NON-SITUATIONAL RESPONSES
A Study of the Book of Daniel
RESPONSE FOUR: Praise
By J. Michael Strawn
;This will be the third part of the study of standard non-situational responses or reactions to situations. It should be elemental that every Christian would respond by saying that prayer is one of the first reactions to any circumstance. So here in the book of Daniel, we find that Daniel prays regularly; and he believes in this practice as a connection to the unseen world.
We are going to look at three sections of the book of Daniel, i.e., Chapter 2:17-19, Chapter 9:4-19 (which is his lengthy prayer after he consults Jeremiah’s prophecy about the 70-year duration of captivity, and his response to the Lord about the sinfulness of the people and his own failure) and Chapter 6:10-13 (where we see that his prayer to God became a pretext for the rivals in the kingdom to create a collusion against this good man and to try to destroy him. Prayer is a substantial element of the Christian life, and it was a large factor of Daniel’s presence in the Babylonian empire and had everything to do with his involvement in that kingdom as a representative of God in the palace over the number of years that he was there.
Now let’s look at Daniel 2:17-19. We might read a little bit in Chapter 6. These verses say, "Then Daniel returned to his house and explained the matter to his friends Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. He urged them to plead for mercy from the God of heaven concerning this mystery, so that he and his friends might not be executed with the rest of the wise men of Babylon. During the night the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision. Then Daniel praised the God of heaven," and his prayer follows.
Going to Chapter 6:10-13, we find the episode when Darius wishes to elevate Daniel to an even higher position in the Babylonian empire. The administrators and the satraps stand against this and they develop a conspiracy against this man to frame him and to hopefully have him destroyed and removed. It would appear to me that this is not a new idea to these individuals. They probably have had a longstanding resentment of the man and now they find an opportunity in which they may be able to destroy him. In verses 10-13, the text says, "Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, 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. Then these men went as a group and found Daniel praying and asking God for help. So they went to the king and spoke to him about his royal decree: ‘Did you not publish a decree that during the next thirty days anyone who prays to any god or man except to you, O king, would be thrown in to the lions’ den?’ The king answered, ‘The decree stands—in accordance with the laws of the Medes and Persians, which cannot be repealed.’ Then they said to the king, ‘Daniel, who is one of the exiles from Judah (in other words, an outsider after all these years), pays no attention to you, O king, or to the decree you put in writing. He still prays three times a day.’"
Now as we look at this aspect of Daniel’s life, it becomes obvious that besides being a non-situational response to situations, prayer also amounts to two other things that we can identify from these verses, as well as from other statements in scripture. Primarily we draw from the book of Daniel that as a non-situational response to situations, prayer would become two specific things to us:
Then he issues this death decree that they would all be destroyed because they are fraudulent and are of no help to the empire. They would be categorized as liars and leeches hanging on to him for whatever personal benefit they could gain, but are of no use to him. Arioch goes to the place where Daniel and his three friends dwell and he is to arrest them and put them to death. But that is not what happens. He speaks to Arioch with tact and with wisdom.
In chapter 2:18, it says that he encouraged his friends to plead for mercy from God. Now that is a picture of the universe. It indicates that God has direct access to all situations. That is what they were saying in this very short grammatical construction: to plead for mercy from God. Later in Chapter 6, we find that Daniel would pray to God for help. So we have a picture of a direct access, a direct contact that exists. When we pray, we are exercising a Christian privilege and we are encouraged to do this, and to do it regularly. But we are also saying that this is a picture of the universe.
Prayer is a picture of the universe. It is a symbol of this larger universe in which we live. Now what that means is that when he goes to the Lord to pray about this situation of the death threat (in Chapter 2), he is taking the situation out of Nebuchadnezzar’s hands. When he says, "Let us go to God and plead for mercy" this would only make sense if he believes that the act of prayer would take the situation out of Nebuchadnezzar’s hands and put in somewhere else. That is a picture of the universe.
So Christians today, would be operating on the same basic understanding of what prayer is. It is a picture of the universe. We believe in prayer as a projection of our understanding of the way that the universe operates under the direct access that God has to it. We want to pray to him because we want to take the situation out of people’s hands. We want to take it out of the flow of the events or the current of dynamic that would be involved. In other words, we might say that prayer denatures all situations. The word "denature" is very useful to us here because the Lord means that when you denature something it loses some of its original properties.
When we are looking at situations of various kinds, what we want to do is to denature the situation. We want to see that some of the inherent properties of the situation are denatured—that they lose these original properties. That would be the reason Christians pray. In Acts 4, Christians prayed about the relationship that existed between the government and themselves as followers of Christ. They were projecting a picture of the universe. They believed that God had direct access and direct contact with the situation in which they found themselves. Indeed he would have direct contact and access to all world situations. He penetrates beyond their horizon. We pray to him because we believe, in effect, that he will denature the situation. So we pray about our economic difficulties, we pray about our biological difficulties, and in so doing, we are asking the Lord to denature the situation. Well that is what this man did, and what his three friends did.
We can also say, that individuals can have direct access to something as well. Now we don’t have direct access to the situation. But it would turn out that we don’t want direct access to situations. What we want is direct access to help. In 6:11, when Daniel is the victim of this collusion, of this conspiracy, it says in the text that he goes to ask God for help. Now we know that the presence of God defines "help" in that context. When we want to know what the term "help" means, we know that it reflects the presence of God in the situation and what we experience as Christians is just this. We have direct access to help. Help defines the situation.
Why does he pray three times a day? Well he prays because he is a man of God, because he is a man of faith, because he operates on the basis of the covenant, on the word of God that has been revealed to the people of Israel. He has massive responsibilities being a part of the Babylonian Empire. He has to execute these duties with acumen, with dispatch, with competence, and with justice. He therefore needs access to help. He doesn’t need access to the situation so that he can manipulate the situation, or change, or transform the situation. Rather what he needs is direct access to help.
These two things when they come together act upon the situation in such a way as to denature the situation. So we know clearly that prayer among other things is a picture of the universe. Now that should change or at least challenge the way that we think of the practice of prayer. There are many things that can be said about prayer and there are many passages throughout the Old and New Testament when taken together collectively provide an enormous teaching about the nature of prayer as a non-situational response. Part of the non-situational response is to understand that it is a picture of the universe where God has direct access to all situations and where those who operate on the basis of faith in God, and respond to him on the basis of the propositions that have been revealed have direct access to this "help." This changes the nature of the situation.
That sounds somewhat foolish from the human point of view—from the experiential perspective. We have come to a point to admit something to ourselves and to the Lord and to each other. That is, that we do not have and we do not want to have direct access to events and situations. The idea is that if we have direct access to situations that we would be able to manipulate them and things could be shaped to the well being of the individual involved. Direct control over situations is thought to be one of our highest priorities.
Others have tried that in the past, and things have not always gone so well. Although it is a prevalent myth, a very popular myth, that we need to enter into situations (whatever they might be—biological, economic, social, or anything in the full range of temporal involvement’s, potentials and possibilities) and find a way through our own intelligence to exert some kind of direct control over them. That becomes a priority because it is thought that if we can directly control nature things would be much better for us. If we can directly control economics and the use of economics and economic systems, things could be so much better for us. Various people have tried to do that. There are things happening all the time around us where others accuse entrepreneurs of trying to corner the market, create monopolies, etc. because they tried to get access to situations of such a nature that they could exert direct control.
In Chapter 9, in Daniel’s prayer, there are a number of statements made that show that this is not the case. The idea of having direct control and the significance of that is an illusion. In Chapter 9:5, the text says, "we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws." The most significant statement, I believe, in that passage, is that they turned from God and from his laws. Which means to us that they turned from God to try to get direct control over their circumstances. That is to say that they violated the dicta that was stated in the book of Deuteronomy and in the book of Leviticus about how they were to relate to the land around them on the basis of faith. If you relate to situations on the basis of faith, you really have forfeited any pretense of trying to develop direct control over situations.
Daniel did not want direct control over the situation in Chapter 2. He did not try to get direct control in Chapter 6 when he faced the lions’ den, nor did the three friends in Chapter 3 try to get direct control over the circumstance when they faced King Nebuchadnezzar before the gaping mouth of the superheated furnace. What they did was to pursue access to help from God. It was this that changed the situation because it denatured its. Now if God denatures situations for us, it would be folly for Christian thinkers to try and pursue direct control over situations. This is not our highest priority.
In Chapter 9:5, he tells us what the highest priority of the people of God should be. It is to turn away from wickedness. It is to turn away from rebellion. It is to turn away from sin and from wrongdoing. It is to turn away from disobedience and back to the commands of God in order to maintain one’s relationship to God only on the basis of what has been revealed. The Israelites, however, decided to turn from God to direct control. They were warned about this in a number of places, one of the most obvious is Deuteronomy 8. God said that once they were in the land and they have built their houses and their wealth increases dramatically, they would forget that it is he who has given them all of these things. The passage clearly demonstrates that direct control—man exercising his will over situations—is an illusion as a priority.
We see this also in Genesis 3. Direct control does not produce betterment in all instances.
In Daniel 9:6 it says, "We have not listened to your servants the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes and our fathers, and to all the people of the land." Now we know from the first three verses of Chapter 9, he had been reading some of the prophecy of Jeremiah. From Chapter 2 of Jeremiah we know that the people of God and even the priests had turned away from God. No one asked where is the Lord? Jeremiah said in the first chapter of his prophecy that they had turned away. This was an indictment of the kings, of the princes, and of everyone down to the last man on the street.
Here is the problem with anti-revelation. They had shunned the revelation of God in favor of trying to get direct control over events—direct control over their practices. And if anyone sins, it is because they think they have direct control. People think that because something is possible or they have the freedom to do it, that they are going to go ahead and do it. That is anti-revelation. The revelation of God indicates, "You don’t have access directly to circumstances. Your central nervous system gives you the impression that you do, but you don’t. The greatest and most telling thing that we have to admit to is that we don’t want direct access. What we want is access to God and we want access to revelation. That is the thing that operates as the dynamic mechanism in our relationship to God on the planet. Anything else is but a lie and an illusion and it will lead to disaster in the end.
In Chapter 9:11, we have yet another statement that underscores this principle. "All Israel has transgressed your law and turned away, refusing to obey you. Therefore the curses and sworn judgments written in the Law of Moses, the servant of the God, have been poured out on us, because we have sinned against you." They refused to obey and because of that the situation was cursed. You can see that very clearly. They were put into a position to have access to God and if they had accessed this help, God would denature all circumstances and situations so that there would never be a serious obstacle to the well being of Israel. But because they decided not to pursue their relationship to God, because they did not share this eternal picture of the universe with God, because they wouldn’t admit that we can’t have direct access and understand the world that way, they decided to follow the lies of the world and of their central nervous and they wanted to be like all the other nations.
But in Chapter 9:11, he says they transgressed. They turned away. They refused to obey. Therefore they were cursed. All through the prophets, we read where the Lord would affect the crops in the field, the animal population and the biology of the entire nation of Israel according to their obedience or disobedience. Their thinking that they had direct access to the situation caused them to operate on this illusion only to realize that they never had direct access to the situation. They never had control over any circumstance. It was always God who was ordering events. He could order those events in their favor or as it is stated here in Chapter 9:11, he could turn on them after he had given all the notice that was required.
Direct control over situations, while people think it is the highest priority, would be a gigantic, cataclysmic mistake for people who are trying to become representational thinkers, trying to become biblical thinkers. It is a heresy from the world’s point of view. One of the things that immediately occurs to us as human beings when we find ourselves confronted with crises or circumstances that are running counter to what we consider to be our well being is to try to "do something." In other words, this conflict could be expressed this way:
"You have a major health issues, and all you are going to do is just pray about it?"
"Yes I am going to pray about it."
"Well what else are you going to do? Will you operate on some of the other strategies? Will you try to exert some kind of direct control over the situation?"
If the believer has the temerity of saying, "Well no, I am not going to do this, people will ask the question "why not? How could you possibly reach that conclusion?"
"Well I’ve reached that conclusion because I understand something from the book of Daniel about the way in which prayer operates."
Prayer is a picture of the universe and the picture of the universe is just this: God and God alone has direct access to all situations and that includes biological crises. What we are doing is pleading for mercy from him because, according to the book of Daniel and a lot of other passages in both the Old and New Testament, when we pray it takes the situation out of other people’s hands and out of the crush of events and transfers it to the hands of God. In other words, we believe that it denatures the situation. It forces the situation to lose its original properties. That could only be maintained by a strict adherence to the revelation of God. We don’t see that in terms of how the central nervous system interprets reality. We pray because we believe that we have direct access to help. We are asking God for his help. His presence in our lives, his presence in this situation defines "help" and this help defines the situation. Now that is sumptuous in its implications. How do we Christians look at any crisis? How is the crisis to be defined? Well here we have the answer: We define the situation on the basis of the help that is provided to us from God. We never understand any situation on the basis of what we can observe. We define the situation from a non-situational perspective.
What is that non-situational point of view? It is the understanding that we have access directly to the God of the universe who denatures situations and his help in the situation defines the situation. We are going back to the previous standard non-situational response of faith, which claims that the non-situational defines all situations. Well here you have the same thing expressed in the way in which we are related to prayer. Since that’s the case, we admit to ourselves, to God and to the world that we do not have (no one has ever had, no one will ever have) direct access to situations. We only think they do. Nor would we want to have direct access to events and situations. What we want is something else. Direct control over situations is not the highest priority in a crisis. It turns out to be a problem.
"Getting control" of situations is not the proper biblical response to situations. Getting control is not non-situational. It is a popular myth of the ignorant. We have to say ignorant here and would be justified saying that because we are referring to people who are ignorant of the ways of God, who are ignorant of the revelation of God, who are ignorant of the way in which the Lord responds directly to all world situations. We don’t want control. We want access to the Lord. That is what makes the difference. That is why we say we just pray. It is considered to be counter-intuitive because it doesn’t look like action.
Well prayer is action. But one has to answer the question, "if it is action why is it not seen as an action?" Well maybe it is because when we pray we’ve got to have the true picture of the universe in mind. We don’t always do that. So it may be a case where we have a development of the thing we might refer to as "situational prayer"--that is, prayer that is shaped by being within the situation. It is much like the case we were discussing in the previous study of a "situational faith." Really you can’t have a situational faith and you truly can’t have situational prayer. But when we pray and that prayer is modified and shaped by our desire for direct access to events, trying to put these two things together, this is not the prayer that the Lord desires of us. Perhaps this is the greatest manifestation of the sin of the man in James 1:6-7 that we know as the double-minded individual because he tried to pray or tried to operate within this kind of thinking. He didn’t understand how the universe operates. For us we pray always with this much larger picture of the universe in mind.
The experience of Israel proves that only God has direct access, that only he has direct control of events. Going over again to Chapter 9:11-14. We read vs. 11 previously so we will begin here in verse 12: "You have fulfilled the words spoken against us and against our rulers by bringing upon us great disaster." The situation was turned because of God in spite of all the efforts of Israel to counteract the action of God. They were brought to disaster. "Under the whole heaven nothing has ever been done like what has been done to Jerusalem. Just as it is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us, yet we have not sought the favor of the Lord our God by turning from our sins and giving attention to your truth." The root of their problem goes back to the idea of disobedience and an improper understanding of how the universe operates. A belief built upon their experience of things through direct access becomes the principal priority of human life. Therefore, they will shift all of their resources toward trying to get a greater access to events. Their minds developed in such a way that they operated almost intuitively and directed all of their thought processes to trying to shape circumstances instead of coming to God. (Human beings today still approach their situations making this same error). This is as clear from the book of Daniel as it is any place in the scripture.
He is saying we can’t do what we want to do. We can try to reach out and extend control over events and circumstances, but we will never attain this control. Are we crazy? Are we outside the parameters of what is to be considered normal because we accept this as a fact of the universe when no one else does? We are faithful. In verse 14, Daniel says: "The Lord did not hesitate to bring the disaster upon us…" It is the Lord doing this. We are talking about the geopolitical world at the time. We are talking about God developing the Babylonian Empire as an instrument of wrath against his chosen people. We are talking about the decline in Israel because of their sin. We are talking about prosperity for the Babylonians. We are talking about destruction for the Jews. Those are events that are normally interpreted on the basis of economic differences, trade imbalances, military disparities and other such considered advantages or disadvantages.
We now learn here that this is not the case in Israel. "The Lord did not hesitate to bring the disaster upon us, for the Lord our God is righteous in everything he does; yet we have not obeyed him." Nebuchadnezzar certainly came to see that principle. The Lord did not hesitate. He is telling us that God rules through his revelation and he rules through our obedience. We rule our hearts through prayer. We know what rules our response to situations because prayer governs our response to situations.
Read Matthew 6:9-13. We have read this passage many times where the Lord tells us that we are to be dependent upon him and to trust him. There is no desire for control. Now the pagans manifested a massive inclination toward control over events. That was a mistake on their part. And the Lord was quick to point out that folly.
There is another passage that also indicates the same truth—Luke 22:39-46: "Jesus went out as usual to the Mount of Olives and his disciples followed him. On reaching the place, he said to them, ‘Pray that you will not fall into temptation.’ He withdrew about a stone’s throw beyond them, knelt down and prayed, ‘Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.’ An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. When he rose from prayer and went back to the disciples, he found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow. ‘Why are you sleeping?’ he asked them. ‘Get up and pray so that you will not fall into temptation.’" Jesus is going to rule his life through prayer. He is going to try to rule his response to God through prayer. Prayer certainly must rule our response to situations. This becomes one of the major non-standard reactions we take to all situations.
It seems rather obvious as we take a look at these truths that we can reach a conclusion. That is, that non-situational prayer has a temporal effect just like disobedience has a temporal effect. The rejection of God has weighty and substantial temporal effects. So prayer, and again we are emphasizing non-situational prayer (prayer that is not controlled by the situation), has a temporal effect. The temporal effect is that it denatures the situation. There are six things that can be clearly seen about this. We won’t limit it to just these six, but these six will be demonstrated in the way in which Daniel relates to us his confidence in the practice of prayer and why he did it.
This effect that comes about from non-situational prayer denatures the situation. It also denatures to some degree the relationship that exists between the individual human mind and the situation. A lot of times people face different kinds of depression precisely because their minds are not detached from the situation. Now how do you get detachment? It is the way in which we operate in our relationship to God. Principally here under discussion is the conduct of prayer where we have this unique picture of the universe as we have described it up to this point. It has the tendency to isolate us somewhat from the situation. We are not operating upon nor are we going to focus on the various dynamics or the currents that are inherent in the situation. So we pull aside from it. We begin to think differently about it. That effect of separating the mind even just that much has a denaturing effect on the situation. The situation begins to lose some of what we think of as its inherent properties. We begin to conceive of the situation differently. Certainly at the end of the evening that is mentioned in Daniel 2, this man and his three friends had an entirely different view of the situation than they did before. The thing that brought that about was non-situational prayer.
Daniel, if he had so chosen, could have taken a blank board and he could have lined up the various pros and cons having to do with his situation. He could have made all sorts of phenomenological observations and by and large he could have been right about the observations he made provided that they were strictly based on the obvious that would have been derived from his observations. For example, there is danger (that’s obvious). The king has all the armaments and all the power sufficient to bring this about. (That’s obvious) He is vulnerable to the Babylonian bureaucracy. (That’s obvious) They have no recourse but to turn to God. (That’s obvious) If Nebuchadnezzar does decide to relent here that could be very positive on their behalf. (That’s obvious). Things like this.
We make observations on a regular basis built on phenomenological intelligence, on how things appear. Daniel didn’t do that in the situation described in Chapter 2. He didn’t do that in the situation described in Chapter 6 either. Once again, he is encircled by his enemies. They did not lie about him. Everything they said about this man was absolutely true. So it is unique kind of conspiracy. What they said to the king about Daniel was "Here is a man that defies you." And that was true. Darius was defied by Daniel’s response to this foolish decree that had been written and had been published. They accused him of praying to his God as he had always done. The decree was to cover a thirty-day space of time. For thirty days, if Daniel had been willing not to pray, which was his well-known custom, this crisis would have been averted. But he didn’t change his perceptions on the basis of any phenomenological observations. It says in the text in Chapter 6:10, when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room with the windows opened toward Jerusalem and prayed. He knew what the publication of the decree meant. This was open to his phenomenological observation. Someone showed him the decree or someone told him about it. But however he became aware of it, he knew.
He decides that he will factor out all phenomenological concerns and observations. Could one do that with biological events? Or could one do that in relationship to economic crisis or any other things that we have to deal with in the material world? Should we factor out all phenomenological observations? When we pray isn’t that part of the process? Prayer denatures the situation. We aren’t looking at the situation on the basis of its phenomenological inherencies. We don’t approach anything on the basis of observation. Well everything in contemporary society is approached on the basis of observer-dominant schemes. We human beings place a great deal of value on the way in which we observe. We think that we can observe something and that we can reach valid conclusions. We think that when we see something or we have experienced it that we understand it. Daniel would say that this is untrue. Of course, the world would consider him to be somewhat foolish in the way he is responding. But these are all non-situational responses. He believes that non-situational prayer will denature this situation. In fact, it did.
It is interesting as a sidelight that what they said of him was not a lie but was actually the truth. They were smart enough to know how to use that. He says of them in Daniel 6:5: "Finally these men said, ‘We will never find any basis for charges against this man Daniel unless it has something to do with the law of his God.’" That was the truth. So he was persecuted for the truth. And they knew that this was the way to bring about this situation.
In these cases that are mentioned in their lives, they take the position as they pray that all situations in which they will find themselves are to be configured as a field. In this field, the operation of God holds sway. All circumstances that develop are to be turned over to God as a field of operation for him, for his manipulation, for his displacement of certain things. Therefore, all situations they believe are subject to absolute causation. This is a part of the response of non-situational prayer to circumstances. No matter what the issues are in our lives, we are going to configure it. We have experienced panic upon occasion. We have experienced discouragement upon occasion. We have experienced some degree of depression, minor or otherwise, in our lives. But actually it turns out that it’s not the situation so much as it is the way that the situation is configured in our minds. This man who prays, who pleads for mercy from God, who asks God for help, is an individual who understands how to configure the situation. He lets God do that.
God tells him what the situation is. "This is where I work. This is where I demonstrate my power." When Moses comes from the desert into the land of Egypt and he announces boldly and without reservation the truth that has come to him from God about the exodus of the Jewish people from Egyptian captivity, he bids his people to understand that God is working in the situation. Pharaoh didn’t understand that in the beginning, nor did the chief men of the empire. Later they came to recognize this fact. Israel, the Jewish population, had great trouble in accepting this as a fact. When they come out from Egyptian captivity, and the Jews are receiving all of this wealth that the Egyptians are heaping on them as they leave, they go down to the Red Sea. Once again you have a situation. But how shall the situation be configured? Who is going to configure it? They look up and see the chariots of Pharaoh coming. They did not see it as a field in which the operations of God were to take place. They were wrong when they did that. They didn’t understand that all situations are subject to absolute causation. Later when they are in the desert and they get to Rephadim, here is a situation that is concrete, has certain dynamics, has certain currents in it, but they don’t understand what’s happening. This situation is a field. It is configured as a field for the operation of God.
I think this would be of enormous help to us as believers to learn how to let God configure all situations. How does he do that? Well among other things he does it through the revelations of his written word to us. He tells us, "This is how I want you to think about your situations." That, in part, has to be one of the reasons why the book of Daniel is written. Situations have to be configured. It is up to us to let God do that. In 2 Corinthians 1, when Paul and his friends were in trouble in Asia, they thought they were going to die. They didn’t let God configure the situation as a field for his operation. Now that takes courage and it takes a kind of spiritual penetration past the obvious, past the circumstance and all of its concrete descriptions.
When we pray we understand that it is a picture of the universe that God has direct access to these situations. That makes it a field for him and we have direct access to him and that defines the situation. Therefore, we freely admit whether we are in Egyptian captivity or whether we are pinned up against the Red Sea or we are in the desert and there is no water, that we don’t have access to the situation. We have never had access to the situation. When we get to the great fortifications and bulwarks of defense over the land of Canaan, we are not going to have control over that situation either. And we don’t want it. That is our admission. It is an admission of great faith. What we want is direct access to the Lord. That is all we need. That is reiterated countless places and times in the New Testament. That is why Jesus would say, "Don’t worry about what you are going to eat, or drink or wear. You follow me. You pursue me. You seek direct access to me. I will take care of all that other stuff. This requires faith. You don’t want control. Get rid of that conception of trying to get control." That boosts our psychological profile to say the least.
In other words, non-situational prayer has the tendency to adjourn inevitabilities. Inevitabilities gather, they warn us and they appeal to our rationality. "You have to prepare for this. You have to take this into consideration. You have to be aware that sooner or later this is going to happen. Will you be prepared? Will you be able to protect yourself? Are you going to be too vulnerable?" All these inevitabilities gather around our necks and they clamor for attention and they demand to be satiated. They call out for us to prepare and to be wise, etc. But they, of course, would define wisdom as heeding the inevitabilities that face us.
Now in this book of Daniel, there were many things that looked inevitable. We might even admit that they were inevitable given the situation. We might say that it was inevitable that in Chapter 3, the three Hebrew boys were going to be arrested and thrown into the fiery furnace. We might say that once the decree was published in Chapter 6, that it was an inevitability that Daniel would be arrested and because the decree had been written and published and could not be repealed that he would inevitably be thrown into the lions’ den, which in fact he was. Suppose we admit to that. These inevitabilities as actual forces over the situation were simply adjourned. They were sent away, they were disbursed. How did that happen?
Daniel was not gripped by inevitability. He is not concerned about inevitabilities. He is concerned about the same core issue that had always gripped his heart, of which we read in Chapter 10:12, (which every time I think of it I cannot resist but to read it again), "…Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God your words were heard, and I have come in response to them." This is the thing that makes the difference. This is a matter of prayer. He understands how the universe operates and he has freely admitted that he is not interested in getting control of the situation. That’s why he would go home after the decree is published in Chapter 6, goes up to his prayer room and prays without thought of the repercussions. Supposedly he knew they were going to happen, but his mind and heart were already stilled for that. The word of God and this kind of non-situational prayer adjourns inevitabilities.
We face all sorts of crises—health issues, sometimes grave and threatening, permanent disabilities, death—and what should we do? People will come to us and say, "You have to take care of this right now because if you don’t inevitably this is what is going to happen to you." Now because we respond to the situation non-situationally what happens is that the situation is denatured, some of its original properties are dispelled. Once they are dispelled, the whole group of inevitabilities loses its bite. We don’t listen to them anymore. They come and they holler and they make their claims, and they are adjourned. The reason they are adjourned is because of non-situational prayer. We don’t listen to them. They may stand outside the courtroom, so to speak, outside the tribunal and scream, "You’ll be sorry, you will regret this. You think you can operate in a way that is different from other men, that things that befall other men will not befall you." And we would have to say, "Yes that’s exactly what we think." Is that because of pride or arrogance? No. It is because of our understanding of non-situational responses.
Our prayer presents a picture for the world of the way the universe operates. When Daniel prayed, he was projecting to every one in the room a picture of the universe. And this man was willing to die on that basis. In Daniel, Chapter 2, he would say, "There is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries." Later on in Chapter 3, his three friends said, "Here’s the picture of the universe that you should have in your mind. There is God in the heavens who rules the universe and so we will not bow down to this false image. What you are calling us to is a lie. It is not true and we will have nothing to do with it." In Chapter 4, when Nebuchadnezzar has the dream of himself as the big tree and God is going to cut him down, he tells Nebuchadnezzar directly the significance of the meaning: "It is God who rules the affairs of men. He puts whomever he wants on the throne and when he is through with them he will remove them. You don’t have that picture of the universe in your head. You don’t understand that your kingdom will be denatured, that your control over us has been denatured. That your exercise of authority before God has been denatured."
In Chapter 4, a year later after this prophecy has been made Nebuchadnezzar is out on his veranda bragging about how he and his might have built this mighty empire. He denies the truth. God has made him the big tree, God has put him on the throne, and now God is going to strip him bare. Talk about being denatured. Nebuchadnezzar was absolutely denatured, even mentally while he was sent into the fields by God himself to live like the animals. But then in 4:34, Nebuchadnezzar looked up to God and said, "You’re right, I’m wrong." He appealed to God for help. He was made greater than he ever was before. He understood he did not need direct access to situations and that was where he had been making his blunder all along. He needed access to God. We can’t play a game in this universe of denying that. Therefore, he would admit I don’t have, never have had, and don’t want direct access to anything except this God who governs the universe. That is what we have to have. If you do this, it adjourns inevitability and those things—fears, anxieties, and worries--don’t grip us like they used to. In Matthew 6, the pagans were gripped by the presence of inevitabilities.
In Numbers 13 and 14, when Israel is at Kadesh Barnea, they listen to the report of ten of the 12 spies who are saying inevitably if we go up against he Amorite nations, we will be destroyed. These people go home to their tents and the inevitabilities are not adjourned. The inevitabilities are gathered in full force. The inevitabilities are screaming at them and condemning their foolishness and condemning their leaders that have brought them out on this fool’s errand. They failed to understand that everything in Canaan-land would have been denatured by a non-situational response to it.
All of these things taken together create a non-situational reaction called "prayer" to the situations that we face and it will have a temporal effect as the Lord promises. It will denature the situation and that is because of the presence of God in the universe. It is a non-situational intelligence pushing his will into the world circumstance.