strangers in babylon

chapter one

aliens and strangers

Before we can say a single word about how a Christian ought to engage the world, we have to settle a far deeper thing, and settle it down in the bone where it cannot be shaken loose. We have to settle who you are. For every right response to the world flows out of identity, and every wrong one flows out of forgetting it. You will not live as a stranger in a land until you are convinced, truly convinced, that you are one.

And that is precisely what the Word insists you are. Listen to Peter, writing to scattered believers who knew something about being out of place.

Those two words are doing heavy labor, and the Greek beneath them is worth the digging. The first, strangers, is paroikos, which means a resident alien, one who dwells alongside a people not his own, present and living among them but holding no citizenship there. The second, pilgrims, is parepidemos, a sojourner passing through, one whose stay is by its very nature temporary. Put them together and Peter is telling you what you are with great precision. You are a lawful resident of a country that is not your home, and you are only passing through it. You live here. You do not belong here. Both halves are true at once, and the whole art of the Christian life in the world hangs on holding them together.

You live here. You do not belong here. Both halves are true at once.

Paul says the same thing from another angle, and again the original word repays a close look.

The word our older translators rendered conversation is politeuma, and it has nothing to do with talking. It means citizenship, or commonwealth, the city or state to which one belongs and owes allegiance. Paul wrote it to people living in Philippi, a Roman colony whose residents prized their Roman citizenship though they had likely never set foot in Rome. They lived in Greece and belonged to Rome, ordered their lives by Rome’s law, carried themselves as Rome’s people in a foreign place. And Paul takes that picture they knew in their bones and lifts it higher: your true colony, your real citizenship, is in heaven. You are heaven’s people stationed here, and you are to carry yourselves accordingly.

This is why the Scripture reaches again and again for the image of Babylon. Israel was carried off to a literal Babylon, made to live for seventy years in a glittering pagan empire that was not their home, and the Lord’s word to them through Jeremiah was neither to assimilate nor to revolt, but to settle in, build houses, plant gardens, and seek the peace of the city while never forgetting that Jerusalem was home. And by the close of the Book, Babylon has become the very name for the whole world-system in its pride and its seduction, the great city set against the city of God. We live, all of us, in Babylon. The only question is whether we will live there as people who remember where they are from.

So fix it down before we go a step further. You are an alien and a stranger here. Not because the world is worthless, for it is your Father’s world and full of His glory, but because you have been claimed by another country and are only passing through this one on the way home. Everything else in this book grows from that root. Lose the root, and you will fall into one ditch or the other before the next chapter is done.

chapter two

daniel in babylon

Now I could spend this whole booklet describing the posture of a stranger in the world in the abstract, My Friend, and you would close it none the wiser for how the thing actually looks when a flesh-and-blood believer lives it out under pressure. So before we name the two ways to get it wrong, let me show you a man who got it right, in the hardest place imaginable, so that you have a living picture in your mind for everything that follows.

His name is Daniel, and his circumstances were these. He was a young man of Judah, likely still a teenager, when Babylon overran Jerusalem and carried off the choicest of her youth. He was hauled hundreds of miles from home to serve in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, the very king who had crushed his nation. And the empire set about, deliberately and skillfully, to make him a Babylonian. They put him through a three-year pagan education in the tongue and learning of the Chaldeans. They even stripped him of his name, Daniel, which means God is my judge, and gave him a new one, Belteshazzar, built around the name of a Babylonian god. Everything about the place was designed to absorb him whole.

And here is the wonder of it. Daniel let them do nearly all of it. He took the education. He answered to the new name. He entered the king’s service and served that pagan government with such excellence that he rose to its very heights, advising the throne that had destroyed his homeland. He did not refuse to engage Babylon. He engaged it more fully and more ably than almost any Babylonian in it. He was, by every outward measure, in the world to the hilt.

But watch where the man drew his line, because the placing of that line is the entire lesson. When the royal provision came, the king’s rich food and wine, Daniel quietly would not touch it.

He purposed in his heart. The thing was settled inwardly, before the test ever came, which is the only way such things are ever actually held. And notice what he drew the line on. Not the education, not the service, not even the pagan name, but the table, the point at which participation would have meant defilement and a quiet swallowing of Babylon’s worship through Babylon’s food. Later the line would be drawn far more starkly still: in the third chapter his friends will stand before a furnace rather than bow to a golden image, and in the sixth Daniel himself will keep his windows open toward Jerusalem and pray straight into the teeth of a death sentence rather than worship any but the living God.

Bend on what can be bent. Die on what cannot.

There is the whole skill of the stranger in Babylon, shown in a single life. Daniel flexed on culture, language, and service, the things that were matters of living in the place. He would not flex by so much as an inch on worship and conscience, the things that touched his God. He bent on what could be bent and would have died, did nearly die, on what could not. And learning to tell the one kind of thing from the other, what a believer may freely give to Babylon and what he must never give it though it cost him everything, is the art this entire series exists to teach. Keep Daniel before your eyes. We will come back to him. For now, having seen the road walked, let us look hard at the two ditches that run along either side of it.

chapter three

the first ditch: going native

There are two ways to ruin the narrow walk of the stranger, My Friend, one on either hand, and a soul can pitch off the road into either of them. We will take them one at a time, and we begin with the ditch the world itself is forever pulling you toward. I will call it going native: the slow, comfortable surrender in which a believer who is in the world becomes simply of it, until there is nothing left to tell him apart from anyone else.

This is being of the world in the plainest sense. The man in this ditch has taken on the world’s values as his own, its appetites, its ambitions, its fears, its measure of what makes a life good. He may still attend his church and keep his label. But his heart runs on the same fuel as his unbelieving neighbor’s, wants the same things, is wounded by the same losses, and would, if you could see it laid bare, be nearly indistinguishable from the world around him with the Christian veneer scraped off. He has blended in so thoroughly that the world feels no friction from him at all, and a faith that creates no friction has quietly ceased to be faith in any sense the New Testament would recognize.

Scripture gives us a sobering portrait of this drift, and his name is Lot. Watch the slow slide of it across the pages of Genesis. First he merely looks toward the well-watered plain and chooses it for its richness. Then he pitches his tent toward Sodom, edging nearer. By the next we read of him, he is dwelling in Sodom outright. And at the last, when the angels come, we find him sitting in the gate of Sodom, the place where the elders and rulers of a city sat, which is to say he had become a man of standing in the very place he had once only camped beside. The progression is gentle, almost invisible at each step, and that is precisely how this ditch swallows people. No one decides in a morning to be of the world. He drifts there an inch at a time, each inch reasonable, until he wakes to find himself seated in the gate of a city under judgment.

No one decides in a morning to be of the world. He drifts there an inch at a time.

And here is the bitter end of it. When the city finally fell, Lot escaped with his life and almost nothing else. His wife looked back and was lost. His sons-in-law thought he was joking and perished. Peter calls him righteous Lot, and so by God’s mercy he was, but his was a faith that saved his soul as through fire and saved nothing else, a life poured out into a city that burned. That is the wage of this ditch. You may keep your salvation and lose nearly everything you might have been and done, because you gave your one life away to a Babylon that had no future.

Be honest with yourself here, for the going-native ditch is the respectable one, the one no one will rebuke you for falling into. The world will think the better of you the deeper you sink. There is no social cost to it, only a spiritual one, and that is exactly what makes it so deadly. Ask yourself plainly: if the Christian veneer were scraped off your life, what would be left underneath, and would it look any different at all from your neighbor who fears no God?

chapter four

the second ditch: running away

Now we cross to the other side of the road, My Friend, to the ditch that catches a very different sort of believer. If going native is the trap for the careless, this one is the trap for the earnest, the serious, the ones who genuinely fear the world’s corruption and mean to keep themselves clean. And that is what makes it so deceptive, for it does not look like a failure at all. It looks like holiness. But it is disobedience wearing holy clothes, and we must name it as plainly as we named the first.

I will call it running away: the retreat from the world out of fear of it. This is the believer who, rightly seeing how the world corrupts, draws the wrong conclusion and withdraws altogether, sealing himself inside a Christian bubble where everything is safe and labeled and nothing of the world is allowed to touch him. His friends are all believers, his books and music and entertainment all sanctioned, his every hour spent within the fortress walls. He has solved the problem of being of the world by ceasing, as far as he can manage, to be in it at all.

But return to the Lord’s own prayer, for it shuts this ditch as firmly as the other. He prayed not that the Father would take us out of the world. The retreat is the very thing He declined to ask for. We were left here on purpose. And He says why in the same breath, sending us as He Himself was sent.

Sent into it, My Friend. Not walled off from it. The fortress, for all its appearance of devotion, is a refusal of the commission. And the Lord had hard words for a light that hides itself.

A lamp shoved under a basket is not a holy lamp. It is a useless one, and worse, a disobedient one, for it was lit precisely to be set where its light could reach the room. The believer who hides his light in the name of keeping it pure has missed the entire reason it was kindled. There is no virtue in a flame that warms only itself.

And mark the irony that sits underneath this ditch: it is built on fear, and fear is the very thing the gospel was given to cast out. The man retreats because at bottom he is afraid, afraid the world is stronger than the Spirit in him, afraid that contact means contamination, afraid the darkness can put out his light. But that has the truth exactly backwards, as we shall see in a coming chapter, for light does not fear the dark. The dark has every reason to fear the light. The retreat ditch is unbelief dressed as caution, and the cure for it is not recklessness but the recovery of a holy, well-founded courage.

So there they are, the two ditches, one on either hand. On the one side, the believer swallowed by the world until he is no different from it. On the other, the believer hidden from the world until he is no use to it. Between them runs a narrow road, and on that road walks Daniel, in Babylon to the hilt and captured by none of it. The rest of this little book is about how to keep your feet on that road. We turn next to the question the going-native ditch forces upon us: how does the world actually capture a soul?

chapter five

how the world captures you

If the first ditch is so easy to fall into that a man can slide all the way down it without ever deciding to, My Friend, then we had better understand exactly how the falling happens. For the world rarely captures a Christian by frontal assault. It does not, as a rule, march up and demand that you renounce your faith. It is far more patient and far more clever than that. It captures by pressure, by atmosphere, by the slow and constant work of making its own assumptions feel like nothing more than simple common sense, until you have breathed them in so long that you no longer notice you are breathing them at all.

Paul names the mechanism exactly, and the Greek of his warning is worth opening up, for it is one of the most important sentences in all of Scripture for the stranger in Babylon.

Two great words stand opposed in that verse, and the whole battle is in the contrast between them. The first, conformed, is syschematizo, built on the root from which we get our word scheme or schema, the outward shape or fashion of a thing. It carries the sense of being pressed into a mold, of taking on the external form of whatever is around you. And the tense Paul uses suggests a continual pressure, a stop letting yourselves be molded, as though the pressing is happening every hour whether you consent to it or not. That is the world’s method precisely. It does not argue you out of your faith; it presses you, steadily, into its shape, the way water takes the shape of any vessel it sits in long enough.

Against that Paul sets transformed, which is metamorphoo, the word from which we get metamorphosis, a deep change of inner nature and not merely outward fashion. It is, strikingly, the very same word the Gospels use for the Transfiguration, when the Lord’s inner glory broke out and changed His appearance on the mountain. This is no surface adjustment. It is a change worked from the inside out. And Paul tells us exactly where it happens: by the renewing of the mind, the nous, the seat of our thinking and judging and perceiving. The world reshapes you from the outside in, by pressure on your habits and appetites. God reshapes you from the inside out, by the renewing of how you think. The two are working on you at once, in opposite directions, every single day.

Do you see now why the going-native ditch is so quiet and so dangerous? No alarm sounds when you are being conformed, because conforming feels like nothing. It feels like simply being normal, being reasonable, getting along, not making a fuss. The pressure is invisible precisely because it is constant and on every side, as the deep-sea fish does not feel the weight of the ocean pressing on it. And the only defense, the single thing that can hold a soul on the road, is the active, daily, deliberate renewing of the mind, the steady countervailing pressure of the Word read and the Spirit obeyed, pushing back from the inside against the mold the world is forever trying to press you into.

Renew the mind, or be remolded by the world. There is no third option.

This is why the stranger in Babylon cannot drift. Drift always runs one direction, down into the first ditch, because the current of the world runs that way and the conforming pressure never sleeps. To stay on the road you must be transformed, and transformation is not passive. It is the most active thing a believer does. Renew the mind, or be remolded by the world: there is no third option, and there is no standing still.

chapter six

unafraid

We have seen that fear is what drives the earnest believer into the second ditch, the retreat behind the fortress walls, and so we must deal with that fear directly, My Friend, for it is the great enemy of bold engagement. And I want to show you that the Christian, of all people on the earth, has the least reason to be afraid of anything the world can do or be. We do not engage the world from a crouch. We are not the anxious ones, forever scanning the horizon for the next threat. We cannot be, if we have understood the gospel at all, because we already know how the entire story ends.

Hear the Lord on the last night, in the same discourse where He prayed that we be kept in the world. He does not pretend the world is harmless. He promises plainly that it will press hard upon us. And then He says the most extraordinary thing.

The word He uses for overcome is nikao, to conquer, to be victorious, to win the decisive battle. And notice the tense of it: not I will overcome, not I am fighting to overcome, but I have overcome. The thing is already done. He speaks it on the night before the cross, before the nails, before the tomb, and He speaks of the victory as already accomplished, because in the settled purpose of God it was. The world He tells us to walk into has already been a defeated foe since before we ever set foot in it. We are not soldiers marching toward an uncertain battle. We are sent in to occupy ground our King has already taken.

John, who heard those words that night, carried the same certainty into his old age and wrote it to frightened believers as plainly as it can be put.

There is the ground of all our courage in nine words: greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world. The Spirit of the living God indwells the believer, and He is greater, immeasurably greater, than any power arrayed against you in all of Babylon. This is why the retreat ditch is, at bottom, a failure of belief. The man hides because he secretly fears the darkness is stronger than the light he carries. But light has never once feared the dark in all the history of the world. Bring the smallest candle into the blackest room and watch which one flees. The darkness cannot put out the light; the light puts the darkness to flight. We have been carrying that backwards, and our fear is the proof of it.

Light has never once feared the dark.

So engage boldly, My Friend. Walk into the argument, the workplace, the cultural storm, the hard conversation, without panic and without that defensive crouch that betrays a heart that has forgotten who lives in it. We can afford to be the calm ones, the unafraid ones, the ones who do not flinch, because the outcome of the whole thing was settled before the world began and cannot now be undone. Perfect love casts out fear, and the believer who has grasped that he is on the winning side of a finished war is finally free to step into Babylon with his head up.

chapter seven

salt and light

We come now to the last and most important question of all, My Friend, the one that gives the whole posture its purpose. Why are we left here at all? If we are strangers and pilgrims whose true citizenship is in heaven, if the world is a Babylon we do not belong to, why does the Lord not simply take us home the moment we are saved and spare us the whole difficult business of living as exiles? Why keep us in the world rather than gather us out of it?

The answer is that we are not left here merely to survive Babylon, nor even merely to resist it. We are left here for Babylon’s sake. We are kept in the world because the world needs what we carry, and the Lord means to reach it through us. Hear how He puts it to His own.

Both images only make sense in contact with the world, and that is the whole point of them. Salt does no good sealed in the cellar; it must be rubbed into the meat to do its preserving work, mingled in to hold back the rot. The Lord even warns in the same breath of salt that has lost its savor, become bland and useless and good for nothing but to be cast out and trodden underfoot, which is a picture, is it not, of the going-native believer, the salt that has so dissolved into its surroundings that it can no longer season anything at all. And light, by its very nature, exists to be seen; a light is kindled to drive back darkness, and a city on a hill cannot be hidden and was never meant to be, which is the rebuke of the retreat ditch, the lamp hauled off and hidden under the basket where it can do no good to anyone.

Do you see how the salt and the light answer both ditches at once? The salt that dissolves into the meat until it is no longer salt has gone native. The light that hides itself under the basket has run away. The Lord’s two images condemn both errors in a single stroke and point to the narrow road between: a salt that keeps its savor while mingling fully with the world, a light that shines openly while remaining wholly distinct from the darkness it pushes back. In and not of, the both-at-once, embodied in the two homeliest pictures He could have chosen.

And this turns the whole posture outward and warms it through. The reason for being in the world but not of it is not, finally, self-protection. It is not about keeping yourself unspotted as an end in itself, hoarding your own purity like a miser. It is mission. We keep ourselves distinct from the world not so that we can be safe from it, but so that we have something to offer it, for salt that has become meat can no longer preserve the meat, and a light that has become part of the darkness can no longer light anyone home. We stay different precisely so that we can be useful, and we stay engaged precisely so that our difference can do the world some good.

That is why you are still here, My Friend, and not yet home. The same reason the Lord prayed you would be kept in the world rather than taken from it. There is a Babylon full of people who do not yet know the way home, and you are a city on a hill, lit for their sake. Strangers, yes. Pilgrims passing through, yes. But sent, and salted, and shining, for the sake of the very world you are passing through.