Where Do You Draw the Line When Everyone Else Is Going Along?

Daniel 1, quiet conviction, and an airport plan that could have used a little more planning.

By Pastor John Erickson

In college, I spent a summer in South America. I had visited a family in Paraguay on a mission trip and thought it would be a fantastic idea to go back for the summer.

So I got on a plane.

And about two hours into a fourteen-hour flight, an inconvenient thought occurred to me. I didn't speak the language. I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't know my host's address or phone number. I wasn't even completely confident I'd recognize him at the airport.

That left me roughly twelve hours to think about the brilliance of my plan.

When I arrived, the signs were in Spanish. Everything felt unfamiliar. I was taller than most people around me, and I stuck out in practically every way imaginable. Thankfully, my friend found me.

I learned what it feels like, at least in a small way, to be somewhere you don't belong.

Babylon had a plan for Daniel

In Daniel 1, Daniel and his friends are taken from Judah into Babylon. Unlike my trip, theirs wasn't voluntary. They were displaced from home by the power of an empire.

Babylon had a strategy for the young exiles: teach them the language, give them an elite education, rename them, and feed them from the king's own table. The goal was to shape them into good Babylonians.

The pressure was subtle in some ways and overwhelming in others. This is who you are now. This is how you live. This is the place where your future comes from.

And Daniel was willing to participate in a surprising amount of it. He learned. He trained. Eventually he served the king.

But Daniel 1:8 says he resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine.

There was a line he would not cross.

Why the food mattered

It is worth noticing that this isn't a passage about the spiritual superiority of vegetables. Daniel isn't announcing a brand-new biblical diet. Israel's laws permitted meat and wine in appropriate circumstances.

The text says the royal food would defile Daniel, without spelling out every reason. His refusal becomes a point of distinction: a daily reminder that he belongs to the God of Israel, even while living in Babylon.

Sometimes faithfulness looks dramatic. Other times it looks like a relatively ordinary choice that nobody understands unless they know what matters to you.

And I appreciate the way Daniel approaches it. He doesn't start by insulting everyone in the dining room. He asks for permission, works with the official, and proposes a test. He holds his conviction without treating everybody around him like the enemy.

There is wisdom in that.

We sometimes confuse conviction with combativeness. We assume that if we aren't loud enough, we must not be serious. Daniel's example reminds us that integrity can be both firm and thoughtful.

The pressure to blend in

Every culture has things it takes for granted. Work yourself to exhaustion. Build an identity around what you earn. Treat people as obstacles. Let popularity determine what is true.

Not everything around us is evil. Babylon gave Daniel useful education; he didn't have to reject every aspect of it to remain faithful. But some values ask for more than participation. They ask for worship.

That is where we need discernment.

While preparing this message, I was reading the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 during my devotional time. Jesus calls the humble, the merciful, and the peacemakers blessed. Those are very different priorities from wealth, power, and getting our own way.

It made me ask how often I absorb the world's values and then try to 'Jesus-ize' them. Add a little religious language, leave the rest alone, and call it discipleship. That question gets uncomfortable surprisingly quickly.

Where have we learned to go along because stopping would be awkward? Where have we accepted an expectation simply because everybody else accepts it? Where have we made our peace with something Jesus is trying to change in us?

I suspect most of our lines in the sand won't look as dramatic as Daniel's. It may be honesty when a half-truth would make life easier. Refusing to dehumanize someone during an argument. Choosing not to join a conversation that turns another person into a punch line. Making room for God when the rest of life wants every available minute.

Trusting what God is doing

Daniel's decision involved risk. The official had a legitimate fear: if the young men looked unhealthy, the king might punish him.

Daniel proposes a ten-day test. The outcome, the narrative says, is favorable. God grants them wisdom and understanding; Daniel and his friends continue their preparation.

But we should be careful here. This story isn't a guarantee that every courageous decision will end in immediate success. Elsewhere in Daniel, faithfulness will come with much greater danger. The point isn't that obedience is a trick for getting everything to work out.

The point is that Daniel's confidence rests in God, not in Babylon's approval.

My Paraguay airport experience makes me laugh now because the plan was so spectacularly underdeveloped. Trust isn't supposed to be a substitute for good planning. But that summer did teach me something about depending on God when I couldn't manage all the variables.

We rarely get to manage all the variables.

The invitation is to be faithful with the choice that is in front of us.

You can live in Babylon without letting Babylon live in you.