What Can We Learn From Daniel? — Spurgeon on Standing Firm
⏱ 14 min read
You have heard the stories the way they were given to you in childhood — the lions’ den, the writing on the wall, the three friends in the furnace, the dream of the statue. The colours were vivid. The morals were portable. The dens were closed at the right moment, the furnace did not burn the right men, the king saw the writing and the kingdom changed hands by morning. The Sunday-school version is bright and quick. The slow inside of Daniel’s actual life is something else entirely.
What the Sunday-school version does not tell you is that Daniel lived through three civilisations. He was carried from Jerusalem to Babylon as a teenager, around 605 BC. He served under Nebuchadnezzar, then Belshazzar, then Darius the Mede, then Cyrus the Persian. He outlasted the empire he was deported into and continued under the empire that conquered it. The lions’ den happened when he was already an old man — somewhere in his eighties by most counts — and the open window habit that got him thrown to the lions had been a daily practice for around seventy years by then. The standing-firm of Daniel is not the standing-firm of a single dramatic refusal. It is the standing-firm of a man who had been quietly facing Jerusalem three times a day since he was a teenager and was not, at the age of eighty-something, about to stop because a new law had been signed. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is built for the slow reading of stories whose surface has been worn smooth by overuse — Daniel is one of the most worn. For now — read slowly. (If you are walking through your own kind of pressure right now, how to fight spiritual warfare is the closest companion to this article; what does the Bible say about death walks the slow end of a long faithful life; and Bible study for married women sits beside this one for the reader whose standing-firm has had to happen inside a household.)
Charles Spurgeon, in Treasury of David and across his weekly preaching, returned often to Daniel — not for the spectacular interventions but for the manner of life underneath them. What Spurgeon saw, and what this article reaches for, is the quiet courage that had been formed in Daniel’s bones over decades of small faithfulness before the lions’ den was even on the calendar. The lions’ den did not test a courage Daniel was about to develop. It revealed a courage Daniel had been growing since he was sixteen.
The first episode: the table, and what the boy would not eat
The story opens with a young man brought to Babylon and offered the king’s food and the king’s wine. The text is matter-of-fact about it. The Babylonian project was sophisticated. They did not torture their captives; they re-educated them. Three years of training, a new language, new literature, a new name (Belteshazzar), and the king’s own table to eat at. By the end of the three years, the captives were supposed to be Babylonians who happened to have been born somewhere else.
Daniel, at the start of the programme, made a small quiet refusal. He asked the steward if he could eat vegetables and drink water instead of the king’s food. The text records no speech, no grandstanding, no public stand. The refusal was a piece of administrative paperwork between a teenager and a middle manager. The steward agreed to a ten-day trial. At the end of the ten days, Daniel and his three friends looked healthier than the rest of the trainees, and the matter was settled.
This is where Spurgeon paid attention. The small refusal at the table was not, in itself, theologically dramatic. Daniel could have eaten the food and been fine on most readings. What the refusal trained in him was the habit of small faithfulness under pressure that was not labelled as persecution. The Babylonian system was offering him everything — comfort, advancement, the king’s favour — and asking, in exchange, for an inch of compromise that nobody would notice. Daniel kept the inch. The keeping of the inch, at sixteen, was the same muscle that would keep the open window at eighty.
Spurgeon understood the architecture of small refusals. In Morning and Evening he wrote of the kind of patient communion that the soul under pressure has access to when it has not let the small inches go:
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth! O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. Every other thought is hushed. That is the inward posture of a man who has, over time, learned to keep the small inches. Daniel at the king’s table was practising this hushing — the everyday refusal to let the empire’s food set the terms of his attention. I am only asking what he delights to give. The line is exact for the boy in the foreign palace. He did not ask the king for special treatment as a stand. He asked God for what God delighted to give and accepted vegetables as the form the asking took that week.
The first lesson, then, on what can we learn from Daniel in the Bible: the standing-firm of the lions’ den is not built in the lions’ den. It is built at the table, decades earlier, by the small refusals that nobody photographed. The woman in her own pressured environment — the workplace where the language slowly hardens around values she cannot fully say yes to, the family system that has been quietly asking her to compromise an inch a year for thirty years — is building the standing-firm of her seventies right now, in the small refusals of her forties, that nobody will notice until something large is required of her and the muscle is already there.
The second episode: the open window, and the seventy-year habit
The most famous episode in Daniel’s life is the lions’ den, and the lions’ den hinges on a single detail that the Sunday-school version usually rushes past. Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime. The whole hinge is in the last four words. As he did aforetime. The open window habit had been in place since the deportation, around seventy years earlier. The new law did not call for a new act of courage from Daniel. It called for him to continue, openly, the small daily practice he had been keeping in private for a lifetime.
This is the part Spurgeon wanted his hearers to feel in their bones. The lions’ den was not a test of whether Daniel had the courage to start praying. It was a test of whether Daniel had the courage to keep doing what he had always done now that the doing of it had been criminalised. The window did not need to be opened any wider. The knees did not need to fold any more deeply. The three-times-a-day was not a new figure. Everything the new law forbade was already in Daniel’s hands as ordinary practice. The courage required was the courage of continuity — the refusal to add a single subtraction to a seventy-year habit because the empire had changed its mind about prayer.
The modern Christian woman tends to think of courage as the production of a new act under pressure. Daniel teaches the opposite. Courage, in his life, was the preservation of an old act under pressure. The act had been ordinary. The pressure was new. The standing-firm was the simple decision not to let the new pressure shrink the old ordinary.
Spurgeon, on the kind of grace that flows through a faithful life over decades, wrote in Gleanings among the Sheaves:
“Thou, O Father, art the source of all grace, all love and mercy towards us. Thou, O Son, art the channel of Thy Father’s mercy, and without Thee Thy Father’s love could never flow to us. And Thou, O Spirit, art He who enables us to receive that divine virtue which flows from the fountain-head, the Father, through Christ the channel, and which, by Thy means, enters into our heart, and there abides, and brings forth its glorious fruit. Magnify, then, the Spirit. There never yet was a heavenly thought, a hallowed deed, or a consecrated act, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ, which was not worked in us by the Holy Spirit.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Gleanings among the Sheaves
Sit with the last sentence. There never yet was a heavenly thought, a hallowed deed, or a consecrated act, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ, which was not worked in us by the Holy Spirit. Spurgeon is closing the back door on any reading of Daniel that turns the man into a self-made hero. The seventy years of open-window prayer were not Daniel’s achievement. The hallowed deed of kneeling at the window with the lions waiting was worked in him by the Spirit who had been working in him since the king’s table in his teens. The standing-firm was given, not generated.
For you, this is the line that lifts the burden of standing-firm-as-personal-strength. You have been afraid that you do not have the inward fortitude required for the long pressure. Spurgeon would say — and Daniel’s whole arc bears him out — that the fortitude is not yours to produce. It is the Spirit’s to work in you, slowly, through the small daily practice that has nothing dramatic about it on the day-to-day level, until the day the lions are at the door and the prayer that has been worked into you stands up by itself.
A pause for the body
The teaching has been long enough that the body has begun to brace again. Pause, here, in the middle of the essay.
Sit somewhere quiet. Place both feet flat against the floor. Let the shoulders drop by a small amount — not by trying to relax, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up. Let the jaw unclench. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out — slower than the inhale, until the lungs are empty enough that the next inhale arrives on its own. Repeat once more. Then continue reading.
The un-bracing is the body’s version of Daniel at the window. The shoulders that have been held up against the chronic atmospheric pressure of a hostile environment do not need to be held up while you pray. The body knows how to lower itself; it has only not been asked, in a long time, to do it on purpose. The lowered shoulders are not a small thing. They are the bodily form of the standing-firm that does not require rigidity. The oak that stands in the storm is not tense. It is rooted. The tensing is the pre-rooted version. The rooting comes from underneath, and the body above the roots is free to be loose.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women is the daily companion that builds this slow rooting. One short passage. Room for one honest sentence. No demand to perform. The kind of small daily practice that, after seventy years (or seven, or seven months), becomes the open window your own life is held up by.
The third episode: the den, and the calm afterwards
The law is signed. The cabinet ministers who had engineered the trap watch through the day. Daniel goes home. The windows are opened toward Jerusalem. The knees fold. The three times a day pass. Daniel is reported. Darius is grieved — the king liked Daniel — but the law of the Medes and Persians cannot be unsigned. The den is opened. The stone is rolled across the mouth. The night passes.
What the text records about the night inside the den is not what most paintings show. The text does not say Daniel was wrestling with lions or being lifted on angelic backs. It says, in the morning, when Darius comes to the den at first light and calls out, Daniel answers calmly: My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths, that they have not hurt me. The calm is the part that startles. Daniel has spent a night in a closed den full of large hungry animals, and his voice in the morning is the voice of a man explaining what happened.
The calm was not produced in the den. The calm had been built across seventy years of open-window prayer, and the den was simply the room in which the calm was tested. The faithfulness underneath the daily window had been the slow construction of a soul that could be locked in with lions and still wake up the next morning able to give a coherent account of God’s mercy in measured prose.
Spurgeon, writing in Morning and Evening, named the kind of constant divine outflow that surrounds the soul whose practice has been long and ordinary:
“He is so prolific of grace, that like the sun which shines as it rolls onward in its orbit, his path is radiant with lovingkindness. He is a swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. Virtue is evermore going out of Jesus, as sweet odours exhale from flowers; and it always will be emanating from him, as water from a sparkling fountain.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
The line worth keeping near the page is the middle one. A swift arrow of love, which not only reaches its ordained target, but perfumes the air through which it flies. Christ’s grace toward Daniel did not arrive only at the den. It had been perfuming the air through which it had been flying for seventy years — through the king’s table, through the dream interpretations, through the writing on the wall, through the rise and fall of three civilisations. The den was simply the place the arrow finally landed in a way the empire could photograph. The grace had been continuous the whole way.
For you, in your own pressed environment, this is the consolation. The grace that will be visible at the moment of testing — the calm that will somehow be there when the room locks behind you — has been perfuming the air around your daily practice the whole time. You have not been alone in the small open window. The arrow has been in flight for a long time. The fragrance has been in the room since long before the lock turned.
What the standing-firm actually looks like across a life
The famous line — the God whom thou servest continually, he will deliver thee — is spoken by King Darius the night before the den is opened. The line is not Daniel’s own. It is the testimony of the pagan king who had been watching the man’s life for years and had come to recognise something about the God Daniel served continually. The adverb is the whole sentence. Continually. Three times a day. Window open toward Jerusalem. Seventy years. The pagan king saw the continuity before the lions did.
What we can actually learn from Daniel in the Bible, for the lives most of us are living, is not the spectacular night in the den. It is the continually in the small unphotographed practice across decades. The open window when the empire was friendly. The open window when the empire was indifferent. The open window when the empire turned hostile. The same window, the same knees, the same three times a day, regardless of which civilisation was outside the window in any given decade.
Spurgeon would say — and the whole arc of Daniel bears him out — that the courage to stand firm in the den is not separately granted on the night of the den. It is the natural extension of seventy years of standing firm at the window in private. The empire could not take from Daniel anything Daniel had not already given to God for seventy years. That is the whole secret. The man who has been giving the day to God since he was sixteen has nothing left for the lions to take. (For the sibling slow reads in this series, what can we learn from King David walks Spurgeon on the man after God’s heart, and what can we learn from Paul the apostle walks Owen on Paul’s sufferings, both at the same contemplative pace.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each evening, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily anchor for the woman whose open window has been in the same wall for a long time and who is ready, slowly, to keep it open through whichever empire is currently outside it.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the hushed posture, the sun in its orbit, the arrow that perfumes the air — into a daily companion built for the woman whose own standing-firm has had to live, quietly, across more than one season of pressure, and who is ready to let the small window keep being open.
