There was no danger in the professor’s words when she instructed a lecture hall of 300 undergraduates not to have children, for the sake of Mother Earth.
The danger was in the laughless silence that followed. The danger was in the hundreds of heads nodding in unison.
This fall, families across the country are packing their cars with mini fridges and dorm accessories, preparing to send their children out into the world. Much anxiety has gripped the Christian community in recent years regarding young people going off to college, and rightly so.
New college students are walking into Babylon. Even though Daniel didn’t walk into Babylon willingly (but was forcibly exiled there), his biblical example of faithfulness there can help encourage both students and parents.
As young men, Daniel and his friends in Babylon studied alongside unbelieving peers to receive a rigorous secular education under a regime that demanded obedience. Daniel’s story can help believing college students not only survive but thrive in their own Babylons. Let’s consider his advice.
1. Avoid the ‘king’s table.’
The ideas Babylon promoted didn’t shake Daniel. Just like students today, Daniel and his friends encountered plenty of notions hostile to their faith when studying Chaldean literature: astrology, divination, immoral mythologies. They wisely knew that social pressure erodes loyalty to God’s kingdom far faster and more effectively than any professor’s ideological rants. That’s one reason why Daniel and his friends chose not to eat the king’s meat or drink his wine (Dan. 1:8). Though they shared the king’s classroom, they wouldn’t share the king’s meal.
Daniel and his friends shared the king’s classroom, but they wouldn’t share the king’s meal.
The latter act separated them from the other wise-men-in-training. Their bold, early choice to forgo pleasant food bound them together and embodied their countercultural identity as God’s people. Avoiding the king’s wine kept their heads clear for intellectual battle.
Similarly, Christian college students should avoid the king’s meat and wine. Yes, this means passing on frat parties. But it also means limiting our most intimate social touch points (like regular meals together), and most deeply rooted friendships, to fellow believers.
Sacrificing one’s social inclusion can hurt. But Daniel and his friends were willing to pay this price for faithfulness. Resistant fellowship with other believers must be our default mode from the start.
2. Eat with believers.
Scripture tells us those who are faithful with little are faithful with much. How did Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah have the courage to enter into the fiery wrath of their king? How did Daniel put one foot in front of the other on the way into the deathly den? Their strong resolve was built on a foundation of a thousand mundane meals unrecorded in Scripture.
Christian students who neglect regular meals with other believers—ideally in the context of a local church—are robbing themselves of the necessary nutrients for a courageous lifestyle. Christians shouldn’t underestimate what the Lord will do with those gathered in his name, especially in those places where his name is routinely blasphemed. Every meal shared with God’s people is an act of spiritual warfare.
Every meal shared with God’s people is an act of spiritual warfare.
If students aren’t reminding themselves to whom they belong in private, they’ll forget in public. Tuesday night in my (Catie’s) college years was soup dinner with the ladies. We’d recount the tales of the day, laugh at the lies of the world, and replace the saltine calories of empty and destructive partying with the warm and rich sourdough bread of substantive spiritual conversation and fellowship. Over time, I became eager to challenge harmful ideologies proposed by peers the next morning, because I knew my stand for truth would make for an encouraging Tuesday night dinner story.
3. Bless Babylon.
While avoiding the university’s “table” could appear separatist, combative, or calloused toward unbelievers—this strategic distance ultimately enables God’s people to bless Babylon. Because the other wise men couldn’t interpret his dream, King Nebuchadnezzar was about to wipe out all the wise men (Dan. 2:12). This same systematic destruction of knowledge and human life is reflected in modern Babylon with the intellectual suicide occurring in humanities departments and the literal suicides occurring among students.
The fellowship and prayers of Daniel and his friends initiated the solution (vv. 17–19). Their unbroken connection to God brought life to the empire. God showed Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and its interpretation to Daniel and preserved Babylonian knowledge.
Likewise, clear-headed Christians with strong convictions shine in the darkness. They have the backbone and clarity to speak words of life at opportune moments, whether in the classroom or counseling unbelieving students, always with the aim of bringing them into the fold. The preparation for that kind of transforming speech starts with daily resistance to life-as-usual campus habits and daily cultivation of Christian fellowship.
Christians on campuses eager to share truth with nonbelieving classmates may instinctively want to start by relating to them—hanging out in their spaces, joining them in their cultural routines, and “doing life” with them as a sort of pre-evangelism. But Daniel’s example shows that in a hostile cultural Babylon, the opposite is needed. To lead pagans to solid tenets of belief, Christians must resist joining pagan rituals of belonging. Rather than assimilate to a culture that erodes belief, Christians should become a tower the unbelieving can run to.
Form Pockets of Resistance
Anxiety about college—for oneself or for the students we love—makes sense. Undoubtedly the contemporary university is the cutting edge of the beast of Babylon. The choice facing Christians on modern campuses is simple: be assimilated to the Babylonian way or resist and keep the faith.
If we choose the path of resistance, we must be strategic and decisive. Trying to feel vaguely close to God and fraternizing frequently with the lost (in the name of winsome love) may be nice, but it likely won’t be effective as a long-term strategy for evangelism, let alone for the health of our own faith.
The choice facing Christians on modern campuses is simple: be assimilated to the Babylonian way or resist and keep the faith.
Daniel demonstrates biblical tactics for living in Babylon by countering the king and by talking and praying over a meal with believers regularly. If we form pockets of resistance with believers, the university itself will be saved. If we pray together as bands of brothers and sisters—mutually spurring each other to faithful orthodoxy and orthopraxy—the wisdom of the university will be restored. If we enjoy table fellowship that orients our hearts around worship of the one true God, we’ll find the power to stand strong when we face a fiery furnace or a lions’ den.
Though you face trial, tribulation, and the social sword, don’t be afraid. The God who placed Daniel in Babylon, who saved him from the lions’ den, who stood in the furnace with him and his friends, and who gave these brothers one another also leads you and will be with you in the Babylon of campus life.
Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?
In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
