Singing in Babylon: Finding Purpose in Life's Second Choicesنموونە

 Here’s a dream, more a nightmare.

You are living happily in the location of your choice. Life is good, comfortable, happily predictable.

War suddenly breaks out, and a totally unexpected defeat comes at the hands of a foreign power. Rumors abound about the brutality of the advancing soldiers, who are rapidly approaching your area.

The dreaded day dawns. Enemy soldiers arrive, and pound on the door. They order you to pack your things: your home no longer belongs to you. You are being deported, shipped off to that foreign country, together with some other leaders and influencers from the community. All your plans, hopes, dreams—your whole life—all has been snatched from your grasp.

Choices? You have none right now, and the horizon looks bleak.

At last, you arrive in the place where you will be forced to settle and make your home, but it is an alien place, where everything is unfamiliar. Again, you have no choice. Nobody is asking what you think, if you like it here. You’re a commodity. You’ve been trafficked.

You wonder: Where is God in all of this? Is He there? Worse still, if He is there, does He care?

As we turn to the story of Daniel, which unfolded 2,600 years ago, around 600 years before Christ, we see he faced an unexpected development that he would never have chosen: and one he would live with for the rest of his days. Deported, probably as a hostage, with a few friends to the strange land of Babylon, he was now in a location and situation where absolutely everything about the culture—music, food, customs, religion, philosophy, education, values—was all utterly foreign to him. Daniel, a contemporary of the fiery prophet Ezekiel, was a young man whose name means “God is my judge.” Now he was suddenly caught up in the maelstrom in what was an extended period of exile, the judgment of God upon His wayward people.

So what’s all this got to do with us, thousands of years later?

We’ve been relocated. We too live in exile.

It’s always true of Christians that we live as foreigners, exiles, resident aliens. Exile is the place where we are not fully at home yet, and where God is not fully in charge—yet.

And that is where we live.

One day every knee will bow, but for now, the world remains broken. We are establishing a kingdom colony as we live as the people of God, and one bright day the new Jerusalem will come down, and the good King will fully take charge. In the meantime, we are resident aliens, living here but with a passport from another kingdom.

We are in exile, which is where the church began. In fact, they were an exilic people among an exiled people. Birthed in a nation that was governed by the occupying Roman forces (and therefore, in a sense, exiled within their own nation), they were initially a tiny minority, viewed as a strange sect within Judaism.