, showing them how much better it is to
be Babylonian than Israelite. Surely
because he conquered them his society, everything about being Babylonian, must
be superior to their culture. It is an
interesting idea, take the sons of the leaders and the nobility, treat them
well, make them leaders in your world, and then turn them into Babylonians so
that the rest will follow them. Four of
the young men, however, remained faithful to their God and His ways rather than
be co-opted in this way and they rose head and shoulders above not only their
fellows who accepted the ways and the largesse of the king, but those of his
own people. They knew that it wasn't
superiority that had caused this situation, it was the Lord's doing whether the
king knew it or not, and they were a witness to him.
Jesus prays with the knowledge that He has been faithful and
blameless, bringing glory to the Father in His life and knowing that the most
severe test comes next. The most amazing
line in the prayer to me is, "Father, glorify me in your own presence with
the glory that I had with you before the world existed." How can anyone doubt that Jesus claimed to be
who the church has confessed Him to be since His resurrection? How can we not be roused to anger when we
hear this claim diminished in any way?
We must have the Jesus of the Creeds or we will have nothing of eternal
value. His prayer is that we, believers,
experience the oneness that He and the Father know. We are "in the world" and in the
same way that Daniel and his friends witnessed to a better way, God's way, we
are to witness to the world that its ways are not better than God's.
John says that Jesus indeed did what He prayed that night to
the Father, He did make the Father manifest.
John wrote the same in the prologue to the Gospel, "No one has ever
seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known." John says that in the writing of these
things, the sharing them with the church, his joy is complete. We are one in the confession of Jesus, the
recitation of the Nicene Creed in our worship is a moment of great unity around
a world-denying set of truths. We are to
walk in the light of God's Word and Spirit, together, and in that we show the
world who is this our God and why His ways are higher than our ways and His thoughts than our thoughts. We are intended to make Him manifest in our
lives and our fellowship that others may ask for that accounting of the hope
that lives in us that Peter wrote about.
We are aliens and strangers in this world.
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