Many of his disciples said, “This is very hard to understand. How can anyone accept it?” Jesus was aware that his disciples were complaining, so he said to them, “Does this offend you? … And the very words I have spoken to you are spirit and life. … At this point many of his disciples turned away and deserted him. [John 6:60-61,63b,66 (NLT]
Some prophets weren’t bothered by the truth and were available for hire. Ahab, for example, had 400 prophets on his payroll acting as his “yes men.” When he asked Jehoshaphat to join him in a campaign against Aram, Jehoshaphat requested the advice of prophets so Ahab summoned his seers. Jehoshaphat, however, recognized them as pagans; when he asked for a true “prophet of the Lord,” Micaiah was summoned.
Honest prophets, like Micaiah had a difficult life; if they prophesized an unpleasant truth, they often were punished or killed. Although warned to promise victory, Micaiah was unafraid of offending the king and responded with God’s truth about Israel’s defeat and Ahab’s death. His reward for telling the truth was a slap on the face, prison and a diet of bread and water; Ahab’s reward for ignoring the truth was death by a randomly shot arrow.
Daniel served as prophet to four kings; facing a series of egocentric and powerful rulers and surrounded by idolatry, his was not an easy job. When Nebuchadnezzar had a dream about a tree, the troubled Daniel hesitated to tell the king that it predicted a period of insanity for him. Nevertheless, he truthfully interpreted the dream and, at the risk of offending the king, bravely advised him to stop sinning. When the proud king didn’t, he ended up spending time living in the fields like an animal.
When Belshazzar called Daniel to interpret the mysterious writing on the wall, the king offered him beautiful gifts and great power for explaining the message but Daniel declined. His prophetic gift was never about gaining reward or power and, knowing the words’ meaning, he knew the reward was worthless. Unafraid of offending the king, Daniel boldly began by taking him to task for the way he’d dishonored God with his sinful disobedience, pride, desecration of sacred objects, and idolatry. The prophet finished by telling Belshazzar that his days were numbered, his reign had been found deficient, and that Babylon would fall and be divided among the Medes and Persians. Confident that he had an impregnable fortress and enough provisions to survive a twenty-year siege, Belshazzar didn’t take the words of warning seriously. Daniel’s prophecies proved correct. The ancient historian Xenophon writes that while the Babylonians were in the midst of that drunken feast, Darius the Mede diverted the Euphrates. Walking on the dry river bed, his army easily entered the city through the water gates. Belshazzar died that very night and the kingdom of Babylon was divided into 120 provinces.
Even when they knew their messages were unpleasant and that the consequences for speaking the truth and offending a king could be severe, neither Micaiah nor Daniel ever sugar-coated God’s truth. Finding their prophecies distasteful, Ahab, Nebuchadnezzar, and Belshazzar chose to ignore them. Like those kings, many of the people who heard Jesus found His truth offensive and inconvenient; choosing to ignore it, they walked away from Him. The fact that the truth is often unpleasant and can be ignored, however, doesn’t change its veracity.
Sometimes, as Christians, we are afraid to offend people with the truth and so we say nothing when God calls us to speak. While we never want to come off as domineering, disparaging or arrogant, we must not let fear keep us from speaking the truth. That God’s truth, even when lovingly and considerately spoken, may offend some people doesn’t mean the truth must not be told.
Someone was missing from yesterday’s story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and the fiery furnace: their good friend Daniel. When Nebuchadnezzar’s giant statue was erected on the plain of Dura, word was sent to all of his officials to assemble there for the statue’s dedication. We know Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were there because Daniel reported that they got tossed in a fiery furnace for refusing to bow to an idol. But what of Daniel? He’s the one who chronicled the event: the one who wrote that all of the high officers, officials, governors, advisers, treasurers, judges, magistrates, and provincial officials were present. Daniel gives no explanation for his absence at the dedication of the king’s golden statue.
One night King Nebuchadnezzar had a disturbing dream and asked the court’s wise men to interpret it. Whether he couldn’t remember it (as happens with dreams) or, being obstinate, wanted to test the soothsayers and astrologers, we don’t know, but the king expected them to tell him the dream’s meaning without his revealing its content. Indignant at their failure to do so, he ordered the execution of all of Babylon’s counselors (which included Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego). Daniel approached the king and asked for time so that he could discover the dream’s meaning.
After Nebuchadnezzar’s first invasion of Judah, he returned to Babylon with the temple’s treasures and some of Judah’s nobility as captives. The best and brightest of the young men were to learn the literature and language of Babylon so they could serve the king. In spite of being captives, they were housed in the palace and given the king’s choice of food. While this would appear to be a pretty good gig for prisoners of war, the boys were probably castrated and made eunuchs as was typically done for palace officials (and prophesied by Isaiah in 2 Kings 20:18).
If you ever visited the Mayan ruins near Cancun, Mexico, chances are you saw the remains of a stone ball court with sloping walls. Nowhere near as impressive as the Mayan pyramids, I didn’t even take a picture when I saw one. Two stone rings hang about 20 feet up the walls. A ball game called pok-ta-pok was played there. As in volleyball, players passed a solid rubber ball around by hitting it with various parts of their bodies. Unlike volleyball, however, they could not touch the ball with their hands. The goal was to get the ball through one of the rings.
We were at the symphony watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho while the orchestra played Bernard Herrman’s chilling soundtrack. When Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane, stepped into the shower, a man in the audience yelled, ”Don’t do it!” Since most of us saw the movie decades ago, we didn’t want her to take that fatal shower either. In spite of the warning, however, she did. Since Marion was at the Bates Motel because she’d embezzled $40,000 from her boss, perhaps that man should have yelled, “Don’t do it!” much sooner.
