First Church of Babylon

The ruin of Jerusalem and the captivity of Israel in Babylon are pictures of the church today in many places around the world. There are pockets of life and purity and depth and faithfulness and power and zeal around the world. God will never give up on his people and he will get his global purposes done even if he has to use a remnant to do it.

But much of the Christian movement today has become a desolation of disobedience and disunity and dishonor to the name of Christ. So the way Daniel prays for the desolation of his people is a pointer for how we can pray for the desolation of ours. Let me mention three aspects of the desolation of God's people in this text to see if you won't agree that it sounds like much of the Christian movement today.

1. The people are captive to godless forces.
Two times, verses 11 and 13, Daniel says that this calamity of Babylonian captivity was warned against in the law of Moses. For example, in Deuteronomy 28:36 Moses says that if the people forsake God, "The Lord will bring you . . . to a nation that neither you nor your fathers have known; and there you shall serve other gods." Now that had come true in Babylon.

In 1520, Martin Luther wrote an essay which he called "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church." What he meant was that forces and powers that were foreign to Christ and to his word had captured the mind and heart of the church. She was in bondage to godless forces. That is the situation in much of the church today. Millions of church-goers today think the way the world thinks. The simple assumptions that govern behavior and choices come more from what is absorbed from our culture than from the word of God. The church shares the love affair of the world with prosperity and ease and self. Many groups of Christians are just not that different from the spirit of Babylon, even though the Lord says that we are aliens and exiles and that we are not to be conformed to this age. So, like Israel of old, much of God's church today is captive to godless forces.

2. The people are guilty and ashamed.
Daniel spends most of his prayer confessing the sin of the people. For example, verse 5: "We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from thy commandments." In other words, we have great guilt before God. And because of this real guilt there is real shame. This is mentioned in verses 7 and 8. The RSV has the phrase "confusion of face"--"To us belongs confusion of face." Literally it means, "To us belongs shame of face". What we have done is so terrible and so known that our face turns red and we want to cover it and run away. That is the way Daniel felt about the people of God. Their guilt and their shame were great.

Today in the church there is an uneasy conscience. There is the deep sense that we are to be radically different, living on the brink of eternity with counter-cultural values and behaviors of love and justice and risk-taking service that show our citizenship is in heaven. But then, we look in the mirror and we see that the church does not look that way. And the result is a sense of shame based on the real guilt of unbelief and disobedience. So we slink through our days with faces covered, and scarcely anyone knows we are disciples of Jesus.

3. Finally, the people were a byword among the nations.
Verse 16b: "Jerusalem and thy people have become a byword among all who are round about us." "Byword" (in the RSV) means reproach, or object of scorn. It means that the nations look at the defeated and scattered Israelites and they laugh. They mock Israel's God. That is the way it is with the Christian church in many places. She has made the name of Jesus an object of scorn by her duplicity--trying to go by the name Christian and yet marching to the drum of the world. So the world sees the name "Christian" as nothing radically different--perhaps a nice way to add a little component of spirituality to the other parts of life that basically stay the same.

So when Daniel prays for the desolations of the people of Israel, I hear a prayer for the desolations of the Christian church--captive to godless forces, guilty and ashamed, and a byword among the nations.

This excerpt was preached By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: http://www.desiringgod.org/. Email: mail@desiringGod.org. Toll Free: 1.888.346.4700, in a sermon titled "How to Pray for a Desolate Church" you can download this sermon here, or read the entire sermon here.