Cadyville Wesleyan Church
Thriving in Babylon challenges us to hope in God and strive to live in a unique way, even compared to other religious people. In what appears to be an increasingly godless society, we are called to live as people of hope, humility, and wisdom. Though Daniel lived thousands of years ago, he has much to teach us today.
Since the Garden of Eden, in fact, humanity has felt a cognitive dissonance, a discomfort with the status quo, this overwhelming feeling like something is amiss, as though something is awry.
Daniel 7:13-14 NIV
These Gospel messages proclaimed throughout the kingdom that something had happened, and that something would happen.
The Gospel is good news because Christ came to establish the Kingdom of God here on earth.
“The whole point of the gospels is to tell the story of how God became king, on earth as in heaven.”
- N.T. Wright
Matthew 3:2 NIV
“On the lips of Jesus, the gospel was about the dramatic moment in history when, through the long-awaited Messiah, the kingdom of God had broken through in time and space. The good news was the good news of the kingdom.”
- R.C. Sproul
John 18:36 NLT
Mark 10:43-45 NIV
Jesus was leading a new kind of kingdom, one that looked nothing like their own. And one that could not be defeated.
The Kingdom of Heaven was a Gospel that had happened, but also a Gospel that would happen.
Jesus challenged his followers to a new understanding of kingdom, a new understanding of citizenship, a new understanding of victory. He called them to an entirely new way of thinking.
Jeremiah 29:5-7 NIV
While they were exiles, the one thing they were never to forget, the one tension they were always to feel, was that they didn’t belong to Babylon. Their heart belonged to another.
Philippians 3:20 NIV
The life of the exile challenges us to reorient our allegiances.
John 15:18-19 NLT
“[They were] admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth...they were longing for a better country- a heavenly one.”
- Hebrews 11:13b,16a
“Preserving this ‘alien status’ is not an addendum to our calling as kingdom-of-God citizens; it belongs to the essence of what it means to be a kingdom-of-God citizen. The way we advance the kingdom of God is by being the unique kingdom of God in contrast to the kingdom of the world.”
- Greg Boyd
The Holy Roman Empire started a new tension that exists to this day: the tension between the empire that claimed itself to be holy and the Kingdom of God that is.
American Christians seem themselves as co-equally American and Christian, feeling no tension between these two identities.
“However, I have this against you: you have abandoned your first love. Do you remember what it was like before you fell? It’s time to rethink and change your ways; go back to how you first acted.”
- Revelation 2:4-5