The story of Daniel in the lions' den is a children's favourite, for obvious reasons. It has fierce, furry animals that are tame enough to stroke, and a happy ending.
Look a bit closer at Daniel 6, though, and it's a much darker story than the one we tell in Sunday school
At this stage in his career, Daniel is the subject of a power struggle for influence over King Darius, instigated by civil servants who saw him rising in the king's favour.
Though Daniel's the star of the show, in many ways the most interesting character in the story is King Darius. He's fond of Daniel, and he respects him, but he doesn't understand him – either that, or he's blinded by his own arrogance and pride.
So when the plotters tell Darius it would be a wonderful idea to proclaim that no one should pray to any god but him, on pain of death, he doesn't think it through. And Darius comes to regret it bitterly, because the unexpected victim is Daniel. Daniel has never compromised in his life, and he's not going to start now. At his usual prayer time, he gets on his knees as he's always done and prays toward Jerusalem. He's reported to the king, and the law of unintended consequences comes in: he doesn't want to, but Darius is forced by his own law to condemn him to death.
Or so he thinks, anyway; we know the result. God shut the lions' mouths, and they all lived happily ever after.
The trouble is the story doesn't end that way at all. In the version we don't tell the children, Daniel's accusers, and their wives and children, are thrown to the lions instead; and this time there's no rescue. Verse 24 says: "And before they reached the floor of the den, the lions overpowered them and crushed all their bones."
Is this just a dark story from a spiritually primitive time, or does it still speak to us today? Daniel is rescued – we can all cheer that – but what about those who weren't, and who suffered though they were entirely innocent?
The message of the story is this: sin always has consequences, and they can spread out far more widely than we ever thought they would. Those who plotted against Daniel did so out of jealousy and ambition. They deliberately planned a horrible death for him and that was profoundly wrong. In the end, it wasn't just they who suffered the consequences but their wives and children as well.
And where there is sin, people get hurt – that's one of the ways we know it's sin. There might be forgiveness, where that's possible, but there are always casualties. It isn't just the guilty who suffer; there's collateral damage too. In this case innocent people died, and we might think too of how that terrible act of revenge might have corroded Darius's spirit even further.
So the story isn't just about God's miraculous preservation of one of his saints. It's a solemn warning to all of us not to beome so comfortable with ourselves that we don't realise when we're being given a choice between right and wrong. Choosing wrongly could mean disaster, not just for ourselves but for those we love as well.
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
