This is a study that originates in the book of Daniel and will be examining what we call "standard non-situational responses to situations." We know that when we look at God we think of a non-situational intelligence—an intelligence that stands outside the system that is not controlled by anything within a situation. Also spread out throughout the book of Daniel, but especially in Chapter 1, there is this impression that God pushes his intelligence upon us. So early on, in our series on the book of Daniel, we discussed this "pushed" intelligence—a non-situational intelligence.

We are individuals living in what we call the "world situation" and we could draw this as a box with 3 sides. We are in the middle of the box. The world situation would constitute all the things that we have to face that are of a space/time variety. In the middle of these real-life, space/time circumstances, we ask certain questions. "How should I handle this?" "How do I deal with this person?" "How do I deal with this circumstance?" "What should I do?" becomes a question that is uppermost on our minds. Of course when we ask that question, most often (not in every case) we are thinking of a situational response to a situation because that makes sense. "This is the way the world works" we would suggest to ourselves. We need to find a way to relate to all the stuff going on in the world situation that makes sense in the realities that we face. So we approach all situations with that point of view—looking for situational responses to situations. People have always done that, and we have a large number of illustrations of that happening both in the Old and New Testaments.

The fact of the matter is that this stands against the clear teaching of scripture. What we are encouraged to do from the book of Daniel, as well as in other places (we will discuss other pragmatic examples where this principle is taught) is to look for a non-situational response to situations. Of course, this seems scandalous or heretical because it doesn’t seem to make sense. We could well understand why certain people, such as the example in 1 Corinthians 1:18 and the verses following, had come to the conclusion that the gospel had to be foolishness because it was a non-situational response to the real world.

In the book of Daniel, we find this man and his three friends, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, constantly making non-situational responses to real space/time circumstances. So I decided to go back to look at the book to discover the nature of these non-situational responses. We have found several of them and will begin discussing these one at a time. I have decided to refer to these as "standard" non-situational responses, because for those of us living on the basis of faith, these kinds of responses would be automatic or habitual to us. These are the things that we should see as standard operational procedures within any given situation. The key term here is not the word "standard," but it is the term "non-situational."

We are in situations. How is it possible for us to make non-situational reactions or non-situational decisions, or reach non-situational conclusions or take non-situational responses relative to these circumstances? This becomes a primary question. We also have to bear in mind here that these several non-situational responses that we will be discussing in this study are also concomitant; that is, they all take place at the same time. Within any given world situation—facing persecution, injustice, illness, financial difficulties, difficult relationships, sociological difficulties, psychological problems relative to the external world—whatever it may be, these responses will help us to deal with it. So it becomes very helpful to us to know how to respond to these world situations. The main question now becomes: "How does the Lord, in effect, want us to respond?"

If we take Daniel as the starting point, we would discover that God requires of us a non-situational response to all situations. There is a kind of counter-intuition about this. This doesn’t seem to make sense on the surface, but that is because we have to take into consideration how the Lord governs the universe and what he is doing through faith operating in us within world situations.

Beginning with the first one of these standard non-situational responses, we are going to call it "the isolation decision." This type of approach shows up in several places in the book of Daniel. We begin in Daniel 1:8 and the following verses. We could say the context runs from 1:8-16. "But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself in this way." Now this is a unique decision for this young man to make in view of the things that surround him. He is in the Babylonian Empire. He has been picked out of the lineup of Hebrew captives because he has certain qualities. He was in Jerusalem when it was destroyed, when the city and the temple were destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar; and he, along with some other captives, were carted off to Babylon.

If we go back to Daniel 1:3, we get the larger impression of what surrounded this man and his three friends (a grander appreciation of the world situation that he faced at that time). "Then the king ordered Ashpenaz, chief of his court officials, to bring in some of the Israelites from the royal family and the nobility—young men without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning, well informed, quick to understand, and qualified to sere in the king’s palace. He was to teach them the language and literature of the Babylonians." They were to be taken care of at the expense of the royal purse. One of the first things we note about the world situation that these men face is that they were not there to be independent of the Babylonian Empire. They were brought there, when they were picked out of the lineup, to be conformed to the Babylonian system. They were not there to make up their own rules. They were not there to be given the kind of independence to pursue their own direction, their own life, their own destiny. They were there at the behest of the king of the Babylonian Empire,.

They are in that situation with a kind of understanding, knowing that they are not there to be independent, and not there to be isolated from the Babylonian system—quite the opposite. They are there to be transformed from a Jew into a Babylonian functionary. The measures that the Babylonians took in order to do that were to teach them the Babylonian language, culture, how the bureaucracy operated, and their literature. The reason they exposed them to this three-year training program was to reshape their minds; to get a kind of conformity, a kind of restructuring taking place in their minds. So we have this reality facing these individuals. Apparently, the Babylonian king had plenty of resources and force at his disposal to make this conformity come about. Most likely others had been placed in this kind of training program before and had been shaped up very well. Now we have Daniel coming along, who is a Jew, loyal to God; and he is going to have to confront this world situation.

He faces the same questions that we all have to face: "How am I going to handle this?" "What am I going to do?" "What is my purpose here?" "How am I going to handle all of the details of the elements that are involved in this world situation?" These are the very same questions that we need to ask today. We get the answer beginning in verse 5: "The king assigned them a daily amount of food and wine from the king’s table. They were to be trained for three years, and after that they were to enter the king’s service." In verse 8, it says, "But Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine, and he asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself in this way." Now if we think of the Babylonian Empire as a lake and the Babylonian culture as a lake, this is just the very outer perimeter of this great vast construction, which is the Babylonian world and its bureaucracy, culture, language, literature, and understanding of the world. When we talk about eating from the king’s table, to most men this would have been considered a privilege, an honor. They would have had presumably the best of everything. But Daniel decides that this is a mistake for him. And so he had to make a decision at this particular point.

This is at the edge of the great lake, which is Babylon. This is not down at the bottom drinking profoundly of the Babylonian waters. This is not absorbing deeply from everything that they believed and thought. This stuff lies at the very perimeter of his exposure to the Babylonian Empire. This is before he gets into having to weigh specific kinds of philosophical concepts against the revelation of his God. So what does he do relative to this very immediate and superficial problem that he faces regarding the king’s meat? Now it is obvious that this man is alert. He is not just waiting for things to happen in some sort of bland mental state. He is weighing things, thinking about things. He has been chosen and placed in this elite group to be trained, but he is thinking. And he is not just thinking independently. He is thinking from a biblical point of view about everything that surrounds him. He had to come to a conclusion about this food. Perhaps seemingly a minor decision, but it was important to him because he did not want to offend God. He did not want to defile himself and his three friends didn’t want to do that. So he resolved in his heart not to defile himself with the royal food and the wine and he asked for permission not to defile himself in this way.

Daniel clearly, early on, had made an isolation decision. He made a decision that would isolate him somewhat from the Babylonian culture and a lot of these influences that were going to act upon him. We have here a manifestation of one of the conclusions that he reached about one of the elements. That is not the only element involved, of course. And it might be considered somewhat peripheral, but to him it was important and to him it was a matter of faith and a matter of principle built on biblical understanding. So now he has to make a decision. We know of Daniel that he never made compromises, this was not his inclination, this was not his understanding of the way in which he related to God. While it is my way of expressing this and not his terminology, we can see a certain principle that is involved here. He decides that he will be in the Babylonian sociology, but he will not be of it. Lines are going to have to be drawn. There is a kind of epistemological isolation, which carries him beyond the moral limitations.

He is not just thinking about his relationship to the Babylonian Empire in terms of the morality that is involved. He is talking about his relationship to the world situation from a non-situational perspective. He is not making this decision because of the situation. Others who had decided to make a situational decision would have perhaps concluded, "Well this is not worth making a fight over, or creating difficulty, let’s go on and we’ll draw the line at some other place where there is a lot more involved." But Daniel is going to react to this element just like he will react to all other elements. Apparently, from what we can see from the book of Daniel about this man and his three friends, they did not draw distinctions in their own minds between what they thought was a big issue and what they thought was a small issue. If the Lord desired something of them, then all other decisions had been settled. There was nothing else to concern themselves about. The Lord had revealed his desires and that was that and there were not going to be any compromises or changes. There should be isolation at this particular point from any other concerns.

Daniel made an isolation decision. We could say looking at Daniel 1:8, that this isolation decision might be the most primitive calculation that anyone could ever make. We call it a primitive calculation because this is the first calculation that we would make. He wants to know that he is not going to be defiled and that he is going to be in the Babylonian culture but not of it. He did not mean this in a sophist way where it could be bent to his own advantage. He drew lines and he maintained that kind of isolation from any other concerns.

Now in our own circumstances, we are dealing with a world that is extremely real to us, extremely tangible, and therefore extremely situational. What is the first decision, the first question that we ask? What is the most primitive calculation that an individual living today would make relative to that world situation? It must be the isolation decision--the decision not to be defiled. It may be the case that we don’t always know when, where or how we are being defiled. We can’t always know that unless we have a revelation. Now that is the difference. Daniel had a revelation and he used it to represent his material circumstances. He used a non-situational revelation, a non-situational intelligence that has come from God to determine how he will relate to the situation. This is a non-situational response to the situation when he asks the chief official for permission not to defile himself in this way.

One has to wonder that if we make situational responses to situations that we run the risk of being defiled. I would think that this is the case. We wouldn’t even know whether or not we have been defiled by thinking certain things, by doing certain things without the benefit of a revelation. Now that is the operational basis upon which he reaches his conclusion. So Daniel makes a decision. Daniel is not going to be defined by the Babylonian system nor by the Babylonian culture. His thinking is not going to be defined by the situation whatsoever. Now that has a lot of implications for this man. In the same way, we would make a decision to be isolated in such a way as to not be defined by the American system, by the American situation, or by the American culture.

In Daniel’s case, the Babylonian system provided certain advantages to him. He could perhaps achieve great wealth, influence and eminence within the empire. Or at the very least, he could secure for himself and for his loved ones some degree of security, some degree of insulation from injustice, mistreatment and some of the vagaries of the system as they would confront them. But he decided that he was not going to be defined by those advantages. This is the same kind of decision that Paul, the apostle, essentially would have pronounced after his incursion with the Lord on the road to Damascus. Although he had grown up in the Jewish system and had achieved great prominence in the Jewish system, he would no longer be defined by its advantages.

Daniel also decided that he would not be defined by the Babylonian system in terms of its disadvantages of which there could have been a considerable number. We are dealing with a king here who was somewhat arbitrary. One gets the impression reading the book of Daniel that Nebuchadnezzar was hot-tempered, arbitrary, and spontaneous sometimes in what he did. Obviously he was a great leader, an awesome personality, a dynamic kind of individual to accomplish what he had done so far. Now we know from other statements made in the book that it was the Lord that had given that part of the world into his hands. He did not understand that. But beyond all this, he must have been an imposing personality. The threat of death, imprisonment, forfeiture, torture, punishment, and slavery were all possible disadvantages. And as we read through the book, we see a number of cases where men of faith had to face these disadvantageous aspects of being part of the Babylonian system.

These four men were situationally desirable. They were youthful, handsome, smart, well educated, and quick to learn. When we think about situational desirability it is often seen as an advantage. It looks like it is an advantage. But as we study the life of Daniel it turns out not to be an advantage. We are often told how we need to "sell ourselves" to the system. In fact, recently on the Internet, I accessed a channel that had to do with employment concerns. In that database were a lot of things stated about how to write resumes and how to dress appropriately and how to refer to a potential employer in job interviews. There were discussions about how we should talk in general, what we should say and not say from a legal perspective, and a lot of other things associated with how to approach a potential employer. The bottom line was how we could position ourselves, how we could sell ourselves, how we could appear to be situationally desirable?

It occurred to me that we do that a lot in the rearing of children. We want them to be situationally desirable. We want them to be attractive. We want them to be intelligent. We want them to be well educated. We want them to be able to fit in well within any given situation because we believe that this looks like a distinct advantage. Now, of course, we say that about our country and our culture because we would consider ourselves to be morally superior to the Babylonian Empire or perhaps any other empire that ever existed. This seems only reasonable to us to think that this is the case. So we pursue situational desirability. However, these guys in Daniel decided that they would not respond situationally to their circumstances. They are situationally desirable—that’s true. Yet they are non-situational in their response to the situation that surrounds them.

This would appear to many to be an outright contradiction. It could often be defined as some sort of eccentricity. I have a friend who for many years was a part of the world. When she became a Christian some time later in life, she suffered the defection of some of her former friends because they would say of her, "Well don’t bring that religious stuff around me anymore. You don’t think the way you used to think. You are clearly outside of what is rational, what is reasonable, and what is worthy of respect." It is seen as a kind of eccentricity or a kind of non-conformity. That’s the way the world would look at this. They would always see it as eccentricity or non-conformity.

It could be presented as perhaps a type of rebellion or a type of counter-culture. These are the terms that are often used. John W. Stott wrote a book years ago called "The Counter Culture." It was a discussion, I believe, from the sermon on the mount. It was about the way in which the Christian relates to the world. I think now that this is an unfortunate term to use. I don’t believe we should allow worldly expressions like the "counter culture" to be applied to us. I suppose it is true in some limited sense, if we had control of the term, we might be considered "counter cultural." But really what we are is "non-situational." We are non-situational in our response to real space/time situations. That is something that the world can simply not accept—cannot understand. We can see why that is the case.

In 1 Corinthians 2, the statement is made by Paul that the man without the Spirit cannot understand the things from the Spirit because they have to be discerned in a spiritual way. Since such a man does not have the apparatus to do the spiritual discernment, the things that come from God have to be considered foolishness. God has always been non-situational in his response to situations. From what we can tell in the Old and New Testaments he has always required a kind of isolation decision to be made by people of faith relative to the situation. Abraham was a man who operated on a non-situational basis. That is the reason why he would have left Ur of the Chaldeans. That is the reason we can see from statements about Abraham in Genesis 22, Romans 4 and Hebrews 11 that he was willing to sacrifice his only son. That is a non-situational response to a situation because God had instructed him to do so. He even had a non-situational understanding about the circumstance, believing within him that God would resurrect his son from the dead. This becomes for us this marvelous standard by which we gauge faith. He is called the "father of all the faithful" and so we are admonished to pursue Abrahamic faith.

If we make situational decisions, of course, it is going to be very difficult for us to operate on the basis of faith, and we would incorrectly conclude that perhaps we can develop a gradation in our understanding of faith. We want to seek a kind of faith that we can bring into the situation and color it with the situational aspects and call it " true faith" although it is really no such thing. Only reliance upon the non-situational revelation of God can lead us to a correct understanding of a "true" faith.

Baptism, for example, would be a representational action or perhaps a representational posture, or perhaps a representational response to the world situation. Baptism would represent the isolation decision because in baptism we are supposed to be dying to something. We are being isolated from old ways. The old man is passing from the scene. The old man is being cast off. The old man is dying and as he dies, his use of our bodies, his use of our mind, have all passed. All old things have passed away. Paul would say "Behold all things have become new." So we rise from the waters of baptism being isolated from the old man and from the world that he represents and from all of the evil that was a part of that old man’s way of looking at life. All of those things are gone. We are isolated from old sins. We are isolated from the things that provoked that sinful attitude. Our relationship to the sinful past is all revoked and we call that salvation.

Baptism is a wonderful gift that the Lord has given us because it represents this isolation decision. Now in many respects baptism is not always practiced this way. For many years in Latin America and here and other places, whenever I thought about the need for the practice of baptism, I believed that this was because the Lord has commanded it. It is very clearly stated in the book of Romans and in the book of Acts, and there are impressions of that in other places. I believed that because the Lord required that of us, therefore it must be done. But I might have thought of it only marginally as an isolation decision. But I can see now that I was wrong in that. We have many people who are baptized, but who have not precipitated an isolation decision about the world in which they live. They are not going to operate non-situationally within any given situation because that doesn’t make sense. Of course, they were not required to make that kind of decision. One wonders about our need to rethink this ritual of baptism and what it represents to us and what it constitutes and tells us about how we relate to the outside world. If the outside world is the world situation and baptism is a death to it, then this certainly amounts to a kind of isolation. We are removed from that world situation in this precise way as we’ve described the term isolation.

People have to make certain decisions in order to be baptized. I would think it quite reasonable to believe that the decision to be baptized should be first and foremost an isolation decision. That seems to fit in well with all the statements that are made about this kind of isolation attitude and commitment that we find in the book of Daniel and in other places. In Daniel 1:8, this man and his three friends made a commitment. It says that "Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine." Another way to say that or to talk about some of the implications associated with that situation is that he had to make a decision about how to think about his experience. Part of his experience at this time was going to be eating at the king’s table and he had to decide how he was going to think about that experience. He was going to have to decide how to think of the whole Babylonian "lake" from the margin of the lake down to its depth; from the things at the superficial level to those things that would be most provocative and most fomenting in the heart of the Babylonian empire--their ideas and the way they thought about themselves. He knew how the Babylonians thought about their experience.

We live in a world where our fellow Americans, our fellow practitioners of the culture, think a certain way about their experience. Christians are expected more or less to be socialized into that. And if we are not socialized into that prevalent and authoritative interpretation of experience, then we are to be cast out or, in some extreme circumstances, we are to be punished. Daniel had to make exactly the same kind of decision about isolation that we have to make. We have to decide how we are going to relate to our experience, how are we going to relate to all situations, how are we going to think about these things. He resolved not to defile himself. The question is do contemporary Christians know when, where and how they themselves have been defiled? If I hold on to ideas in the way in which I relate to experience that are not built on the revelation of God, then clearly I have been defiled at that particular point. If I believe, for instance, as we have discussed earlier in our study of the book of Daniel that natural causation plus time equals development, then that is an idea that defiles. So the answer to defilement is to be cleansed of it and to remain isolated from it as long as we live. This becomes a fundamental principle in our understanding of experience and how to relate to it.

We might ask the question, "Do the scholars know when, where and how they have been defiled? Does scholarship in general need to be reconsidered as to how it has been defiled by ideas from the world that have crept into our thinking about scripture for instance? Does the church need to ask itself the primary question have we been defiled? At what point are we being defiled?" When all of us deal with the world situation, wouldn’t you think that a fundamental question would always be to what degree have we been defiled? In the rearing of children, if we don’t understand how they have been defiled and what ideas are out there that would defile them and create a buffer between them and God, then we are in serious trouble already. We are going to have to decide how we are going to think about our experience.

Notice that in the contemporary church, we would have many different opinions, many different appraisals of our national circumstance regarding certain moral issues that we confront regularly now. We confront all sorts of behaviors. We confront all sorts of opposing ideas; that is, ideas in opposition to the revelation of God. We confront all sorts of philosophies and all sorts of attitudes about money and about health and about personal liberties. We are not quite sure any more what a personal liberty is. In earlier generations, that question was more or less accepted. But now we have new practices and new potentials. In the biomedical area, we are developing all sorts of new techniques. We don’t know to what degree those things can defile us. Of course, we don’t refer merely to some sort of physical defilement, but a defilement of the soul, a defilement of the spirit. If we had acted habitually on the same basis as Daniel and had asked ourselves how it is we are going to relate to experience, we might not have fallen prey to a lot of the worldly influences that we have experienced in the church. I would consider such incursions as conflict resolution and the business model to the operation of church life to be defilement because they have nothing to do with the revelation of God. We are unprepared perhaps to deal with these questions.

Now as Daniel related non-situationally to his situation, that becomes the basis for making our own conclusions about how to relate to our experience. As we live life, we are trying to find out how to respond non-situationally to all situations. There has to be the proper motivational basis for this. What is that basis? How does the businessman respond non-situationally to his economic situation? How in the areas of biology, do we believers respond non-situationally to situations? These become fundamental questions if we have a revelation that acts as an agent and if it is used as a representational phenomenon. It will pose this problem for us; it will raise these questions or at least point us to this need to inquire of the Lord as to how we should respond to all situations.

I doubt that there is any way to successfully elude the observation, the conclusion, or a generalization that the Lord is requiring of us non-situational responses to all situations. Certainly Joshua and Caleb at Kadesh Barnea operated non-situationally in the middle of a situation. They urged their fellow Israelites at that most critical moment to respond non-situationally to the categorical situation that had just been explained to them by 10 of the 12 spies, i.e. that the fortifications in the land of Canaan were great, that giants walked the land, that they were outnumbered, that their enemies had many advantages over them and that they had more disadvantages. Still these two men at their own risk of life decided how to think about their experience. And they decided to think about it non-situationally. Years later, when the conquest was full under way, it is Caleb who says, "Give me the mountain where the giants live." He is still thinking non-situationally about the situation.

In Luke, Chapter 4, where we are told about the widow of Zarephath, we see she was thinking non-situationally about a very real critical and apparently dangerous situation—starvation. Naaman was facing a concrete, tangible biological situation and he decided to operate non-situationally. That is referred to as "faith" and that is the reason why these two cases are mentioned in Luke 4. They had learned how to think non-situationally about their situation. This is an isolation decision at least to that degree. In Matthew, Chapter 8 when the centurion approaches the Lord and says, "I request that you heal my servant who is desperately ill." Jesus says he will go with this man. But the centurion says, "Don’t bother yourself with having to travel that far, just say the word and my servant will be healed." He tells Jesus he knows that is the case because he understands authority. He recognizes that Jesus has non-situational authority over all situations. He understood this. He grasped this fact. When he articulated this fact in just that way, Jesus responded by saying that he had not found greater faith in all of Israel.

It looks very suspicious does it not that faith and non-situational responses as triggered by our appreciation of the revelation of God are one and the same? In Daniel, Chapter 5, we have a case where Belshazzar has succeeded Nebuchadnezzar on the throne in Babylon. In the first few verses of Chapter 5, we find that a drunken bacchanal is going on and his wives and his concubines and his friends have all come together to drink quite heavily. He calls for the golden goblets that were used in the temple worship service be brought to him to be used in drinking toasts to their false gods of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood and stone. This offended the Lord and the hand appeared writing on the wall. Daniel was called in to interpret this event.

This is a non-situational event and they are terrified by this experience. Belshazzar’s wife points out that he needs a non-situational interpretation of this event. She remembers what happened in the days of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 2) where Daniel was able to interpret his dream. Non-situational meaning was brought to bear on that situation. They needed an isolated individual. They needed an isolated mind. An isolated mind of the highest order is a mind with the proper kind of motivation. Notice that the motivation is not situational. His motivation is also situationally isolated.

When Daniel was summoned and brought before Belshazzar, the king promises him wealth and to make him third ruler in the empire if he can tell him what the writing on the wall means. Daniel responds in 5:17, "You may keep your gifts for yourself and give your rewards to someone else. (He is not interested) Nevertheless, I will read the writing for the king and tell him what it means." Then he begins to give him quite a tightly woven sermon about his excesses and about his sins. Daniel is not interested in things that are motivated by the situation. This becomes a very critical issue for us to think about. There are a lot of things that have to do with situational motivations—acceptance, reward, financial improvement, influence, power, political gain. When we have been exposed to political intrigue in our country and the shenanigans that take place during presidential elections and at other times, we get a very strong short course on situational motivations. But Daniel has a kind of isolated motivation. He is not interested in what he can get. He is interested in maintaining a relationship to his God. He is interested in avoiding being defiled. He is not for hire for anyone’s purpose when it is opposed to God. Why? Because his motivations are isolated from situational motivations.

Notice that while Daniel is "isolated," he is not marginal. This is one of the frightening things contemporary people think about—being marginal. Being marginal is not good. There are a lot of illustrations of marginality that come from our cultural circumstances today that produce anxiety and a sense of injustice. For instance, it is being mentioned frequently how many American citizens are without health care insurance. That means that those millions are marginalized from the mainstream so they are not going to have the same access to medical care. This is seen as an injustice and it is not a good thing that they have been marginalized. We are worried about others that historically have been marginalized in society whether it might be due to race, or sexual orientation, or some other criteria. Marginalization has always been considered to be very negative, very costly in terms of the forfeiture that it provokes in individuals who are marginal. It is seen as a bad thing, something to be overcome. The culture then makes attempts to change to be more inclusive.

We are not interested in marginality or the way in which the world conceives of it. Daniel is isolated. He has made an isolation decision. He is not going to be defined by the situation. In the same way one would assume that Christians today would make decisions equally firm not to be defined by the contemporary situation. Daniel is isolated, but he is hardly marginal. The reason he is not marginal is because God is using him in that particular situation. In Chapter 1, when he makes his decision to be isolated at that particular point and at other points, he is going to read a lot of things in Babylonian literature, which he is not going to accept. He is going to be confronted with a lot of things in the Babylonian bureaucracy that he will have to shun, with which he will have to disagree. He will have to maintain that posture of isolation in order to be faithful to the Lord.

If one operates biblically, if one operates on an absolute representational basis, perhaps believers would have to run the risk of being looked upon as outside of the mainstream, certainly not very intelligent, rather fundamentalist or fanatical in our approach to certain things. We don’t want to run that risk. We don’t want to go too far. We don’t want to go off the deep end. In this case, we have a contradiction to all the predictive ability of the human mind about those things and about how those things work. Daniel is isolated in the way we have described it, but he was never marginal. In Daniel, Chapter 2, he is not marginal as the Lord had thrust him into the presence of the king at the apex of the empire and he has convinced the king of the truth that has been revealed to God. He is not marginal. And then by the power of God he is elevated to a position of eminence and at Daniel’s request, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah are equally elevated to men of eminence in the Babylonian Empire. Not because they drank deeply of the Babylonian system, but because THEY DIDN’T. That is the key. They were isolated and yet they were hardly marginal.

Christians don’t need to run around concerned about being marginalized. Young people don’t have to run through the gamut of fear associated with being marginalized. We don’t have to be marginalized. We are isolated. In Chapter 3, Daniel’s three friends are arrested because they refuse to bow down to the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar had set up. They made an isolated decision that they were not going to be defined by the situation, because "if we give in to you, O king, if we bow down to your golden image, we are in fact saying God is wrong, the revelation isn’t alive, and the ten commandments are not valid. We have opted to refuse to be defined by the circumstance, immediate as it is and as dangerous as it potentially appears to be." But because they were isolated, this was the key to their salvation. They were hardly marginal. After that event took place they were elevated to even greater eminence than before. In Chapter 6, Daniel is standing before Darius. Darius equally recognizes that this man is not marginal. He becomes a central figure in the Babylonian kingdom. He is isolated and that is the reason he is successful.

This is a slap in the face to most prevailing wisdom that says we should be able to sell self and that the self cannot be isolated in this way because if we are we run the risk of marginalization. That is just not the case. I was reminded of the situation in the book of 1 Peter 3:1-7, wherein Peter was describing a woman who is married to an unbeliever. We get the impression of a woman, married to a man that is not a Christian, who has had to make an isolation decision. She is not going to harangue her husband into the baptistry. She is not going to push, cajole or hammer him over the head. She is going to live a life that is isolated. She has made certain decisions about her comportment and about the way she thinks about her experience. Now here is another case where Peter is saying to the woman, "Here is your responsibility. You have to think non-situationally about your situation." Well that is a remarkable gift that the Lord has given to us.

Many of us are depressed, discouraged, anxious, or overburdened. What do we need? We don’t need a situational response that often calls for medications or some other salve applied. We need a non-situational response to situations. Of course, this will be considered to be somewhat dangerous on the surface. We have a number of biblical examples that indicate the presence of this kind of danger. Yet this is what we are called to do, this is what we are called to be: isolated. Not marginal, but isolated. The Lord will use this isolation as he chooses.

When we think of Joseph, this wonderful man in the closing part of the book of Genesis, we find a man who is stripped away from his family at a tender age. He is exposed to the brutalities of the world. He is exposed to injustice. He is lied about. He is treated unjustly in many different ways. He makes a decision at more than one point to be isolated from the Egyptian circumstance. He is even going to be isolated from the call of the flesh. So that when he finds himself being tempted by the wife of Potiphar, he makes an isolated decision. He says, "I can’t do this and sin against God. Therefore, I am isolated from the pull of the flesh." A remarkable decision especially for a young man to make. When we turn to different chapters in the proverbs, we find the wise man instructing the youthful individual who would perhaps run through a lot of potential danger if his mind were not isolated in precisely this way. That is what teaching is supposed to do. It is supposed to isolate us. It won’t marginalize us. Joseph is another great proof of the truth of that declaration: "You can be isolated, not marginalized." He ends up being a man of tremendous power and tremendous influence and tremendous personality in the Egyptian Empire. This had reverberating effects on his family later when Jacob and all the clan come into Egypt and prosper and remain there for the next few centuries until someone comes along who does not respect what Joseph has done and the debt that they still owe him for the salvation of the Egyptian empire.

In the same way, the woman in 1 Peter 3 who faces a husband who is not a Christian has made an isolation decision. She is going to relate non-situationally to a situation. Scandalous to the world, but that is exactly what the Lord has called us to do. We learn something from her, but we also learn the same lesson from other examples, and that is that the only way to get command over a situation is to be isolated from the situation. This is a great scandal. This is a great contradiction that seems to be very counterintuitive. This was true in the case of Rahab or of David when he faced Goliath, or when the Israelites were facing the wrath of Pharaoh or when they were pinned against the Red Sea. The only way to get command in any situation is to be isolated from the situation. That is a blockbuster. That is a whopper of an idea to think that this is true about the world we live in as well.

only way to get command over situations is to be isolated from the situation. Therefore, we are wise and correct when we make non-situational responses to all situations no matter what those situations are. I have this enormous reverence for this woman in 1 Peter 3 and Peter would say this is how men can be won to the faith. This is how a woman living in an isolated way from any situation can show men the truth--. Her influence on this man is hardly marginal. It is not easy to look at certain situations and make this decision to be isolated from the situation, believing (because God has told us that it’s true) that if we remain isolated from the situation, we will have some power over the circumstance. But it must be done. We are going to have to learn how to do this.

In Daniel 6, there is a statement that ought not to go unnoticed concerning the character of Daniel and the power that would underscore his constant commitment to be isolated. In Daniel 6:10, after this decree has been issued by Darius about no one being able to pray except to him over the period of time indicated, it says, "Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published (he knew it was out and he knew what it meant in terms of how the Babylonians interpreted it and how they would respond to those who were isolated from it), he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before." So there is a great indication of how he was able to persistently manifest this isolation attitude. He knew apparently that the way to deal with this situation was to be isolated from it. This was a significant situation. This was a death threat. This is not an idle death threat. These are the men who have the power to bring this thing about. At least apparently they do. So he goes home, as he has always done with apparently no other thoughts on his mind. He was not going to change this godly habit of praying to his God for help. Why? Because he knew that the non-situational defines the situation. The only way to get command over the situation is to be isolated from it. He believed that and operated on that basis. He was isolated from the situation.

When we look at the life of Daniel, it becomes clear that Daniel’s rise in the Babylonian bureaucracy was totally disassociated from the world situation. We don’t get the impression as we read these chapters that his repositioning in positions of eminence was associated with his natural virtues or with his involvement or embracing of the Babylonian circumstance. From all indications that we have in this book, he didn’t do that at all. So we know that his rise was disassociated from the world situation. Now can we generalize from that about our own circumstances in the world situation? The Lord may not want to reposition us to positions of great political eminence or put us in a position where we have such definitive power over the lives of others. But that is just the simple manifestation of one of the various elements involved with this. We know that our well being is disassociated from the world situation. We would generalize that the ability to deal with situations is disassociated from the situation and totally and uniquely related to the presence of God.

Daniel was not defined by the world situation. He was not defined by its advantages or by its disadvantages. The generalization that comes forth from that would certainly urge the same appreciation on our part. Isolation in this particular light—the way we’ve tried to describe it—in fact was the key to his salvation and to others in Daniel 2 when he turns to the Lord and does not try to deal with the situation directly as we often think it is wise to do. In Daniel 3, this isolation decision that the three Hebrews took was the key to their salvation. In Daniel 6, when at the behest of Darius he was thrown into the lions’ den, once again his isolation decision was the key to his salvation. We find this manifested in the lives of all the great people of faith. It is stated of Moses that he desired to take the hardship of the way with the Lord rather than operating on the basis of the acceptance that he had achieved within the Egyptian Empire. So it is with all great people of faith.

Isolation decisions would require some kind of sacrifice and the running of some kind of risk. Therefore, we talk about what we can call isolated discourse. The way in which we would respond to the world and the way that we would discuss the situation would be somewhat isolated. That would explain to me why it is that in terms of representational thinking we often run into conflict with individuals on these things. The discourse that we are developing and trying to develop is an isolated one. It is isolated from the psychology of experience. It is consequently isolated from the discourse built on that kind of a psychology. We have a vast gulf that has been formulated between the psychology of experience on the one hand and the kind of isolated discourse on the other. The inconvenience of this is obvious. Isolated discourse cannot be surrendered in order to make friends. We are not talking about just the employment or the imposition of certain words. We are talking about the way that discourse is shaped altogether. Wouldn’t it be a phenomenal thing to contemplate how in the middle of all of these real time/space situations that we face, we could follow a kind of discourse to describe it, to represent it on the basis of this kind of isolation built on the revelation of God as it defines the situation and not the other way around? This would be the most primitive calculation possible for our behavior and the way in which our mind operates. So the isolation decision among other things would certainly cap our mental processes or saddle it with a certain kind of discipline. That would show up in isolated discourse.

Certainly Jesus when he was here was known for an isolated discourse. He was appreciated by many; it was a scathing scandal to others. In the book of Matthew 7 toward the end of the Lord’s teachings on that occasion, in verse 28 the writer states, "When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law." He operated on a kind of isolated discourse. Later in the book of Acts 26, when Paul would stand before kings and men of eminence, he would say, "Why should any of you consider it a strange thing that God raises the dead?" He knew that his discourse was isolated and that everything he was saying about Christ relative to the world situation was difficult to choke down by these types of individuals who operated on the psychology of experience. The psychology of experience may change its colors and some of its content from generation to generation, but it will always be there.

It comes down, among other things, to this: We are going to have to be terminologically isolated from the world. In that precise way, Daniel was terminologically isolated from the Babylonian system. He made a statement that is composed of ordinary words (words that could be used in any combination, but it is terminology that was isolated from the situation), when he said in Chapter 1:8 that he resolved not to defile himself. Those are terms. Every one of those terms in that structure, in that syntax needs to be there. But there are things in the way in which we talk, or terms in the syntax that many of us use that should not be there. Certain terms should be removed. That might sound like a superficial act, but it would become most profound in the way that we deal with the world and its situations. We have to be isolated from the situation. That means linguistically isolated and it means representationally isolated as well.