Promised-Land People in Strange Lands

On being faithful where you live even when it makes you look unfaithful to others

The prophet Daniel was a captive from Judah in Israel, part of the deportation forced by Nebuchadnezer in 605 BC. In today’s terms we might call him and his friends (Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah) victims of human trafficking. Good-looking and smart (Daniel 1:4), they were assigned a three-year course of study to learn how to administrate government affairs. In this way, the Babylonians aimed to exploit them and erase them at the same time. They were given pagan names, taught pagan wisdom, given pagan clothes and food. Babylon wanted to save the men, but kill the Hebrews—so they could put the men to work.

The life of Daniel is a case study in what it looks like to remain faithful to the God of Israel while the king of Babylon has his boot on your neck. It’s also a case study in faithful contextualization.

Daniel rose quickly through the ranks in Babylon. By chapter 6, Daniel had “so distinguished himself among the administrators and the satraps by his exceptional qualities that the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom” (6:3). The other administrators and satraps were upset about this. They wanted to get Daniel out of the way by catching him in the act of breaking some law or convention. 

This wasn’t easy to do, because Daniel was a stand-up guy. The text calls him “trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent” (6:4). His single exploitable weakness was that he was devoted to Yahweh. The only way to trip him up, they thought, was to leverage his piety against him: “We will never find any basis for charges against this man Daniel unless it has something to do with the law of his God” (6:5).

Daniel was in the habit of praying three times a day toward Jerusalem while kneeling in an open window. This practice was predictable and public enough that his political adversaries could count on it. They talked Darius into passing a law forbidding anyone to pray to anyone besides Darius for the next 30 days—then they waited for Daniel to break it. 

And break it he did. When Daniel heard the news, he went right on ahead with his daily prayers. His enemies had him arrested and tossed into a lion’s den. 

Daniel survived. But that’s not what I find interesting.

Two questions intrigue me. First, why did Daniel pray three times a day toward Jerusalem? Second, why was he so committed to the practice that he was willing to be torn apart by lions rather than give it up? 

Daniel’s enemies assumed this form of prayer was based on “the law of his God.” But there’s nothing in the Law that prescribes praying toward Jerusalem, praying three times a day, or praying out an open window. This was a form of devotion Daniel appears to have innovated. Sure, there are texts you can pull together to justify it. (Three times of prayer may correspond to three daily sacrifices, and toward Jerusalem makes sense if you can’t be in Jerusalem.) So praying toward Jerusalem three times a day is perfectly reasonable. But it’s not a biblical mandate, not something God said you must do. It’s an “extra-biblical” practice that can be justified by the Bible but is not required by the Bible. 

Yet Daniel was so committed to this extra-biblical practice that he was willing to die for it. 

Daniel’s innovation in his prayer life was necessary because living as a captive in Babylon made it impossible to worship God the way the Law prescribed. The Law was designed explicitly to direct how God’s holy people should live in his holy land. The Law says over and over, “When you enter the land I’m giving you, you must live in this way” (Exodus 12:25; Leviticus 19:23; Deuteronomy 26:1, for example). But now, instead of living in the Promised Land, God’s people are living in a strange land. Being estranged from the land makes worshiping as the law requires virtually impossible.

Daniel couldn’t offer tithes and offerings before the Lord at the Temple. He couldn’t travel to Jerusalem for holy days. It’s unclear whether he could observe the Sabbath. (Did administrative offices close for the weekend in ancient Babylon?) If he was unable to follow the weekly and seasonal rhythms the Law set out for worship, unable to offer tithes and sacrifices in the temple, generally unable to do most of the things that reminded Israelites what it meant to be Israelites, then he had to get creative. He settled on praying three times a day in the direction of the temple he couldn't visit, with his window open—perhaps as a reminder to himself and anyone looking on that his true allegiance lay elsewhere.

The problem Daniel was trying to solve was how to live as a Promised-Land person in a strange land.

Faithful Contextualization

What Daniel was doing is what we at City to City (where I oversee publishing efforts) often call “contextualization.” Conversations about contextualization often prioritize communication. The key biblical texts are often the speeches in the Book of Acts, where the apostles modulate their presentations of the gospel when they address different audiences.

But the concept of contextualization is broader than communication. Contextualization is about faithful incarnation. It’s about living faithfully before God in our whole lives—in our work, worship, service, and devotion—in a particular time and place, within the challenges, limitations, and opportunities that time and place affords. For Daniel, that meant worshiping Yahweh outside the Promised Land. For Christians today, it means following Jesus as Promised-Land people in whatever strange land we might inhabit. 

The choices Daniel made are interesting and surprising. He accepted a name change, as well as formal education in the “language and literature” of the Babylonians, which would’ve included religious instruction, ethics, history, law, and more. He drew a line at diet and devotion. 

White American evangelicals like me might have different impulses. For most American Christians, diet is a matter of our waistline, not worship. We say, “Don’t call anything clean that God has made clean and pass the bacon.” Instead, we draw the line at learning the “language and literature” of the society we belong to. I was taught, as a matter of discipleship, to avoid learning about evolution in science class and protest reading anything in English class that talked about sex or used profanity. Some Christians today, on principle, avoid discussions about critical race theory and intersectionality. Like Daniel, one can justify these decisions by reference to the Bible. “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2) and “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Colossians 3:2) and so on. But refusing to engage with the “language and literature” of our contemporary society is technically an “extra-biblical” practice. And some of us are so committed to it that we’d be willing—well, we won’t go to the lions for it, but we’ll make a fuss, for sure.

Based on the example of Daniel, then, here are few observations about contextualization. 

First, contextualization is always local.

If contextualization is about being Promised-Land people in a strange land, it’s also true that no two “strange lands” are exactly alike. Different times and places present different challenges, limitations, and opportunities for discipleship. The people best equipped to know what faithfulness looks like in a particular time and place are the people who live then and there. We need to be prepared that faithfulness may look very different for different people at different times and places. 

Take Esther, for example. Like Daniel, Esther’s place was Babylon. Her time, however, was different. The events of her life took place about 60 years after Daniel died. Esther’s cousin, Mordecai, was part of the same deportation from Judah as Daniel (Esther 2:6). Esther had been raised by Mordecai, and times had changed. While Daniel had been open about his devotion to Yahweh, Mordecai kept his Jewishness a secret and instructed Esther to do the same. As a result, Esther’s faithfulness looked very different from Daniel’s. Unlike Daniel, she ate the king’s “special food” (2:9). Unlike Daniel, because she “had a lovely figure and was beautiful” (2:7) she ended up in sexual service to king Xerxes. Whether because she was a woman or because there was a new sheriff in town, Esther appeared to have less flexibility than Daniel in how she incarnated her faithfulness. Nevertheless, her faithfulness saved the nation (4:14). 

Contextualization is always local. And that means faithfulness may look different from one place—or one time—to another.

Second, contextualization is always provisional.

Local situations change. Sympathetic rulers die and tyrannical rulers rise. Ways of being faithful that are possible in one generation become impossible in the next—as the generational difference between Daniel and Esther suggests. Limitations and opportunities for faithfulness may vary from one part of the population to another—as the gender difference between Daniel and Esther suggests.

In the book of Acts, Paul and Barnabas engaged in “sharp dispute and debate” (15:2) with fellow believers who were convinced that “unless you are circumcised…you cannot be saved” (15:1). Paul maintained that circumcision was unnecessary for Gentile converts. He told the Galatians, “if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all” (Galatians 5:2). Even so, Paul had Timothy circumcised “because of the Jews who lived in that area” (Acts 16:3) even while they traveled to spread the good news that circumcision was not required for salvation! What’s going on?

For Paul, circumcision wasn’t required for salvation, but it could be expedient for mission. Circumstances rendered certain commitments provisional.

For both of these reasons, contextualization is always controversial.

We don’t know how other faithful Israelites interpreted Daniel’s actions. His friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are missing from the story. (Maybe they lived in another city in the empire at the time.) Maybe they thought his commitment to this form of prayer was overly rigid, adding unnecessarily to the already-stringent requirements of the Law. It’s possible that if the people back in Israel, those who were left behind in the deportation, caught wind of Daniel’s situation, they might’ve considered him a compromiser for adopting a Babylonian name, education, and customs. 

There’s no formula in the Bible that tells us how to live like Promised-Land people in the diverse strange lands we inhabit. Different people, equally committed to the Scriptures and led by the Holy Spirit, will come to different conclusions about what faithfulness looks like in their time and place. When someone in a distant place lives out their Christian commitments differently than us, we often find them inspiring. But when someone in the same place as us lives out their faith differently, we often make judgments about them. Too often, we conclude they are doing it wrong if they are doing it differently. 

One source of conflict in American evangelicalism is that Americans tend to view America as one place that’s basically the same everywhere. Very soon we’re going to have to come to terms with the fact that faithful Christian witness will look different in the many different kinds of communities that make up America.

Contextualization and the Global Church

Wherever we live, we are God’s covenant people, instructed to walk in the Way of Jesus in an inhospitable environment. 

We have two advantages Daniel did not: the global church and the indwelling Holy Spirit. 

While I stand by the statement that only locals can discern what faithful contextualization in their time and place looks like, I’m also convinced that locals can’t do that discerning alone. It helps to have someone outside your situation speaking into your situation. The global church provides this sort of accountability. If we truly worked together, we could have robust conversations about how to be Promised-Land people all over the world. Few things thrill me more than imagining a global church actively discussing, debating, and mutually submitting to one another’s insights as we sort out what faithfulness looks like where each of us lives. 

The Holy Spirit’s job is to remind us of everything Jesus taught and to teach us new things (John 14:26). The “new things” are not new doctrines contrary to what Jesus taught. Instead, they are deeper insights into what it means to follow Jesus when and where we live. In the book of Acts, the Holy Spirit drives the apostles into interactions with surprising guides—sorcerers, eunuchs, centurions, and more—who help them better understand the depth and breadth of the gospel. It’s the Holy Spirit who led the council at Jerusalem to conclude that Jewish-background believers shouldn’t burden Gentile-background believers with circumcision (15:28). It was the Holy Spirit who taught Peter that “God does not show favoritism” (Acts 10:34-35).

One of the things that excites me most about my work with City to City is the potential it represents for the global church to meet with expectation that the Holy Spirit will guide us all, as we discuss and debate and repent and are renewed together, into greater insight about what it means to follow Jesus in our time and place.

In fact, carefully considering how to be faithful in my own time and place is what motivates all my writing (and a lot of my reading). Thank you for walking with me.